In aerospace manufacturing, year-end reviews often highlight the volume of parts a supplier has produced that do not immediately appear to meet specification, but may still be fit for purpose. These potentially non-conforming products are assessed to determine whether they should be accepted, reworked or rejected. All three outcomes carry implications. Even parts that are ultimately accepted can become expensive if they have sat in assessment queues for too long or if the evaluation drags on without resolution. The cost lies not in the acceptance itself, but in the time and resources consumed during the assessment process. Ultimately, the aim of the "keep-kill-change" approach is to unclog the workflow and reduce the backlog, freeing resources and ensuring the manufacturer does not carry "difficult" parts into the new year. The traps lie in the judgment calls. Accepting too many borderline items risks wasted effort and prolonged assessment cycles. Rejecting without considering cost or customer impact can cause parts shortages that disrupt production schedules. Rework can be costly, time consuming and does not always guarantee a conforming part at the end. A practical tip is not to make these decisions in isolation. Convene a small team of no more than five, including representatives from different but vital functions. That way balanced perspectives are gained without clashing or too many opinions across all key considerations. Done correctly, the result is a leaner list and a better-focused start to the year.
A Keep Kill Change audit helps teams slow down and notice what shapes their daily work. Our team has used it to make tough choices feel lighter and more thoughtful. It guides people to see both the emotional and practical sides of what they do each day. I once supported a team that decided to keep their midweek check-in because it helped them build stronger relationships. They also changed their handoff rules so projects moved with a steady rhythm. The shift removed steps that created friction for new members and allowed them to settle in with ease. These choices gave the team better flow and more space to focus on shared goals. A simple and thoughtful approach like this helps create a healthy work culture.
Over the years, I have led so many teams, and I have personally noticed the majority of troubles in workflows come from old processes, half-finished projects, and outdated content. This is why doing a Keep-Kill-Change audit at year-end is one of the most effective ways to reset priorities and remove operational clutter. We often keep experimenting with new tools and technologies with the evolving needs, and this often drains budget and time if not filtered with time. I feel nothing will change unless you change your working method. A keep-kill-change audit helps us to see the big picture and identify what is working for the organization and what needs to be removed. Teams usually continue using the same old processes because they have a habit of doing it that way, and the method has always worked. This audit motivates everyone to look at workflows, tools, meetings, responsibilities, and many other angles with a fresh view. Here is how you can use it: - Keep the things that are working well and need to be updated or improved. - Kill or remove anything that is draining your work, specific tasks, tools, or projects that no longer make sense. - Change the things that have potential to give great results but need a new direction, such as improving workflows, restructuring projects, or anything Lastly, to make this audit effective, use data like time spent, costs, outcomes, and involve people from different levels in important decisions. If you follow this, you will definitely enter the new year with sharper focus, less waste, and your teams will feel more aligned and motivated.
Hey, I've very much done the textbook assigning measurable value to each process before deciding fuck all. We benchmarked tasks based on time, cost, error prevention and business impact, and this unearthed very surprising kills such as a tool we emotionally liked but used hardly ever. The advantage of this scoring system was that it eliminated bias, turning difficult calls into math rather than politics. The biggest pitfall was not including the people closest to the work when we brought in frontline staff, that assessment turned out to be true. My implementation advice would be to agree on a shortlist of only changes with clear owners and deadlines not long lists of shiny new ideas, or it will just end up lapsing into being a January audit ritual with no execution. Best regards, Ben Mizes CoFounder of Clever Offers URL: https://cleveroffers.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmizes/
Our team performs Keep-Kill-Change audits during December of each year to evaluate our marketing systems and internal workflows. The review process functions as a team-based evaluation, requiring participation from all team members. We use Trello boards and whiteboards to document all recurring operations, vendor relationships, and tools before assigning Keep, Kill, or Change labels for evaluation. The main advantage of this process becomes clear when teams identify duplicate operations across different social media platforms or spot unnecessary estimation procedures within the CRM system. The biggest challenge tends to be the emotional attachment people develop to certain elements--many team members naturally want to defend their work. To navigate this, the team uses an outcome-based evaluation model rather than tracking individual work hours. This shift helps assess which activities actually support customer growth and business expansion. That perspective helps teams work through tough decisions more constructively during discussions.
