Kaizen, applied to software
A small daily workaround can waste hours over time. How to spot one, try a manageable improvement and check whether it actually helped.
A team copies the same customer details into two systems every morning. It takes ten minutes and occasionally introduces a mistake. The work is small enough to be tolerated, so it keeps happening.
Kaizen means continuous improvement: noticing that friction, making a manageable change and checking whether it helped. In software, it gives everyday problems a route to improvement before they grow into a large project.
Choose a change you can check
For the repeated data entry, start by finding out why both systems need the information. A small import or a shared data source might remove the duplication. Test it with the people who do the work and compare the time spent and errors found.
Small changes still carry risk. Keep the scope clear, test the affected paths and make recovery possible. Their advantage is that you can usually understand and evaluate them sooner than a large rewrite.
Make the improvement repeatable
If the import works, document it, name its owner and use it wherever the same need exists. If it moves the manual work to another team, revise it. Count the effect on the whole process.
Give the team room to make changes
A team needs a practical way to deliver and evaluate small improvements:
- Fast, cheap deploys, so a small change can ship the same day it's found.
- Clear ownership, so the person who sees the problem is allowed to fix it.
- Observability, so "did it help" has a real answer instead of a guess.
- Boundaries that don't fight back, so a local fix doesn't ripple into three other modules.
Try it: define one improvement worth keeping
Keep the experiment smaller than the problem. This worksheet makes the benefit and the cost visible before a small change becomes a permanent dependency.
How to try it. Complete it yourself or paste it into a chat. The baseline below is invented; replace it with observations before using the worksheet for a real decision.
One-week improvement experiment
Included file: kaizen-experiment.txt
Full prompt
FICTIONAL BASELINE
A coordinator spends 12 minutes each day preparing a missing-files list.
During five observed days, two lists needed correction after being sent.
CHANGE TO TRY
Generate a draft list from recorded requirements and accepted evidence.
The coordinator checks it before sending. Do not change the approval policy.
COMPLETE THIS EXPERIMENT
Problem and baseline:
One change and what remains the same:
Measure: total preparation plus checking time, and corrections after sending:
Owner and backup:
Trial period and review date:
Keep/change/stop criteria:
Recovery if the generated list is wrong:
Propose criteria before predicting savings. Label proposed targets as targets.
Include time spent fixing mistakes; do not measure only the faster generation step.What your result should show
- The comparison covers a whole working week and includes review and correction effort.
- The owner has a review date and a way to return to the previous process. A target such as “under eight minutes with no increase in corrections” is a proposal to test, not a result.
Change one condition
The draft takes two minutes, but checking it takes fifteen. Decide whether to keep, revise or stop the change using the total effort and quality, rather than generation speed.
Where it shows up in how we work
At TreeNodes, improvement continues after launch. We watch how people use the system, compare that with the original model and decide what to change next. A confusing field or a recurring exception can be a useful starting point.
Pick one recurring problem this week. Name the person affected, the change you want to try and the result you will check. Set a date to look at what happened.
See how TreeNodes plans operation and improvement engagements, or explore the live FileTRX product case study.
Takeaways
- Choose one recurring problem and name the person affected.
- Keep the change small enough to test and recover from.
- Review the result and make the better approach part of normal work.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING 4 sources
- Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success Masaaki Imai, McGraw-Hill, 1986 The book that introduced kaizen to a Western management audience, framing improvement as a continuous habit rather than a project.
- Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production Taiichi Ohno, Productivity Press, 1988 (Japanese original 1978) The production-floor origin of the ideas: small batches, stopping the line when a defect appears, and improvement owned by the people doing the work.
- Out of the Crisis W. Edwards Deming, MIT Press, 1986 Deming's account of the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle (originating with Walter Shewhart), the loop this article's diagram is a software-shaped version of.
- Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim, IT Revolution, 2018 The empirical case that small batch sizes and frequent, low-risk deploys correlate with better delivery and stability outcomes.