Operations
Coordination costs more than the work itself.
The task takes ten minutes. Getting it to the right person, with the right information, takes an hour.
You will recognise this if
- Work moves between systems by someone copying it.
- Status updates are assembled by hand for a weekly meeting.
- Handoffs fail silently and are discovered late.
- Everyone agrees the process is broken and nobody owns fixing it.
How we approach it
- Map the real path of one request end to end, including the parts that happen in chat.
- Find the handoffs, because that is where the time and the errors are, not in the tasks.
- Automate the movement of work before automating the work itself.
- Instrument it, so the next bottleneck is visible rather than argued about.
The honest version. Many operational problems are org design problems wearing a technology costume. If two teams disagree about who owns a step, no workflow tool will settle it.
What we would build