Hawai‘i County’s 2025 building-permits audit, published at hawaiicounty.gov, identified a measurement problem: focusing on active review can hide the wait before assignment and after review completion. A Lean Six Sigma team needs to include both intervals in its baseline. Applicants are still waiting while those cases sit outside the review clock.
Practitioners pursuing Lean Six Sigma International’s Certification Programs can use permitting projects to examine how queue reduction affects compliance. The objective is shorter submission-to-decision time, with evidence that every applicable statutory check remains complete. The approach below applies DMAIC to that objective. It is a proposed project design; the cited audits do not establish that the municipalities implemented Lean Six Sigma.
Define the charter around delay and compliance
The project charter needs to identify the legal requirements that constrain process changes. EPA’s About Lean Government guidance, archived in January 2017, available at 19january2017snapshot.epa.gov, states that Lean cannot change regulatory or statutory requirements, or other legal requirements. That restriction sets the limits of the sponsor’s authority over project scope.
For a residential alteration-permit project, the charter should identify the permit class and process endpoints. The time objective also needs a compliance-defect definition, such as a decision issued without evidence of a required review. Agreement between the sponsor and responsible regulatory officers on the applicable requirements must precede changes to routing or approval authority.
A requirement register gives value stream mapping a basis for distinguishing statutory checks from local administrative practice. Each mandatory check needs a recorded authority and an assigned reviewer. The register should also identify the evidence retained to demonstrate completion. A proposed deletion stays unresolved until the responsible officer confirms whether the check is mandatory.
Measure three clocks without hiding the queue
Hawai‘i County’s audit reports that the Building Division began monitoring lead time in April 2024. The audit’s measurement discussion at hawaiicounty.gov explains that the auditors and the division used different application populations and timeline calculations. For a DMAIC team, comparisons must start with agreement on which applications count and how their elapsed time is calculated.
| Measure | Proposed boundary | DMAIC use |
|---|---|---|
| Applicant elapsed time | Initial submission to communicated decision | Measure the applicant’s full wait |
| Agency-held time | Intervals awaiting or undergoing agency action | Locate internal queues and handoffs |
| Statutory clock | Locally applicable rules for starting and stopping the clock, including extensions | Assess compliance with the relevant deadline |
Applicant-response intervals need separate records, and the measurement plan must account for overlapping reviews. Adding parallel departmental durations would overstate elapsed time. Checking a sample of timestamps against case files establishes whether they record the event itself or a later administrative update.
The dashboard should show median and upper-percentile lead time by permit class, alongside the age of open cases. Completed-case measures exclude applications still waiting for a decision. Those unresolved cases belong in the improvement assessment.
Use correction loops to locate avoidable rework
Seattle’s October 2023 construction-permitting audit, available at seattle.legistar.com, found insufficient guidance on what warranted an official correction and when reviewers should contact applicants instead of continuing correction cycles. It also found no policy for routinely evaluating correction quality and necessity. A process standardisation project can address those specific gaps by defining when to issue a correction and how to assess its quality.
Classifying correction reasons in a Pareto chart identifies the largest categories for investigation. Missing-document returns warrant a check of whether the intake checklist states the requirement clearly. Repeated technical corrections need a different examination: whether reviewers explain the requirement consistently and reference the same plan revision.
Each correction needs a traceable requirement and a description of the evidence needed to resolve it. Standard work can define the comment structure and escalation criteria while leaving technical judgement with the reviewer. The pilot should test whether applicants resolve valid corrections with fewer repeat submissions.
FMEA sets the conditions for a routing pilot
Missed referrals and reviews performed against superseded drawings belong in a failure mode and effects analysis before the review sequence changes. Parallel review is an option only where dependencies and applicable rules permit it. The routing decision must specify which checks can proceed together and which depend on an earlier finding.
One permit class with documented requirements provides a defined scope for pilot testing. Lead time needs a balancing measure: the proportion of audited decisions containing evidence of every applicable check. Intake first-pass acceptance measures a separate step. It records acceptance into review and says nothing about the proportion of applications approved.
Give the process owner a response rule
The control plan should assign responsibility for investigating ageing cases and reviewing compliance exceptions. Pilot comparisons need to stay within the same permit class, with changes in staffing or submission volume recorded. A shorter average leaves the compliance question unanswered and is insufficient grounds to close the DMAIC project.
A missing mandatory review found during the pilot requires a documented response before the sponsor accepts the project. The process owner must arrange assessment of the affected case and corrective action before wider deployment.
Lean Six Sigma International’s Certification Programs cover DMAIC problem solving and project management. The programme descriptions at leansixsigma.org provide a basis for matching training to your responsibilities in a permit-improvement project.
Sources
- United States Environmental Protection Agency (2017 archive), About Lean Government: https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/lean/about-lean-government_.html
- Seattle Office of City Auditor (2023), City’s Construction Permitting Needs More Customer Focus and Consistency: https://seattle.legistar.com/View.ashx?G=undefined&GUID=36BB23EB-D926-45D3-99E3-2273197B0E9A&ID=12996121&M=F
- Lean Six Sigma International (undated, accessed 2026), Lean Six Sigma Certification Programs & Belt Levels: https://leansixsigma.org/certifications-programs/
