Process Improvement Results Different than You Expected?

Kaizens and process improvement are all fun and sticky notes until you don't get the results you expected. Why does that happen? Here's what I've seen most often:
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* False Buy-in - All stakeholders and team members involved in the process you are improving need to buy in to the effort. Sometimes people feel like they're supposed to buy in, or don't fully understand the process or changes, and this can negatively impact the results. This is more complicated than it sounds- true buy in is hard work, will require you to challenge your current beliefs and the team will go through the 5 stages of team development, sometimes within a short period of time (kaizen).
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* Too Much Focus on Low Hanging Fruit - It's important to go after the easy wins, but if that's all you focus on, you can't expect exciting results. You will often see larger projects come out of process improvement activities in order to create more comprehensive mechanisms.
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* Lack of Control Plan - You need to have a detailed control plan, based on data, with levers to pull to keep your new process on track and adjust accordingly. Give yourself enough time after the event to collect data on a weekly basis and feel confident with your results. Share with your team; there should be no shame in looking at real data and making adjustments, only curiosity.
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This picture is actually from a Kaizen event with great results, even though you can see lots of quick wins here. 😉