Rapid Process Improvement is a process improvement methodology adopted by the City of Lakeland to help build a culture of continuous improvement through employee empowerment.  It is designed to bring employees who are performing, and/or impacted by the work, together to identify solutions and actually change the way their work gets done, making it more efficient. The goal is to identify “low to no cost” solutions and to focus on those improvements that can be implemented as soon as possible. The process is designed to identify cross-functional process improvements in 3 to 5 days and be implemented in the work area within a short period of time, typically one to two weeks.  

This initiative began in June of 2008 with the selection of 10 employees from five different departments who had various skills in facilitation and/or experience in performance measurement and/or process improvement.