SQDCP Board: Keep a Finished Improvement Visible Every Morning

The SQDCP Board structures the Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost and People board for balanced daily operational management. Five letters. Five measures. One owner against each. You read it standing up, in a few minutes, every day.

It belongs in the Sustain phase of RDMAICS because that is where improvements quietly die. The project closes. The team disperses. The control chart stops being printed. Six months later the process has drifted back and nobody can say when it started.

A board stops that drift by making the drift visible. If a measure goes off target, the colour changes in front of the people who can act. The board does not fix anything by itself. It removes the excuse that nobody knew.

Use it at handover, not after. Build the board while the project team is still together, so the owners are agreed while the knowledge is fresh.

Everything below uses the sample data built into the tool. The case is fictional. It covers an accounts payable process that has just come out of an improvement project, and the board is the handover artefact.

Five measures carry the process. Safety is tracked as incidents, with a target of zero. Quality is error rate, with a target of eight per cent or lower. Delivery is on-time payment, with a target of ninety seven per cent or higher. Cost is cost per invoice, with a target of five dollars or lower. People is training currency, with a target of one hundred per cent.

Four owners carry those five measures. The AP Manager holds safety and delivery. A Green Belt holds quality. Finance holds cost. HR holds training currency. That spread matters. A board owned by one person is a report, not a board.

Each row needs the element, the metric, the target, the current value, a status and an owner. The target field is where most boards fail before they start. A target written as ninety seven per cent tells the tool nothing about direction. A target written as at least ninety seven per cent does.

Look at how the sample handles this. Error rate is written as at or below eight per cent. On-time payment is at or above ninety seven per cent. Cost per invoice is at or below five dollars. Incidents are zero, an exact value. Training currency is one hundred per cent, also exact. The direction is part of the target, every time.

The status column is the human call. It is set separately from the numbers, which lets a team record amber on a measure that is close but moving the wrong way. In the sample, delivery is recorded as amber.

Pick measures you can refresh at the cadence you intend to meet. A daily board with a monthly measure on it teaches people to ignore four weeks out of five.

The tool returns a short summary and then five cards, one per letter. The headline numbers are five measures, four of five on target, one off target and four owners.

The off-target line is specific. Delivery, on-time payment at 96.5 per cent against a target of at least 97 per cent, recorded amber. That is the whole conversation for the morning. The other four letters are on target and need no discussion beyond a glance.

Each card repeats the element, the metric, the target, the current value and the owner. Safety shows zero incidents against a target of zero. Quality shows 7.2 per cent against a ceiling of eight per cent. Cost shows four dollars eighty against a ceiling of five dollars. People shows one hundred per cent against one hundred per cent. Delivery shows the gap.

The tool also offers an AI review that explains the result in plain language if you want a second read before you take the board to a meeting.

The first decision is where to spend the stand-up. With four letters green, the board buys the team permission to talk about delivery only. That is the point of balance. You are not choosing between safety and cost, you are confirming both are held while you work on the one that is not.

The second decision is who speaks. Delivery sits with the AP Manager, who also holds safety. One person carries two letters, which is worth noticing at handover. If the AP Manager is absent, two of five measures go unreported.

The third decision is whether amber escalates. On-time payment at 96.5 against a floor of 97 is a small gap. One day of that is noise. A week of that is a trend, and the board is the only place that difference becomes obvious.

The fourth decision is about quality headroom. Error rate sits at 7.2 per cent against a ceiling of eight per cent. The measure is on target, but the room between the two numbers is not large. A board lets you watch headroom, not just pass or fail.

A board decays in predictable ways, and the signs show up in the data long before anyone admits the routine has lapsed. Watch for current values that do not change from day to day. Identical figures across a week usually mean nobody refreshed them.

Watch for status creep. Amber that never becomes red, and never becomes green, is a measure that has been quietly accepted. The delivery row in the sample is amber for a reason. If it is still amber in three months with the same 96.5 per cent, the board has stopped driving anything.

Watch the owner count. Four owners across five measures is workable. When the owner column collapses to one name, the board has become one person's homework. When an owner leaves and the row keeps their name, the row is orphaned.

Watch for letters going blank. People is often first, because training currency feels like somebody else's job. A board missing a letter is no longer a balanced board.

The first mistake is too many measures. Five letters invite five metrics. Teams add three per letter and the board takes twenty minutes to read, so it gets read once a week, then not at all.

The second mistake is targets without direction. If the board cannot tell whether higher is better, the status colour becomes an opinion. The sample avoids this by writing at or below and at or above into every target that needs it.

The third mistake is treating green as finished. Cost per invoice at four dollars eighty against a ceiling of five dollars is green, and it is also close to the line. Green means within target today, not safe forever.

The fourth mistake is building the board after handover. By then the people who understood why the measure matters have moved on, and the board inherits metrics nobody can defend.

The board reports. It does not investigate. It tells you on-time payment is 96.5 per cent against a floor of 97 per cent. It does not tell you which invoices were late, which supplier terms changed, or whether one approver went on leave. You still need the Analyse phase tools for that.

It does not validate your data. The current values are whatever you type. If someone reports a figure from memory, the board will colour it confidently and wrongly. The structure cannot protect you from a soft input.

It does not weight the letters. Zero safety incidents and one hundred per cent training currency are displayed with the same prominence as cost per invoice. The count of four of five on target treats every measure as equal, which is a reporting convention, not a judgement about risk.

It does not show trend. You see today against target, not the last thirty days. A measure that has fallen steadily for a fortnight and a measure that dipped once both appear the same way. Pair the board with a run chart if direction matters.

Finally, it does not create the routine. A board nobody stands in front of is a spreadsheet. The tool gives you the structure and the honest colour. The daily habit is the part you have to supply.