--- name: kaizen-charter description: "The opportunity, the objective, who's on the team, and whether you're actually ready to start — one document, not three you'd have to keep in sync, with a readiness checklist you check off before the event begins. Use when: You're about to run a focused improvement event (a few days to a week) and want one document the whole team can point to. You want to know honestly whether you're ready to start — which readiness items are actually done and which aren't. You want the RACI assignment checked, not just recorded — exactly one Accountable owner, not zero or several. Not for: You're still exploring whether there's a real opportunity here at all — that's a problem statement or a gemba walk, not a charter yet. The event is genuinely informal and doesn't need a roster or a readiness gate — a charter for a five-minute fix is overhead, not help. The objective would just restate the opportunity with no real number — sharpen it first, or the charter will be as vague as the input." --- # Kaizen event charter The opportunity, the objective, who's on the team, and whether you're actually ready to start — one document, not three you'd have to keep in sync, with a readiness checklist you check off before the event begins. Family: Kaizen events · Format: .xlsx · Domain: core ## What it is A kaizen event charter is the one document a team lead fills out before an event starts: what opportunity or problem it addresses, a specific measurable objective, what's in and out of scope, who's on the team and their RACI role, and a readiness checklist so nobody discovers mid-event that the data was never pulled. State the opportunity, objective, scope, and team roughly — a real charter gets drafted, including a checklist tailored to what you've actually described, and a check that exactly one person is Accountable. ## When to use it Use it when: - You're about to run a focused improvement event (a few days to a week) and want one document the whole team can point to. - You want to know honestly whether you're ready to start — which readiness items are actually done and which aren't. - You want the RACI assignment checked, not just recorded — exactly one Accountable owner, not zero or several. Not when: - You're still exploring whether there's a real opportunity here at all — that's a problem statement or a gemba walk, not a charter yet. - The event is genuinely informal and doesn't need a roster or a readiness gate — a charter for a five-minute fix is overhead, not help. - The objective would just restate the opportunity with no real number — sharpen it first, or the charter will be as vague as the input. ## How to fill it in - **opportunityStatement** — What opportunity or problem does this event address? - **objective** — What specific, measurable target is this event aiming at? Give a real number if you have one — a vague goal gets named as vague, not dressed up. - **scopeIn** — What's explicitly in scope for this event? - **scopeOut** — What's explicitly out of scope, to prevent scope creep during the event. - **roster** — Who's on the team, and what's their RACI role? Entered directly, not AI-assigned — who's accountable is your call, and exactly one person should be Accountable. - **readiness** — Drafted from your scope and team — concrete, checkable items. Check off what's actually ready before the event starts. - **narrative** — Drafted from the roster and readiness checklist. ## What good looks like The example below charters a real event against a finding from this catalogue's own VOC work — the onboarding support ticket spike the customer interview guide's worked example set out to understand. Four of six readiness items are confirmed and two are honestly left open, and the roster has exactly one Accountable owner. Full worked example, on-screen and as a downloadable .xlsx: https://www.katafacts.com/katas/kaizen-charter ## Common mistakes - **Writing an objective that just restates the opportunity with no real number.** — "Reduce onboarding friction" isn't a target — a charter without a measurable objective can't tell the team whether the event actually worked. - **Assigning more than one person as Accountable, or nobody at all.** — RACI's whole point is a single accountable owner — two blurs responsibility when something goes wrong, and zero means nobody actually owns the outcome. - **Marking readiness items ready before they actually are, to make the checklist look complete.** — The checklist exists to catch a real gap before the event starts, not after — an honestly incomplete checklist is more useful than a dishonestly complete one. ## What it connects to Upstream: - **Voice of the customer (VOC) evidence log** (`voc-evidence-log`) — A real opportunity statement is often grounded in something the evidence log already surfaced — this charter's worked example charters an event against exactly that kind of finding. Downstream: - **Sustainment audit** (`sustainment-audit`) — Once the event closes, the sustainment audit checks whether this charter's commitments actually held. ## Where AI helps Judgement — stays with you: - Deciding who's actually Accountable versus Responsible - Deciding whether a drafted objective's target is realistic given real team capacity Analysis — AI helps: - Drafting a specific, measurable objective from a rough goal — and naming it as still vague if the input doesn't support a real target - Drafting a readiness checklist tailored to the stated scope and team, not a generic list Drudgery — automated: - Tallying the readiness checklist and flagging what's not ready yet - Checking the roster for a missing or duplicated Accountable owner - Exporting to xlsx in the house format --- Kaizen event charter 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/kaizen-charter.