People
- Are we all here?
- Who is out today?
- When will they return?
Daily Management System
PREP
People. Resources. Equipment. Processes. A five-minute daily huddle that puts people first.
PREP gives every team a simple, visible way to start the day together. In five minutes at a shared board, people say what they have, what they are missing, and what stands in the way of the work. Nothing gets buried, and nobody has to guess.
PREP
The People First Daily Management System
What is PREP?
A daily management system that starts with people
PREP puts people at the forefront of daily planning. It gives staff a structured, low-pressure way to name the barriers standing between them and the day's work, and to solve those problems together rather than alone.
The system is built on four daily questions: do we have the people, the resources, the equipment, and the processes we need today? Those four words are the whole framework, which is why teams can learn it in a morning and keep it for years.
What is a huddle board?
A PREP huddle board is the visual platform for the daily readiness huddle. It is an organizational excellence tool, posted where the team already gathers, that establishes a communication flow across the whole enterprise by putting people at the front of the daily readiness discussion.
The board can be a whiteboard, a printed panel, or a free-standing sign. What matters is that it is easy to access, easy to use, easy to see, and easy to understand at a glance.
What happens at a huddle?
In just five minutes every day, everyone in the organization contributes to the discussion about what may affect the ability to get work done. Everyone gets updated insight into unresolved issues from previous huddles, along with any announcements cascaded down from leadership.
Within twenty minutes, all relevant issues have reached executive leadership for awareness and appropriate action. The format promotes open dialogue, brings problems to the surface where they can be addressed, and pulls the group into collaborating on the needs of each workday.
What PREP does for teams
PREP supports a Lean foundation of standard work, along with the visual management of the workarounds a team employs when things change. Boards displayed throughout the organization become a method for tracking issues from the first report through to resolution.
Working together, groups break issues into resolvable tasks, document the resources they need, and track timelines. Those tasks stay visible on the board so they can be seen, checked, and supported. Alongside them, teams post announcements, the metrics that matter to them, and the celebrations that make a workplace feel like one.
Used every day, PREP helps remove the obstacles and waste that workgroups face, keeps the work environment stable and safe, and creates real two-way communication between the front line and leadership.
The four pillars
Four questions, asked every single day
Each letter of PREP is a category the team reviews out loud at the board. The questions are deliberately plain, so anyone on the team can answer them.
Resources
- Do we have all the resources we need to do the work?
- What is short, and who can supply it?
Equipment
- What essential equipment is not working?
- Who is the point of contact?
Processes
- Do we need workarounds to get the job done today?
- What has changed since yesterday?
The huddle board
One board the whole team can read at a glance
This is the standard team board in its portrait layout. Every element on it exists to answer a question a team actually has in the morning.
PREP
- TEAM NAME
- AXIOM
- CHALLENGE
- TODAY'S DATE
PEOPLE
RESOURCES
EQUIPMENT
PROCESSES
KEY RESULTS
POSTS
KUDOS
INSIGHTS
ISSUE
CHAMPION
DATE
STATUS
ETA
TACT questions
Before a team uses the board, it settles its identity. What is our identity? What is our mission? What do we want to achieve today? The answers become the team name, axiom, and challenge in the board header.
PREP ribbons
The four green ribbons hold today's readiness answers for People, Resources, Equipment, and Processes. They are updated each shift with a color change to red when issues or workarounds need to be communicated to the team.
Key Results
The metrics that matter to this team, kept where the team can see them, not filed in a report only managers read.
Posts
Announcements and important information shared with the workgroup, including anything cascaded down from leadership that morning.
Kudos
Public recognition from managers and leaders, peer-to-peer recognition, and celebrations. This space is protected on purpose.
Insights
The issue tracker: what the issue is, who the champion is, the date it was raised, the current status, and the estimated time to the next update. Resolved issues stay up long enough for everyone to see how they closed.
How a huddle runs
Five minutes at the board, twenty minutes to leadership
The rhythm is short by design. A huddle that runs long stops happening, and a system that stops happening cannot help anyone.
1
Minutes 0 to 5
The team meets at the board
The team stands together and walks the four pillars out loud. People, resources, equipment, processes. Everyone gets a chance to speak, and everyone hears the same information at the same time.
2
At the board
Issues get a champion and an ETA
Anything blocking the work is written into the Insights tracker with a named champion, the date it was raised, its current status, and an estimated time to the next update. Nothing leaves the huddle unowned.
3
Within 20 minutes
Leadership has awareness
Huddles cascade upward, so within twenty minutes the relevant issues have reached executive leadership for awareness and appropriate action, and answers cascade back down the same path.
Readiness assessment
Where is your team today?
Answer a few questions about your team and your organization, then score engagement as you see it right now. Your scores stay on this page until you send them, and you can print or save the whole thing as a PDF.
Bring PREP to your team
We help organizations set up boards, train facilitators, and build the daily rhythm that keeps issues moving. Tell us about your team and we will help you find the right starting point.
Talk to us