Where does your improvement work actually live?

The problem is, that improvement rarely lives in one place. Ideas sit in a document. Projects run in a different tool. Benefits get totted up in a spreadsheet. The knowledge that actually solved the problem usually never leaves the head of whoever solved it. None of that is a system but where the work happened to end up.

When OpX's Leon Hardwick and Chris Dando sat down to talk through the origin story of OpX, the same question kept surfacing: every other profession seems to have a home for its work. Why doesn't improvement?

Finance has Xero. Designers have Canva. CI pros have a spreadsheet…

Leon's background is technology, not continuous improvement, and it's what gave him the outsider's view that shaped OpX. Talking to CI professionals, one gap kept coming up: everyone else in the business had somewhere to go to do their job.

“Every other profession had a product that they would go to when they logged in, on a daily basis. Finance people would have Xero and Sage, and designers would have Canva and Adobe. CI pros didn't really have the thing that they would go into and get on with their work.” 

It's part of why CI professionals find it, in Leon's words, “incredibly hard to justify their existence.” They're often the only function whose entire job is to make everyone else measurable, while finding it nearly impossible to measure themselves, especially when they’re juggling tools and have no central place to work from.

The honest answer is: a spreadsheet, if at all

Chris has seen the same gap from the other side, being the person who has to explain what an improvement team is actually worth, whilst having no measurable tool in place showcasing the works being complete.

“The honest answer is: it sits in spreadsheets and in PowerPoint decks, if at all. So when the leadership changes, or there's cost pressure, they start looking at their cost lines and go, there's this expensive improvement team — what are they delivering? We should be able to answer that instantly, but we can never answer that question. It's a huge problem.”

Call it the spreadsheet graveyard. The value is real, but it's scattered across trackers nobody else can find, so the moment somebody senior asks the obvious question, there's no fast answer, even though the answer would be a good one.

See how OpX keeps improvement work in one place

Year three looks exactly like year one

Without somewhere for it to live, improvement work doesn't just become hard to report on it stops accumulating at all. Leon put it in terms he'd heard from a CI professional he'd spoken to recently.

“Year three of a CI programme looks like year one, because nothing accumulated. However, the reality is a lot accumulated, but there's no record of it. It just looks like a series of individual things that folks were doing across the business.”

The follow-up question is just as telling: are we still doing what we said we would do? Without a record everyone can point to, drift happens quietly, and nobody quite remembers the conversation where something was agreed.

From a system of record to a system of action

The biggest improvements aren't always the biggest line items. Chris argues the real value sits in the hundreds of small, everyday fixes that never make it into a benefits tracker multiplied across an entire organisation.

“It might be, I've saved three minutes off processing an application. And then you extrapolate that over the hundreds of thousands that happen — it's significant. But because it's a micro-improvement, it's never ever captured.”

That's the starting point for OpX: a system of record that captures the small wins alongside the strategic ones, so the true scale of improvement work is visible for the first time. It's also, as Leon points out, a deliberate boundary. The system won't do the gemba walk, and it isn't a replacement for the people doing the work. What it will do instead is keep a record of it, and surface what comes out of it, so that expertise doesn't leave when a person does.

The direction of travel from here is a familiar one to anyone who has watched software mature elsewhere: from a system that shows you the work, to one that helps you act on it, to one that helps you see what's coming. For now, the job is the first of those three – giving improvement leaders one place to see the whole picture.

Improvement doesn't have an activity problem but instead Chris and Leon’s conversation explored the real problem, being visibility. Currently improvement teams have no single place to see it, connect it, or prove it happened at all. That's the gap OpX was built to close.

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