This post intends to come back on the use of the Action Log and the Problem Log in the way they have been designed for, then of course everyone should feel free to use the solution as they see fit with their needs. 

The Action Log is the central view of the meeting and it should be reviewed at least once during any meeting to ensure no actions are forgotten.

Why only 1 per dashboard?

Here, an Action Log is already in the team board, a Problem Log can be added

You might have noticed that once you've added one Action Log and one Problem Log into a 3DLean team board, you can't select them anymore from the library of Leangets. This is normal and intended.

Indeed, the Action Log is the one place where all action sticky-notes, created from all different pages in the team board are displayed. Same for the Problem Log with Problem sticky-notes. These Logs act as the one place of truth: you can't miss an action or a problem when looking at these pages. 

So sometimes, I hear a need to have 2 different Action Logs for different sub-teams participating in the meeting or for different missions the team has. Well, in both cases, I think the best thing to do is to create 1 board per team, or even better, 1 board per team meeting. So a team who has different missions could have one type of meeting for each mission. This team should build the appropriate board to be effective during this meeting. 

Keep in mind that actions can be sent to other teams. So when we need to assign an action to a sub-team, we could directly assign this action to the sub-team.

How to differentiate problems and actions?

It is true that visually when they are not in edition mode, there is no difference between an action and a problem in 3DLean. When you edit them though, you can identify who is who. The main difference is on the bottom left corner of a problem: it can contain actions. And it makes sense! When facing a problem and trying to solve it, we will do some containment actions first, then corrective ones and then preventive ones to ensure the problem doesn't occur again.
 

Actions can be attached to a problem and this is key to record:

• which actions worked on a past problem
• which actions did not work on a past problem
• how often it occurred (which might help you analyze whether preventive and corrective actions were efficient)
• who was responsible for performing those actions (so who can contact that person now)

In Lean methodologies, an action identifies who, what, when, where and how a task should be performed.

In 3DLean:

• 'who' is carried by the picture of the assigned person;
• 'when' is indicated by the column on which the action is positioned
• 'what', 'where' and 'how' need to be indicated in the sticky-note.

As a simple guideline, I would recommend to always start with a verb to describe 'what' has to be done, try to put yourself in the position of the future readers of this action (that could be you), is it precise enough to remember what you meant? To describe 'where' and 'how', you can either write in the sticky-note directly, or use the 'Attachments' tab to add a screenshot showing the document on which the action has to be performed or any other documents / video or use the 'Sketch' tab to manually write more details.

Then operationally, there are several options:

• an action could be a small task to be performed, and which can not be cut into sub-tasks. This works well in case we want to make sure we don't forget any step, so each action would be an item of a non-ordered check-list. It is also interesting when we work on a new process because it helps ensuring actions don't stay stuck in "in-progress mode" for days.
• it could also be describing a longer process when we know this process is documented somewhere else.

A problem follows the same logic: the content of what is written in the sticky-note should describe what happened, when, how, who found it etc. It is also possible to add a picture or a sketch of the problem. It does not start with a verb, it really is a statement.

On the Use of the Problem Log:

The Problem Log has been designed for you to move problems from the left to the right side of the board.

First, you should assign a responsible to the problem, this is essential to ensure someone will follow-up on its actions, define next steps to be done and in the end, solve the problem. Once the responsible is assigned, move the problem to the column "Responsible Assigned".

In the image above, we can even move it to the column "Identified Actions" as you can see there is already one action attached to it.

A top layer has been defined for top priority problems, it is just graphical so no worries if you don't find a different behavior in 3DLean for top priority problems.

When all actions in a problem are finished, you will see a new symbol on the problem sticky-note. Be careful! It does not mean the problem is solved, just that all actions you had identified are done. Maybe you need to go even further in the actions to do.

What else to know?

Once a problem is created into a specific page (on a Sketch or on a Web page etc), you can't move it into another page so it is wise to carefully think of where you want to create your problem sticky-note in order to attach actions to it from the same view.

For instance, in our standard demos, we notice a problem occurred from a KPI view, but we know we will analyze this problem and take actions from an Ishikawa diagram, so we create the problem into the Ishikawa and simply add the KPI screenshot as a context of the problem.

Tips and Tricks:

1. It is also possible to use Problems and Actions to deal with very short projects, always having in mind that it helps capturing knowledge and know-how. For instance, the project (created as a problem) is "Create a new training session for 3DLean", then actions can be "find a date and time", "create GotoWebinar session", "ask for creation in the University", "promote it in communities". We could then track the completion of each task of this mini project. 
2. As Actions and Problems are copied to the Action Log view and to the Problem Log view, you can delete them from the original page where you created them if you don't need them here anymore.