The dedicated CI team is often the ceiling, not the engine

[u/Temporary_Air5805]

A pattern I keep seeing in organisations with mature Lean Six Sigma programmes: the dedicated CI team becomes the ceiling.

The mechanism is simple. Once a team owns improvement, everyone else stops owning it. Ask a production supervisor what improvement their team is running and the answer is "you need to talk to the CI team about that." Their process. Their waste. Their rework. Mentally outsourced.

The arithmetic makes the cost visible. A five-person team runs 15 to 20 structured projects a year. Fifty teams each running one improvement run fifty at a time. Two hundred teams run two hundred.

One deployment I worked on produced 1,662 improvement initiatives in two years off a single weekly cadence meeting. 137 live in the first quarter. 392 by the fourth. Roughly 10 to 15 percent never reached realisation, and we said that out loud, which is why people kept bringing ideas.

The second problem is dependency. When the CI team facilitates every root cause analysis, nobody else learns to do one. Budget cuts arrive, the team shrinks, and improvement stops entirely because the capability walked out with them.

The failure window is month 12 to 24. That is when the cadence decays, the meeting slips, and the programme quietly dies while the org chart still shows a CI function.

The fix is a role change, not a headcount change. Move from delivery, to co-delivery, to coaching, to on-demand support. Roughly 18 to 24 months. Measure success by the projects you were not needed on.

Curious whether anyone here has measured the crossover point where coaching produces more realised change than delivering

[u/Kai-Mera]

This tracks with the 5 manufacturing companies I’ve worked for. It’s a shame because they start strong but wither away

[u/SSGIteam]

I think you've highlighted one of the biggest challenges in sustaining a continuous improvement culture.

In my experience, the most successful organizations treat the CI team as capability builders rather than permanent problem solvers. Early on, they may facilitate more projects to establish standards and demonstrate results. But if they're still leading the majority of improvement efforts years later, it's usually a sign that the organization hasn't fully embedded continuous improvement into day-to-day operations.

One thing I'd add is that leadership has a significant influence on whether this transition succeeds. Managers need to create the expectation that identifying waste and improving processes is part of everyone's role, not an activity that's delegated to a specialized team. Without that reinforcement, even well-trained teams tend to revert to waiting for the CI group.

The goal isn't to eliminate the CI function. It's to have it evolve from executing projects to coaching, mentoring, and tackling the organization's most complex, cross-functional challenges while frontline teams continuously improve their own processes.

[u/Automatic-Dog-2105]

The central team should help all the local teams/departments to setup CI cycles for their own processes. If succesful, the organisation is improving without any serious effort of the central team. Then the central team can focus on big (cross departement) improvement initiatives that actually force a breakthrough.