What do we really want to measure and how to do that?

This question belongs to Zuzanna Pamula, Process Transformation Manager at Office Samurai. 

When she started her career in process improvement, she thought she had it all figured out: data from enterprise systems, colorful dashboards, and enough KPIs to fulfill a Six Sigma dream. 

For a young analyst, it felt like going to Disneyland for the first time… until she realized that all her numbers were only showing the visible tip of a much bigger and messier iceberg.

The questions arose:

🔸 How much do people actually work? 

🔸 Where do they waste time? 

🔸 What happens between systems, outside of the ERP logs, in the real digital trenches of copy-paste, waiting, rework, and silent frustration?

She did what every Lean Six Sigma purist would do: measurement. She shadowed people at their desks, designed perfect Excel templates, and begged for time tracking compliance.

Guess what? It didn’t change anything. 

Because what she measured was how people SAID they worked – not how they ACTUALLY worked. Fear, bias, and corporate self-preservation kicked in. Everyone gave polished numbers that always added up to exactly eight hours a day. Pure fiction. 

That’s when she learned the hard truth: in most companies, process measurement is less about improvement and more about storytelling – the kind that makes managers feel safe.

And then, the horsemen of success arrived: technologies such as Task Mining, Process Mining, Productivity Intelligence.With those tools you could see the real process. The kind that reveals what’s actually slowing you down, not what people wish was true.

Because when you look at real data, you find things you didn’t expect:

🔸 People spending half their day in non-value-adding meetings 

🔸 Constantly checking and replying to emails which feels productive, but is it really?

🔸 Work fragmented across a dozen tools that were supposed to make life easier, but ended up eating more time than they save.

Zuza calls them the “(Un)expected Findings” – and every organization has them.They’re not about catching people on a lie. They’re about facing the truth.

In this episode, Zuza takes us from her early Lean days – measuring work with pen and stopwatch – to the present, where AI and data analytics finally let us measure how work really happens. She talks about the illusions of productivity, the small human hacks (like mouse jigglers), and the uncomfortable (but liberating) truth that comes when data replaces opinion.

This isn’t just an episode about process improvement. It’s about the courage to measure what’s real.