Part 2: Developing Countermeasures in Process Improvement

In last week’s blog, I shared with you how setting a 30-day lead time can help in successfully developing countermeasures. This time, I will discuss why we aim for an 80 percent completion rate in our 30 days of countermeasure development.

If you’re in the process worksheet (download it for free here), you’ll see your countermeasures under the tab “Key Operational Change”, columns E, F, and G. By this time, when you’re at step 5 of the PDCA process, which is developing countermeasures, they’re already populated, so you have a complete plan.

Over the next 30 days, we’re looking at columns H and I. There’s no going backward on the problems, reprioritizing them, or adding new problems. It’s just managing the status and the next steps over the next 30 days, with the goal of completing 80% of the countermeasures.

What does an 80% countermeasure completion rate mean?

Eighty percent completion of countermeasures is essentially leaving room for unexpected circumstances. The reason behind this is that as we go into developing the countermeasures, sometimes you see that even with all the discovery, discussion, and understanding of the root cause, your idea to solve the problem just doesn’t work. I’ve seen this time and time again.