There's a kind of complaint you hear in a lot of companies that's hard to investigate: everything works, deadlines are met, clients are served — and it's still all more painful than it should be.
The difficulty is that nobody can point to where the problem actually is. Asking "what's going wrong?" doesn't get you anywhere, because nothing is technically going wrong. There's a different way to ask, and that one works.
The exercise: follow one request from start to finish
Pick an ordinary job — not the most complicated one, not the simplest either. Track it from the moment it comes in until it's closed and invoiced, and note down two columns: when it changed hands, and how long it sat idle between each handover.
Don't measure the work itself. Measure the waiting.
Do this for three or four requests. It takes a week and costs nothing. It's almost always enough to see where the waste is, and it almost always surprises whoever runs the place — because the operation, seen from above, looks very different from how it looks from the side.
Almost all the time is in the waiting
This is the typical result: the actual work is three or four hours, and the request takes nine days to close. The remaining eight working days were waiting.
Waiting for an email confirmation. Waiting for someone to get back from holiday because only they can approve it. Waiting for the client to answer a question that could have been asked at the first contact. Waiting for a document from another department, where it had been ready for two days and nobody said anything.
None of this waiting shows up anywhere. No report counts it, because each system only knows its own part of the story.
For every wait, three questions
- Did this information already exist somewhere else? If so, someone is typing out by hand what could have arrived on its own.
- Is this sign-off actually necessary? Many of them were born out of a mistake that happened once, six years ago, and were never reviewed again.
- Does this depend on one specific person? If it does, you've got a bottleneck there — and a holiday nobody's booked.
These are uncomfortable questions to ask whoever does the work, so it's worth making clear you're not looking for someone to blame. Whoever does the task almost always already knows which step is pointless; what's missing is someone with the authority to remove it.
What usually comes out of this list
Three things, in this order of frequency.
Data typed in twice. What the client filled in on the site's form, retyped by someone into the management system. It's solved with a link between the two, and it's usually the job with the best return of all.
Approvals that don't actually decide anything. Steps that exist to give someone visibility and that, in practice, are always approved. Either remove them, or turn them into a notification that doesn't hold anything up.
Status that lives in conversations. Requests whose actual state only exists in two people's inboxes. As long as that's true, nobody can answer the client without going and asking first.
Fix things in the order they hurt
You'll end up with a list of six or seven points. Don't tackle them all — order them by how much time they steal and deal with the top two.
They're usually small things: a link between two systems, a field made mandatory, a step removed. It's workflow and process work, not a transformation project. And it's what has to be sorted before automating anything is worth doing.
Do you already know where you're losing time?
Tell us how a request travels through your company, and where it usually gets stuck. We'll tell you what can be cleared out of the way, and what it costs.