--- name: implementation-plan description: "Milestones toward a real completion date, each owned by your own team, an outside party, or both — with days remaining, overdue and unowned milestones, and a mutuality check computed, not asserted: a plan where every milestone belongs to your own side isn't actually cross-functional. Use when: A commitment depends on more than one team or person actually doing something, and you want a real, dated sequence instead of a vague understanding. You want to know honestly which milestones are already behind schedule and which have nobody named against them yet. Not for: Everything genuinely depends on one person or one team — a plan with no real outside dependency doesn't need this structure; a simple task list will do. You don't have a real target completion date yet — pin that down first, or the days-remaining and overdue math has nothing real to measure against." --- # Implementation plan Milestones toward a real completion date, each owned by your own team, an outside party, or both — with days remaining, overdue and unowned milestones, and a mutuality check computed, not asserted: a plan where every milestone belongs to your own side isn't actually cross-functional. Family: Kaizen events · Format: .xlsx · Domain: core ## What it is An implementation plan turns a commitment — a countermeasure, a kaizen charter's rollout, a Hoshin catchball agreement — into a real, checkable sequence of milestones converging on a target completion date. Each milestone names who it depends on: your own team, an outside party, or both jointly. Days remaining, which milestones are already overdue, and which have no named owner yet are all computed from what you enter, not asserted. The one check unique to this tool: if every milestone belongs to your own side, that's flagged directly — a plan with zero cross-functional dependency usually means nobody outside the initiating team has actually committed to anything yet, not that the plan is simpler than most. ## When to use it Use it when: - A commitment depends on more than one team or person actually doing something, and you want a real, dated sequence instead of a vague understanding. - You want to know honestly which milestones are already behind schedule and which have nobody named against them yet. - You're rolling out something (a countermeasure, a new standard, a system change) where an outside team's action is a real dependency, not just your own team's work. Not when: - Everything genuinely depends on one person or one team — a plan with no real outside dependency doesn't need this structure; a simple task list will do. - You don't have a real target completion date yet — pin that down first, or the days-remaining and overdue math has nothing real to measure against. - You're still deciding what to do, not how to sequence doing it — that's an A3 or a kaizen charter's job; this tool assumes the commitment is already made. ## How to fill it in - **milestones** — Describe the commitment roughly — a first-pass milestone sequence gets drafted, each with who it depends on (you, them, or joint) and a target date. Assign a real named owner to each afterward; that's never guessed for you. - **coverage** — Computed from your milestones and dates — nothing to enter here. - **risks** — Drafted alongside the milestones — what could realistically cause this plan to slip. - **narrative** — Drafted from the plan actually built. ## What good looks like The example below rolls out a new andon escalation rule across a fabrication cell's three shifts — one milestone is already honestly overdue, one has no owner named yet, and the plan is genuinely cross-functional rather than something the improvement team alone could execute. Full worked example, on-screen and as a downloadable .xlsx: https://www.katafacts.com/katas/implementation-plan ## Common mistakes - **Writing every milestone as something your own team does.** — A plan where every milestone belongs to your own side isn't actually testing whether anyone else has really committed — that's exactly what the mutuality check exists to catch, not a sign the plan is simpler than most. - **Leaving a milestone unowned and moving on rather than naming the gap.** — An unowned milestone isn't a detail to fill in later — it's a real risk to the completion date, and this tool's whole point is surfacing that honestly instead of letting a plan look more complete than it is. - **Writing a risk as vague as 'things could change.'** — A risk that isn't specific enough to actually watch for isn't useful — name the real thing that could slip this plan, the same discipline this catalogue applies to every other finding. ## What it connects to Upstream: - **A3 problem solving** (`a3`) — A countermeasure an A3 identifies is exactly the kind of commitment that needs a real, dated, cross-functional plan to actually happen. - **Kaizen event charter** (`kaizen-charter`) — Once a kaizen event's plan is set, rolling out what it produced across a wider area is what this tool sequences. ## Where AI helps Judgement — stays with you: - Deciding whether a drafted milestone's ownerParty judgement is actually right - Deciding which overdue or unowned milestone to chase down first Analysis — AI helps: - Drafting a milestone sequence and real risks from a rough description of the commitment - Drafting the narrative from the plan actually built Drudgery — automated: - Computing days to target completion, overdue count, and the ownership split - Flagging which milestones have no named owner yet - Exporting to xlsx in the house format --- Implementation plan is licensed [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Attribution: Katafacts (katafacts.com). ## Using this skill Apply this method as part of whatever broader task, instructions, or deliverable you're already working on -- it's a method to use, not a standalone conversation to start. There is no generation tool for this catalogue yet, so draft the artifact's actual content yourself, following the fields above, the same way a person filling this out by hand would. The canonical guide page and a downloadable worked example (.xlsx) are at https://www.katafacts.com/katas/implementation-plan.