Collaboration & Process › Agile & Delivery Process

Continuous Improvement (Kaizen)

Small, ongoing improvements to how the team works.

Kaizen is a practice of making small, ongoing improvements to how a team works. Rather than waiting for a major process redesign, the team notices friction, tries a modest change, and checks whether it helped.

For example, if code reviews regularly sit idle, the team might agree to surface blocked reviews in its daily channel and try that for a few weeks. The useful part is not the ceremony; it is making the problem visible, choosing an action the team can control, and returning to see what happened. A retrospective can provide a place to do this, but improvement can also happen when an issue appears during normal work.

Avoid turning Kaizen into a demand that people optimize themselves constantly or a way to blame individuals for systemic problems. If the team identifies the same blocker repeatedly but has no authority to address it, raise it to someone who can change the surrounding system. Keep experiments small enough that failure is safe and informative.

A change should have an owner and a check-in point. If it does not help, stop or adjust it rather than keeping it because it was agreed in a meeting. See retrospective and continuous delivery.

Check the workflow with a recent piece of work rather than relying on an abstract rule. If the practice adds a queue or hides blocked work, adjust it; if it helps the team finish and learn, keep it. Backend developers can flag service constraints, frontend developers can check user-facing behavior, and data engineers can surface pipeline or data-quality dependencies.

After trying it, review several completed items and adjust the practice if it created a queue, hid a blocker, or failed to produce a useful outcome.