Linkible's New Year Keep Kill Change audits are focused on time as the single most honest and reliable metric, and we measure time by pulling a whole years worth of calendar data, task history and client activity; then we assign three values to every recurring item, those being the number of hours it took each month, the dollar amount of the client revenue it touched and the level of team energy it drained using a simple ten point scale. Once all of these items are in one location, the picture is quite clear. The previous review had identified 60 on-going activities and eliminated 7 recurring meetings that were consuming 40 hours per month but generating less than 5% of revenue. Four reporting systems were consolidated into one shared dashboard to eliminate an additional $12,000 in quarterly internal labor costs. The only true risk for a performance audit is turning it into an ideation process. To realize the greatest value from the performance audit process, every keep item should earn its position based on data numbers rather than opinion.
There is a basic rule of thumb we follow when performing our Keep Kill Change Review. We only keep things if someone can show they own them and track a single metric that is relevant today. In our review of the recurring task list for this company last year, we identified 137 tasks and treated each one as equally important from weekly reporting to long term campaign. This clear framework helped make the overall process more manageable and kept the team focused on what still generates value. The next three weeks were spent on tasks with no owner or no active metric which were then immediately moved from routine to kill, keep, change at least weekly. This one action alone reduced approximately 28% of our regular workload, gave each person approximately ten hours per month that they had not previously used, and redirected approximately $60,000 toward channels we are already seeing results from. The only true trap would be allowing the audit process to become an ongoing conversation. Simply treat it as a quick resource reset to what has been proven to work.
I've applied the Keep-Kill-Change audit to optimize workflows and team dynamics at year-end. The framework, while deceptively simple, is surprisingly powerful. "Keep" spotlights practices and tools that are delivering measurable value; "Kill" looks at processes that suck up time or morale without offering clear ROI; and "Change" zeroes in on areas requiring adaptation rather than elimination. One victory came when my team scrutinized how we produce content. We kept it because, for us, the system produced clarity and accountability. We decided to do away with cumbersome reporting templates that took hours of work but delivered limited insight. When it came to "change," we reworked how often we communicated with our clients, evolving from a weekly round of status emails, to bi-weekly strategy calls something that had brought increased alignment and fewer inbox symptoms. The benefits are obvious: the audit provides a common language for improvement, encourages honest reflection and helps keep inertia from carrying bad habits into the new year. The greatest trap, though, is in thinking of it as a one-time exercise. If leaders don't deliver on the "kill" or "change" elements, employees lose faith in the process rapidly. My suggestion: track results, through ownership and quarterly reviews. When it is done well, the Keep-Kill-Change audit becomes more than just something you do at the end of the year; it's a tool for cultural improvements that never ends.
One of the best things we do across automotive and claims operations is to conduct an end-of-year Keep-Kill-Change audit. This is a deceptively simple way of forcing an honest review of habits and practices that have stealthily crept into our processes, and are negatively affecting margins, compliance, and customer experience. In the claims/finance nexus, I've observed teams recapture time on task, sometimes by many hours per week, just by killing redundant affordability checks layered in over time to "cover ourselves." These groups also kept and continue to keep structured triage scripts, which they know improve the validity rate. Both of these change patterns are common across regulated operations. The most important focus areas are often around "change." A good example is around policies, where archaic manual document-review processes must give way to automated ingestion. This need is part of a more general industry trend toward digital compliance processes as the only way to reduce error rates. In my experience, leaders should embrace this audit at the end of the year not as housekeeping, but as a strategic activity that shores up profitability, reduces operational friction, and positions teams for new risks and changing consumer behaviors in the coming year.
A Keep-Kill-Change audit is a particularly useful exercise in digitalised automotive and claims businesses, as leaders' sense of the level of technical debt and organisational friction they are battling can lag behind the speed with which it accumulates, and may be inhibiting conversion rate and/or throughput velocity more than is obvious. I have experienced several instances in which gains can be unlocked by killing legacy marketing dashboards that no-one trusts, keeping high-converting self-service UX flows which relieve inbound pressure, and changing fragmented handover points between marketing/product/operations, which were symptomatic for many teams across the industry. It can be a trap to assume that the tools are the bottleneck, when often the friction lies with lack of clear ownership between teams, and the audit becomes the vehicle to refresh accountabilities and tighten the customer journey. Done well, the exercise should provide leadership with a data-informed set of priorities which will have an immediate impact on performance and a side-effect of de-clutter.
