How do you balance Kaizen with other priorities and deadlines?

This is a severely flawed question to begin with. Kaizen as correctly stated is a continuous improvement philosophy. It’s not a specific event that needs balanced with other priorities. You are talking about an event to host and taking dedicated week long time to solve. This flawed thinking is the reason most organizations fail to improve. The “event” you schedule is worthy of balancing with other priorities but the magic of kaizen is in the everyday work. How do I make my work more efficient through elimination of non value activities? Ask this repeatedly in everything you do. When it becomes of your daily thinking and this permeates across the organization, you begin to see a massive improvement in every meaningful metric including morale

The mission and vision would have already stated where you want to go and how you are going to get there. However, you need a value stream map to expose areas for improvement. Identify these areas, prioritize them and then schedule them. Only then can you do kaizen/accelerated improvement workshop.

I started with Clipper in DOS, I went through the market domination of Microsoft, the Yahoo search engine, arriving at Google services that live on advertising: like Facebook, Twitter, and many other big names in the technology sector. Next door is Apple which doesn't even have its own cloud, it crushed Nokia and went through several moments in which it risked disappearing. The inability to manage continuous improvement, or not understanding the nature of the problems, cuts you off from the market. If your job doesn't give you room for growth, or training, if there's no room for improvement, then you're falling out of the market. No space for Kaizen? You have no future.

Identifica tus objetivos y valores: Asegúrate de que las actividades de Kaizen estén alineadas con los objetivos generales de la empresa y sus valores fundamentales. Establece prioridades claras: Determina qué mejoras de Kaizen tendrán el mayor impacto y priorízalas. Integra Kaizen en las rutinas diarias: Haz que Kaizen sea parte del trabajo diario, no algo adicional. Comunica la importancia: Asegúrate de que todos entiendan cómo Kaizen puede ayudar a alcanzar los objetivos y cumplir con los plazos. Monitorea y ajusta: Revisa regularmente el progreso de Kaizen y ajusta según sea necesario para mantener el equilibrio con otras tareas.

When your organization is in continuous improvement mode there is already a budget and Human Resources allocated for the fiscal year and robustly supported by leadership. Without this support there will be no kaizen. Kaizen is not continuous, improvement is continuous. Kaizen is a onetime event that can be performed many times with the goal of achieving improvements continuously between kaizens.

In customer support, identifying the real problem and finding a solution are essential elements to avoid succumbing to out-of-control costs. The absence of adequate customer support ruins products and services, but that's where many managers cut the budget, leading companies toward the abyss. Continuous improvement here is a requirement, an essential element because the only real solution is to correct defects, provide effective assistance tools, and act in advance. Just one word: Kaizen.

The kaizen team consists mainly of people actually doing the work and their input is the most valuable because no one knows how to perform the job better than them.

Of course celebrate your wins but don’t forget that you must revisit at 3, 6, and 9 month intervals to offer any advice or guidance needed and to ensure that there is no recidivism taking place.

- Open communication and active listening is key to a kaizen mentality - Also investing on current employees to evolve professionally can help in continuous improvement. Ex. Skill based certification - Empathize and setting up one on one sessions can help to better understand core teams. Your employees are key to both operational and leadership excellence.

The words are text book, in my experience before investing time and effort in continuous improvement activities like “kaizen”you first need a level of standardisation (discipline). Done develop something that is hard to manage, make the activity as systematic as possible so you can focus on the outputs (improvement) rather than the inputs (are people doing what they should be doing (Kaizen process)) I may have missed the words somewhere but the Kaizen activity should be owned by the people who work on the process, and not (at all) seen as a management tool.