Decisions
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.
You are probably reading this because:
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.