What are the best strategies for monitoring solutions during team problem-solving?

How you will measure your solution success? This relates back to the problem statement and the outlined goal. The ideal state is the attainment of the goal which reflects the elimination of the problem. Compare the conditions before and after the implementation to ensure achievement of the goal. Don not fall in this trap. Instead of checking results attainment, teams often check whether action items were implemented. Ask clearly was an improvement obtained? If the the answer is YES, ask how much? Then compare the achievement with the outlined goal.

This is sometimes called the action plan. Who will do what at what time , using which amount of human and financial resources, etc. ensure that this list of activities together lead to the achievement of the goal. Note that this activity list has to have three extra points. The first point is who will monitor the above activities , if they were done or not. The second point is who will measure the progress and determine how much of the outlined goa; achieved. Some people consider the third point as a nice to have one but it is not. The third point is who will take the following decision which successful solution could be turned into a best practice ,standardized and generalized to prevent problems from occurring or reoccurring.

Checklists and templates are powerful tools to remember the sequence of tasks and need to be tied to a deep understanding. People love a snappy checklist or template that usually be made “user friendly.” Therefore aspects of quality and effectiveness are often omitted to make a checklist brief. Well-constructed templates would be better seen as a puzzle which its pieces need to fit together to form a coherent and big picture. The big picture here is “Problem is solved” or “performance improvement.” Each section is interconnected, and the checklist itself ( or template) is linked to the problem solving context. Think of the elements as the cogs in a machine and they fit together and the final cog rotates in the correct direction.