Tools for Improving Workflow Efficiency
8 February 2026
Team efficiency often falters not on complex tasks, but in everyday work: agreements are lost, approvals are delayed, readiness criteria become vague, and the manager gradually replaces the system with manual management. Outwardly, it looks like a high workload, but in reality, speed doesn't increase, quality fluctuates, and fatigue accumulates.
Vadim Pustoshkin, PhD in Economics, Founder and Head of BIG TEAM Training Center, shares practical tools from his extensive experience in team development. As a Certified Business Trainer and Professional Master Coach with 30+ training programs, he presents proven methods to systematically improve IT workflows.
Efficiency can be improved without leaps and a constant fire-fighting mode. Three pillars are needed: clear principles of teamwork, a lean approach to processes, and regular improvement practices. Constructive feedback strengthens this framework: it helps align expectations more quickly, solidify rules, and maintain a sustainable pace of change — in timing, manageability, and quality of interaction.
In this material, we share the key tools from the workshop “Tools for Improving Workflow Efficiency”: principles of team efficiency, the Lean IT model, the Kaizen method, and constructive feedback techniques. It is important to understand that full mastery of these tools, working with checklists, practical exercises, and analyzing specific situations from your experience are only possible with direct participation in IT Leaders Club workshops.
13 Principles of Team Effectiveness
Workflow effectiveness is often measured by speed: how many tasks were completed, how quickly requests were processed, and whether deadlines were met. This approach is understandable but limited: speed shows the pace of activity, but not the quality of outcome management. A team can operate at a high pace but still stall at approvals, lose context when handing off tasks, accumulate unfinished work, and repeatedly make the same mistakes. As a result, time and attention costs increase, timelines become less predictable, and quality relies on manual supervision. Therefore, a discussion about effectiveness should not begin with individual techniques, but with an overall framework — foundations that make work manageable and allow for systematic improvement.
The 13 Principles Matrix helps you see the whole picture. It translates the discussion about effectiveness from abstractions to specific elements of team practices: purpose and focus, rules and regulations, communication and responsibility, transparency, standardization and automation, trust and support, the ability to continually improve work. This framework is useful because it shows where the system actually breaks down: sometimes the problem is disguised as a complex project or external circumstances, but the source is in the basic settings of team collaboration.
Practical exercise in the training: After reviewing all the principles, participants chose three that definitely needed to be worked on in their teams. The top requests were: automation (especially in IT departments with outdated tools and manual processes), communication and transparency, proactivity, and joint decision-making. Participants exchanged experiences in chat and discussed why these particular principles are lagging in their teams.
The practical value of the matrix is that it helps to set priorities.
It is rarely necessary to change all principles at once. A more effective approach is to choose two or three factors that currently reduce speed and quality of work the most. Then, these principles are translated into a specific plan of small improvements: clarify communication rules and decision-making, organize readiness criteria, reduce unnecessary approvals, establish a common standard, and assess the impact on results.
The matrix is also helpful for regularly reviewing progress. A repeated evaluation after one work cycle shows what has actually changed in daily practice and what has remained at the level of intention. This approach forms the foundation for the next sections: Lean IT helps identify waste in processes, Kaizen makes improvements regular practice, and feedback tools anchor changes in team behavior and agreements.
Lean IT: How to Identify Waste in Familiar Processes
Lean IT adapts the lean approach for IT tasks. The goal is simple: to deliver value to the business and users faster and more reliably while reducing unnecessary time, effort, and resource costs. Focus is placed on the workflow from request to result and anything that slows this down.
