I — Datum

The Vandrebok

A running, attested record of the improvement work you have actually done. Hoshin kanri’s discipline attached to the Harada method’s owner: not a certificate and not a plan, but a book that accumulates, where each entry is tied to the value stream map that proves it moved.

Ref: Hoshin kanri · Harada method · Nordic journeyman’s vandrebok

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II — Where the Name Comes From

A journeyman leaving on his travelling years carried a vandrebok. Every master he worked under stamped and signed it: where he had been, what he had worked on, and whether the work was any good. It was not a qualification he sat for once. It was a record that grew, and its authority came from the people who had seen the work rather than from the title on the front.

That is the object. A vandrebok in SVEND belongs to a practitioner rather than to a company, it accumulates across years and across employers, and what makes an entry credible is the evidence attached to it — not the fact that someone typed it in.

III — Hoshin Kanri and the Harada Method

The idea is loosely two existing ones put together, and if either is the word you were expecting on this page, you are in the right place.

From hoshin kanri it takes the discipline: an improvement is chartered, not wished for; it cascades from something larger; it is reviewed rather than declared; and it is measured against a number agreed in advance. That is the layer between “we should improve that” and a finished piece of work, and it is the part most improvement effort is missing.

From the Harada method it takes the owner. Takashi Harada’s system is built on self-reliance — the practitioner, not the employer, is responsible for their own development, and the record of it is personal, cumulative and honest. Its long-term goal form cascades from three-to-five years down to the immediate; its sixty-four-window grid decomposes a goal into the work that actually reaches it; its routine checks and daily diary make the practice a habit rather than an annual event.

Put together, you get hoshin’s rigour attached to Harada’s owner: chartered, cascaded, measured work — in a book that belongs to a person and travels with them. The table below is the comparison against hoshin kanri alone, since that is the one most readers already run.

	Hoshin kanri	Vandrebok
Belongs to	A company. It deploys strategy downward through an organization.	A person. It travels with you between organizations.
Assumes	That you sit inside a company that owns the deployment.	Nothing. Most practitioners have no organization to deploy through.
Unit of work	Strategic objective, cascaded into annual objectives and KPIs.	An improvement, chartered and tied to one measurable.
Where value comes from	A savings target, estimated up front and reported against.	A measure on the value stream map, read before and after.
Grows by	Fiscal year. It resets.	Accumulation. It does not reset.

Hoshin kanri is not wrong — it is built for a situation many practitioners are not in. Nothing in the Toyota vocabulary names the individual's ongoing body of improvement work: hoshin deploys strategy, kaizen is the act, hansei is the reflection. That is the gap the Harada method fills from the other side, and the gap this word names.

IV — What the Book Holds

An entry is a chartered improvement: what it is, which value stream it came from, who has committed to it, and what it is measured by. The promotion path from a map is live today; the book's own screen lands with the November 2026 set.

Element	What it carries	Live
Entry	Title, charter, class and type, year, and the value stream it belongs to	●
Provenance	Which map and which kaizen burst produced it — recorded on the entry, not in a note	●
Action items	The work inside an entry, owned and dated	●
Commitments	Who has committed to which entry, and over-commitment detection across a facilitator's load	●
Templates	Start an entry from a standard improvement pattern rather than a blank charter	●
The book screen	Your own logbook: the work you did in SVEND, indexed by you rather than by the instrument or the map, and readable across every project you have worked on. It is a log rather than a chained record — it carries no tamper-evidence and makes no audit claim, which is what lets ordinary retention apply to it. In build for November 2026 — not yet available	○

Over-commitment detection is the part people are surprised by: a facilitator's workload is checked across every entry that has claimed them, because the usual failure of an improvement program is not bad ideas, it is the same four people on all of them.

V — How Work Gets Into It

Nothing is typed straight into the book. An entry has to come from somewhere, and in SVEND it comes from a map — which is what makes the record worth reading later.

Step	What happens	Live
1 · Burst	A kaizen burst is pinned to the step it belongs to on a future-state value stream map	●
2 · Proposal	The future state generates a proposal carrying the finding and the step it came from	●
3 · Review	Approved or rejected. There is no route that mints an entry from an unreviewed idea	●
4 · Promotion	An approved proposal becomes an entry in the vandrebok, carrying its charter	●
5 · Measure	A target on the value stream, with readings over time — the map answers, not the charter	●

Promotion is idempotent on the pair of map and burst: promoting the same burst twice returns the same entry rather than a duplicate. Approval is enforced in one place, so there is one way in and it is reviewed.

VI — What It Deliberately Does Not Do

This is the part worth reading before you decide. Several things you might expect were built, carried across from an earlier system, and then removed on purpose — not left half-finished.

It does not estimate its own value. There is no savings calculator and no annual savings target. An improvement is tied to a measurable on the value stream map and the map reports what happened. Estimating a number in a place with no evidence behind it is how a figure nobody trusts ends up on a slide.

There is no X-matrix. The X-matrix, strategic objectives, annual objectives and KPI roll-ups were built and have been deleted. They exist to deploy strategy down an organization, and a vandrebok has no organization under it. If you need enterprise strategy deployment, this is the wrong tool and we would rather say so here than after you have paid.

The Harada instruments themselves are not built. The self-reliance questionnaire, the sixty-four-window grid, the routine check and the daily diary are where the idea comes from — they are not screens in SVEND today. What is here is the part that attaches to a value stream: the chartered entry, its actions, its commitments and its measure. Take the influence as an explanation of the shape, not as a feature list.

It is not a certificate and not an accreditation. SVEND does not stamp your book. The evidence is the map, the measure and the readings; a vandrebok is worth what the work in it is worth.

VII — Where It Sits

Project trackers hold tasks and know nothing about process. Statistical packages analyze data and hold no lifecycle. Hoshin kanri software assumes an enterprise deployment to hang off, and the Harada method has never really had software at all. The practitioner who maps a value stream, finds eight things worth fixing and then wants a durable record of the four that landed has, in practice, been keeping it in a spreadsheet.

The vandrebok is that record, sitting on the same data as the map that produced it. It is included in Pro at $19 per month, billed monthly, with no implementation engagement attached.

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