Decisions
Business process audit
How the company actually operates, as opposed to how the process document says it does. We map it, remove what is being done for no remaining reason, and name the points where the process — not the market — is the constraint on growth.
A step exists because of an incident in 2022 that nobody remembers.
Three people approve something and none of them has ever declined it.
Headcount grew faster than volume and nobody can say which function absorbed it.
Every department is efficient and the company as a whole is slow.
- 01
Mapping the real process
Traced from the people doing the work and from system logs, not from the documentation. The gap between the two is usually the finding.
- 02
Deleting what should not exist
Approvals nobody uses, reports nobody reads, reconciliations that exist because two systems disagree. Removal is the cheapest improvement available and the one nobody is incentivised to propose.
- 03
Finding the growth points
Where a small structural change compounds: a handover that stops losing information, a decision made two days earlier, a step that can happen in parallel. Constraints, not best practices.
- 04
Understanding the whole structure
How the commercial, operational and technical parts actually connect — because a local optimisation usually just moves the queue to the next department.
- 01
A map of the process as it is actually run
- 02
A removal list: what to stop doing, and what it costs today
- 03
Growth points ranked by effect and by effort
- 04
A sequenced plan, so the changes land without stopping the business
Invariant
Remove before you optimise. Most process debt is subtraction, not addition.
- How disruptive is this to the team?
- A few hours per person across two to three weeks. We work from observation and system data rather than asking everyone to document their own job, which is how these exercises usually die.
- Will this produce redundancies?
- That is your decision, not ours, and we do not present it as the point. In most engagements the finding is that capable people are absorbed by work that should not exist — which is an argument for redeploying them, not for cutting.
- How is this different from the express audit?
- The express audit is a seventy-two hour read across the business model, financials and process together. This goes deep on the operational layer specifically, and usually follows the audit rather than replacing it.
Each one carries what it is good for, what it is proven on here, and the point at which it stops working. We take no vendor commissions on any of them.
- Python
- A general-purpose language whose value in this practice is narrow and specific: the reference implementations for reading and writing awkward archive and binary formats — .docx, .xlsx internals, font tables — are written in it.
- Document extraction
- Reading the fields off a photographed document — passport, Emirates ID, driving licence, trade licence, vehicle registration, insurance, an odometer, an invoice — and filing them against a record.
- End-of-life runtimes
- A language runtime or framework version whose maintainers have stopped issuing security fixes — still running, still serving traffic, no longer receiving patches.
- From an enquiry arriving to somebody answering it
- A message from a person who might buy, travelling from the form they filled to somebody who can actually answer what they asked. 6 steps, 6 known jams.
- From a brief to work somebody has accepted
- A piece of paid work, travelling from the sentence that started it to the moment the buyer agrees it is finished and can carry it without the supplier. 6 steps, 6 known jams.
- From something breaking to somebody confirming it works
- An outage, from the moment the system stopped being correct to the moment a person has checked that it is correct again — including the parts that happen before anybody has touched a keyboard. 6 steps, 6 known jams.
One process, end to end, with the people who actually run it rather than the diagram of how it is supposed to work. We map where the time goes, where the work is done twice, and which step is load-bearing for a reason nobody remembers. The map is yours at the end of it.