Operations Director (Sales & Team Development) at Reclaim247
Answered 3 months ago
The end-of-year Keep-Kill-Change audit makes sense to me when we look at it from an ops lens because it forces out the invisible friction that builds up in front-line teams over time. We often work in claims functions where meeting continuous demands for compliance, communication, and emotional labour can cause good process to degrade. I've led customer service teams that found huge value in simply keeping core parts of their objection-handling framework, killing process dead weight (say, small admin steps added following a past audit or regulatory change, but not removed after the event), and changing legacy escalation flows that led to bottlenecks in the teams - changes that would have been similar in many accident-management ops teams. It also forces an operation to avoid a real trap - of letting legacy thinking become embedded simply because "it's always been there", even when it causes quiet attrition to team morale and a loss of time in case handling. Executives who take on this commitment annually can have a much clearer line of sight, get strong alignment with their team and most importantly feel confident their operation is starting Q1 at full capacity, not with carry-over friction from the previous year.
A Keep Kill Change review has to be based on quantifiable volume and capacity as opposed to subjective opinion. As a result of this, I have created an ongoing weekly log documenting the amount of time that is spent in hours per week performing each of my repetitive tasks, and these are the numbers that will determine my decision. Therefore, if one task is using 12 hours a week with no return on investment, I will move it to Change or Kill; conversely, if a process requires less than 2 hours of my time and generates additional revenue and contributes positively to product flow, then it will go into the Keep category. This process remains non-confrontational due to the fact that the data tells its own story. Also, the most powerful factor of using a Keep Kill Change review is identifying hidden drag. When we eliminated a reporting habit requiring 90 minutes a day of six people's time, after elimination, they had an entire day back each week to produce other value and performance increased without anyone having to fight for it.
I have such a review once per quarter-year in December and I am not being truthful when I say the majority of business owners do so in a manner that most of us only do it once a year during spring-cleaning. The greatest error I can identify is that instead of preserving something that works, the leaders pay attention to what is broken. We nearly murdered our weekly team-huddles last year due to them being perceived to take too much time. It turns out that 30 minutes check-ins were the only factor that allowed our remote agents to remain in touch with our mission. We retained them but reformatted them so that there was more peer problem-solving. The income of the same agents increased by 23 percent in Q1. And the secret is that you begin with your Kill column. Note all processes, meetings or equipment that actively consume resources such as energy or money. Be ruthless. We canceled three software subscriptions, which no one used, and monthly reporting system which overlapped data. That allowed freeing up $8,000 and approximately 15 hours of combined time. It is the Change column, and you will be dedicating most of your energy here. I enquire in any case my group grumbles about at least twice. One of our reception procedures involved the clients completing unnecessary forms. Our digital questionnaire was created by reducing four pages. The time of client onboarding was reduced by half. The Keep column matters most. These are the things that you do not compromise on and they make your culture and the reason why clients will be making repeat visits. Guarantee their protection to the point where they appear inefficient on paper. The disheveled human factor is your sometimes difference with the competitors who have squashed the souls out of their business.
Our team uses the Keep Kill Change audit method at the end of every year to decide what needs our focus. It creates a clear moment for employees to slow down and think about their work. This helps everyone share honest thoughts and new ideas without pressure. It also guides us into a new year without holding habits that no longer serve us. We use this method to support daily alignment and help our employees grow. For example, we keep our monthly skills swap session because it builds confidence and brings new learning to the team. We change any workflow that feels slow or unclear. We kill steps that make tasks longer than they should be and give the team more space to work better.
I lean towards clarity, emotional stewardship and getting blind spots out of high stakes situations. That prism influences the way I handle a year end Keep Kill Change audit since I have observed how invisible friction could damage trust and the integrity of the workflow. The best audit that I had ever directed was more of a forensic analysis but not a planning process. Nothing had been permitted at all in Keep Kill or Change, of the value it secured, or the mischief it injured. That one borderline came out with the subliminal reality that teams tend to evade. Workflow that was universally defended happened to be the cause of most customer delays, and the only protection against quality failure was a task that people considered to be tedious. Opinions were substituted by evidence and the picture altered. Also to escape the trap of attempting to fix everything I narrowed down the category of Change to three items and provided them with a shadow owner after Thirty days. They were assigned the role of mapping the landmines prior to the inception of solutions. It avoided the expensive re-invention and political backlash. An effective audit does not clean up the year. It is the fact concerning the one you really lived.
