Improvement projects rarely fail at the solution stage. They fail at the start, quietly, when a symptom gets mistaken for a problem and momentum does the rest. Five questions catch it early.
1. Would the operator and the finance director sign the same problem statement?
If the person doing the work and the person paying for it describe the problem differently, you don't have a problem statement yet. You have two. Keep working until one sentence satisfies both.
2. What does it cost today?
Not roughly — measured. Delay, rework, overtime, lost orders. If the answer is "we don't know", that measurement is the first project. Data replaces anecdote, and the priority list usually surprises people.
3. Who owns the process — not the project?
A project ends. The process continues. If nobody owns the process afterwards, the improvement decays in six months and you've run a demonstration, not a change.
4. What will you stop doing?
Every new control, report or checkpoint is capacity spent. An improvement that only adds is usually waste wearing a badge. The best interventions remove steps.
5. How will you know it held?
Decide now what number you'll look at in six months, and against what baseline. This is why the Chido method measures chapter five against the baseline taken in chapter two — sustained gains or it didn't happen.
Five honest answers before you start beat any amount of heroics after. If you'd like help pressure-testing a project you're about to launch, book a discovery call — thirty minutes, no jargon.