Step 5 · 5 min read

Beyond one project

A single DMAIC project is the unit of work — but the real payoff comes when you run improvement as a program. These features sit around your projects: a place to collect ideas before they become projects, a way to prove the money you saved, guardrails that keep the gains, and shortcuts that make the next project faster than the last.

About 5 minutes

Before the project

Capture ideas in the Opportunities hopper.

Good improvement ideas show up everywhere — a hallway complaint, a spike on a dashboard, a “we should really fix that.” The Opportunities hopper (in the left sidebar) is where they land before anyone commits to a full project, so nothing gets lost.

  1. 1

    Capture

    Anyone on the team can jot a one-line idea — a title and a sentence on the problem.
  2. 2

    Score

    Rate impact and effort (1–5). The idea lands in a PICK quadrant — Implement, Challenge, Possible, or Kill — so the high-value, low-effort wins rise to the top.
  3. 3

    Triage

    A workspace owner or admin screens each idea: New → Screening → Accepted (or Rejected), with a decision note for the audit trail.
  4. 4

    Promote

    Promote an accepted idea straight into a chartered assignment — its problem statement and sponsor pre-fill the charter, so you start the project already ahead.

Prove the value

From “we think it saved money” to a signed number.

Improvement only counts when finance agrees. Every assignment has a Benefits ledger, and the savings roll up to a workspace-wide Portfolio scorecard.

Financial Benefits ledger

Assignment → Benefits

Log each saving as Hard, Soft or Avoidance. It moves Proposed → Finance-approved (needs a named approver) → Realized. A realized figure is locked for audit; a genuine mistake is corrected with an auditable Reverse, never a silent edit.

Portfolio ROI scorecard

Sidebar → Portfolio

One board across every project: how many are in draft / complete, the realized vs. in-flight savings, multi-year projection, and average process capability — with red/amber/green cues so leadership sees the program at a glance.

Keep the gains

Guardrails so improvements actually stick.

The hardest part of Six Sigma is the part after the celebration — making sure the process doesn’t quietly drift back. Three features hold the line.

DMAIC tollgate sign-offs

Assignment → Plan

Record a gate-review decision for each phase — Approved, Conditional, Rejected — with the approver and notes. A clean, dated audit trail of who signed off on what.

Completion gate

Workspace policy

Owners can require all tollgates to be signed before a project can be marked complete — turning the “anyone suggests, an owner decides” convention into an enforced rule.

Sustainment monitoring

Completed assignment → Sustain

After a project closes, freeze the improved baseline and log periodic readings. If a reading breaches the ±3σ band, the project flips to “at risk” so you catch a slip early — not at the next audit.

Work faster

Shortcuts that compound across projects.

Templates

Sidebar → Templates · “Save as template”

Turn a proven project into a reusable blueprint, then start new ones pre-filled with the charter and schedule. Stop re-typing the same scaffolding.

Replication library

Sidebar → Replication library

Search past projects that solved a similar problem and clone the proven approach — so a fix found once gets reused, not reinvented.

Saved views

Sidebar → Saved views

Bookmark the screens you return to most — a portfolio, an assignment, a filtered list — and jump back in one click.

Command palette

Press ⌘K (Mac) / Ctrl-K

A keyboard launcher from anywhere in the app — type to jump to any screen or start something new without reaching for the mouse.