What Raptor Got Right About Process Improvement
SpaceX made the Raptor engine better across generations by deleting shields, flanges, and whole assemblies until it got lighter and cleaner by taking parts away.
That is an engineering story, but what does the same choice look like in finance, where the product is analysis, reports, reviews, and Monday slide decks rather than engines?
In Field Finance, Mondays used to open with a review of the prior week, and dozens of reports and one deck sat in that stack every week. There was one report that took a lot of time, and on a day with a truncated schedule I stopped sending it. No one had been asking questions about it in months, and when it was late no one asked when it was coming. Months went by and no one missed it. When someone did have a question that report could have answered, I answered it quickly without putting that report back into the Monday morning pile among everything else due that day.
An object in motion tends to stay in motion, and so does a report once the Monday send becomes habit. Parkinson’s law says work expands to fill the time available for it, so an unused report will keep consuming Mondays until someone stops it. Most process improvement talk is about how to add more to the work to make it "better." However, often the better move is to remove the work. That report was not broken, it was just unused. Polishing it would have made Monday busier. Deleting it made Monday lighter and left room for the analysis that actually mattered.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry put it this way: “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”
Before you redesign the next report or deck, ask whether it is still needed at all.