Where Workflows Go Wrong: A Human View of “Not Value‑Add”

By: Kayla Cousineau, COO

My Operations improvement roots are in the LEAN methodology in the healthcare clinical environment.  While not as trendy today, the goals of that model never left me.  LEAN is about flow, clarity, and removing friction so people could spend more time on what truly mattered. The theory is we should level up the value to the customer by prioritizing what’s most important and less important.

Early in my career, I learned a hard lesson on how personal it can be when you start dissecting how professionals work.

One of my first LEAN facilitation sessions involved a group of nurses mapping the end-to-end process of a cancer patient’s treatment at our center. As we walked through each step, I bluntly called out “non-value-add” tasks as “waste”, a common LEAN term. In manufacturing, the term is neutral, precise, and not loaded in any way. In a room full of oncology nurses, it landed very badly.

I unintentionally offended a top-performing nurse with a single word. The moment stuck with me; not because the framework was wrong, but because applying it without context missed the human reality of the work.

I am thinking about that experience a lot lately as we tackle operations workflow improvement for our Market Research clients.  If we want to meaningfully improve how MRX teams run, we must start by identifying a bit of a priority in our work.  Which parts add the most value to the customer?

“Non-value-added” doesn’t mean unimportant or careless; it means work that doesn’t directly or indirectly advance the outcome we’re here to produce.

Ask a CFO, and the question becomes: What isn’t contributing to (or taking away from) the bottom line? Ask a research director: What does your team do that isn’t tied to client delivery? Ask an analyst: What work do you do that doesn’t drive the insights? These questions aren’t about cutting corners, they’re about uncovering where time, attention, and talent are being absorbed without moving the mission forward. They reveal the amount of time spent on status updates, manual handoffs, manual data reviews, etc. It’s in this minutia: where the biggest opportunities for operational evolution in MRX live.

The future lives in the partnership between people and technology. But to truly arrive in that place, there must be a willingness to challenge our own status quo. Technology can absorb the non value-add noise: the administrative drag that pulls teams away from thinking, analyzing, and advising.

Humans bring the judgment, context, and care that no tech can replicate. When we design operations for that balance, we don’t just improve workflows; we elevate the role of our talent and the quality of outcomes we deliver.

That’s the real promise of continuous improvement in MRX: not only doing more, faster; but enabling people to focus on what truly creates value

If this sounds like your world, OpinionRoute can help you find and fix the hidden friction in your MRX workflows. Reach out today to feel the OR difference.