Discovery

This is the right work if any of the following is familiar.

• An ERP system was installed. Part of it is not used, and the reports still get corrected by hand before anyone sends them out.
• The finance team spends the first days of every month in spreadsheets, rebuilding the same table it built last month.
• Human resources reads every application one by one. Hiring takes longer than it should, and nobody can say which step is holding it up.
• The stock count and the figure in the system do not agree. The difference is discussed every month and the cause is never found.
• The sales team prepares proposals from its own templates, and two proposals for similar customers do not match.
• The same figure is kept in three separate places, and which one is correct gets decided in a meeting.
• Orders have risen and the work is no longer manageable by hand. There is no capacity plan, and nobody can answer whether the volume now on the books can actually be delivered.
• Someone in the team built a working application. It runs, but it has no owner, nothing about it is measured, and it is not connected to the company's own systems.

The work produces four documents.

• A map of how the work runs today. This is not an organisation chart. It shows the actual route a piece of work travels, the points at which it waits, and the places where it loses its function and efficiency falls away.
• An ordered list of opportunities, with the reasoning for the order recorded alongside it.
• An implementation plan in which every line carries an owner, a cost and a date.
• An assumption ledger. Every assumption behind the plan is recorded with its source, the evidence it rests on, and what changes if it proves wrong.

The work runs over four calendar weeks and requires roughly ten working days of effort. No more than two of those days are spent physically inside the company; the remainder is carried out in online sessions, so that the work you already have does not stop while we are present.

Measurement is not a separate stage. In the first week we meet the teams, see the systems where they are used, and put our questions in the weekly sessions. The evidence comes from there rather than from the answers given to a questionnaire.

Four calendar weeks. Roughly ten working days of effort, of which no more than two are spent on site.

The fee is set in the proposal, which follows the conversation.

At the end of four weeks a single decision remains, and we take it. By that point we know the teams, the systems and the way the work moves, and we say which of the two routes is right. Under Training your team runs the plan. Under Operations we run it with you.

Both are described on one page →

This work is not right for every company.

• If the decisions have already been taken and only an implementer is being sought, we are not the right address.
• If the leadership will not allocate time to the process, the plan will be written and then filed. We would rather not write a plan that will remain unused.
• If the work has no owner on your side, what gets built will not survive our departure.
• If a guaranteed result figure is expected at the outset, we cannot provide one. Any number given before the company has been examined is an estimate rather than a commitment.
• If you are early stage and the funding is not yet in place, a separate route exists →