My view is that Keep-Kill-Change audits are one of the most effective methods for improving team performance as we move into a new year. Due to continual operational pressures in the hospitality industry, it is often easy to miss out on identifying inefficiencies until they cost money. By utilizing a structured audit, management will be able to quickly recognize and eliminate the processes that do what they claim to do (provide value), the processes that do not provide any value (cost resources with little or no return), and the processes that need to be upgraded to a modern standard. Big benefits * Makes it clear what actually influences visitor satisfaction Reduces workload by eliminating outdated tasks that no longer support revenue Helps teams refocus on high-impact service standards Common traps * Evaluate people instead of evaluating processes. * Remove tasks without understanding the downstream operational impact. * Implement changes without proper training and communication. How to run it effectively * Utilize actual performance data including service times & guest feedback * Include front line staff as they are aware of where the day-to-day workflow is hindered. * Use small scale pilots before introducing large-scale changes. The above approach will keep all teams focused, aligned, and agile as the expectation of guest service changes over time.
Hi, thanks for your question. I have been embracing this concept in saying 'yes' and 'no' to various business related tasks over the course of the year instead of waiting until year end. I have found it to be overwhelming if I wait to conduct this audit at the end of the year and prefer to have an ongoing relationship with evaluating what is working and worth my energy and what is not. Thanks, Elissa
I never thought of calling it keep, kill, change, but that's essentially what we do on our end-of-year audits at our Miami medical malpractice law firm. The purpose is to cut through noise that isn't serving our clients and team members. Clarity and focus are the main practices here; a "kill" item could be any task that isn't advancing our client's position, cutting down draining billable hours, or reducing mental energy being exerted on bureaucratic noise. Our "Keep" has to be an early-stage file review process; it's an absolute when it comes to identifying the most important piece of evidence. "Change" is a difficult one to maneuver; most lawyers (including myself) live in old stories of "the way things have always been done." It's a dangerous outlook to have, especially with the ever-changing advancements in technology. We can waste weeks of precious time by using outdated deposition scheduling tools or calendar systems. It's a threat to our clients' medical and financial stability. In order to be as effective as possible, our team focuses on speed and precision; everything else could be a hindrance.
VP of Demand Generation & Marketing at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency
Answered 3 months ago
At year end I put every part of the operation on the table so the team can see what actually holds our process together. Listing all tasks, tools, SOPs and communication paths in one place exposes what matters and what no longer earns its place. It opens the door for people to talk about the slowdowns they have been quietly managing all year. Our decision making stays tight and our aim is quick alignment. Everything must fall into keep, retire or adjust and nothing floats in limbo. After locking in the decisions we assign owners and set review checkpoints. This keeps the audit practical and prevents it from turning into a long discussion with no follow through. The risk is letting the audit stretch into conversations that never lead anywhere so I keep the structure clear and simple. From there every item has to land into one of three buckets either to keep it as is, retire it or adjust it. And we do not let anything sit in an undecided pile, once we lock in the choices we match each decision with an owner and a review date. This is what makes the audit worthwhile because the team begins the next year with a workflow that is lighter, faster and built on the decisions we committed to.
I've run a window and door replacement company in Chicago for 20+ years, and we do our Keep-Kill-Change audit every January--not because something broke, but because that's when installation schedules are lightest and I can actually think. Last January, we killed our "free estimates within 48 hours" promise because our sales team was rushing measurements and causing rework during installation. Slowing down our front-end process actually cut our project timelines by 3-4 days overall. The biggest thing I've learned: audit your handoffs, not your people. When we had issues with window installations running over budget, everyone blamed the install crew. Turned out our sales team was recommending Pella frames that required different prep work than what our estimators were accounting for in quotes. We changed our sales training to include 30 minutes with an installer, and our cost overruns dropped by about 40% that quarter. One concrete move that worked: I physically shadow each role for half a day in early January--sales appointments, installations, customer service calls, everything. Last year I finded our installers were making three trips to suppliers per job because our materials coordinator was ordering from whoever had the lowest price that week instead of batching orders. We kept the coordinator, killed the "always find cheapest supplier" rule, and locked in two preferred vendors. Cut our installation time per home by half a day. The trap I see other contractors fall into is only auditing when a client complains or an employee quits. By then you're in damage control mode and you make emotional decisions. Set the audit date now for next January, block it on everyone's calendar, and protect that time like it's your biggest client meeting.