Self-assessment

Where does the work leak?

Twenty questions about whether anyone has looked at how the work actually gets done, and what a machine now does inside it.

For the owner, managing director or operations lead of a business of roughly twenty to five hundred people. 20 questions about 6 minutes

Izam Ryan is a chartered accountant who builds with AI. He has spent years checking other people's figures on behalf of whoever was paying for the answer. More recently he has been directing AI models to design and ship working software. Both taught him the same thing about a business: the leak is rarely where the org chart says it is. It is in the hand-offs, the waiting and the work that only exists because something earlier went wrong.

Most businesses of this size run well below what they could, and not because the people are bad. Orders arrive by email and get retyped. A job waits a week for a sign-off nobody remembers asking for. A third to a half of what lands on a service desk is someone chasing something that should already have happened. Everybody knows. Nobody has had the afternoon. These questions ask whether the work has been looked at: who each team serves, how much of the day is the business's own failure coming back, whether anyone has walked the main process and timed it, whether an improvement is ever measured against how things were before, and what the machine does and who checks it.

It is a thinking tool, not advice, and not a view on your business, which Izam has not seen. Nothing here recommends a tool, a system or a supplier, and every question is about the work itself. Answer from memory, a few seconds each. Having to look something up is itself an answer.

The answers stay in this browser. Nothing is recorded anywhere unless the Send control at the foot of the read-out is pressed.

Section 1 of 4

The team: the day's work

The fastest and cheapest place to look. One team, its own work, a fortnight. Nothing here needs permission, and most of it has simply never been measured.

01 Could each team name who it serves and what they want, in the customer's words rather than the team's?

Every team has a customer, even if the customer is the next desk.

02 Do you know how much of what lands on each team each day is a customer or a colleague chasing something that should already have happened?

Chase-ups, re-sends, corrections, "just checking". In most teams it is a third to a half of the day.

03 Has anyone written down a real working day for a team, step by step, and marked which steps add anything?
04 When something goes wrong, is there one standard way the team gets to the cause, rather than whoever happens to be in that day?

Asking why five times and refusing the first answer is the oldest way, and it still works.

05 Is the day's work visible somewhere the whole team, and anyone walking past, can read it?

What arrived, what is in progress, what is stuck, what got fixed. A wall or a screen, it does not matter which.

Section 2 of 4

The flow: one process, end to end

The problems a team cannot fix, because they live in the hand-offs between teams. Enquiry to delivery. Enquiry to first visit. Job start to sign-off. The map is always uglier than the org chart, and the ugliness is the point.

06 Has anyone followed one order, job or claim from the moment it arrived to the moment the customer had what they asked for, and timed each step and each wait?
07 For the main process, do you know how much of the elapsed time is actual work?

Five minutes of work in five days of elapsed time is not a productivity problem. It is a waiting problem.

08 Do you know where in that process information is typed in twice, approved twice, or waits on someone who is copied on everything?
09 Has the waiting and the rework in that process been measured in hours, so the cost of those hours can be set beside the other things the business could do?

Waiting as days the customer loses. Rework as hours the team loses. Both measured from the work, not estimated.

10 When the process was last changed, was the change tried on one line or one week and measured against a baseline before it was rolled out?

Section 3 of 4

The business: the leadership and the score

Where most improvement dies. Not from opposition. From attention moving on. The questions here are about whether anyone is keeping score of the work, and whether the leaders are doing this or sponsoring it.

11 Is there one page that shows where time is lost across the business, by process or team, that the leadership actually reads?

Waiting, rework, chasing and duplicate entry, in hours, from the work itself.

12 Do directors regularly stand where the work is done, without a reason, and ask questions rather than give answers?
13 Is there a visible list of every improvement in flight, who owns each, and what it should give back in hours, and is it short enough to finish?
14 When something is improved, is the result measured the same way it was measured before, by the people who do the work, and kept where the leadership already looks?

A baseline taken before the change, the same measure after it, and a record a second person could check.

15 If the person who knows how the main process works left next month, is enough written down for the work to carry on?

Section 4 of 4

The machine: what it does, and who checks it

The question this decade added. At every step the choice is no longer person or nobody. It is person, machine, or machine with a person checking. Most businesses have already made that choice a dozen times without deciding it.

16 For the main process, has each step been labelled as done by a person, by a machine, or by a machine with a person checking?
17 Does every step a machine already does have a named owner and a person who checks its output?
18 Before a step was automated, did anyone ask whether the step should exist at all?

Automating a step that should have been removed is the most expensive mistake in the toolkit, and it has just got cheaper to make.

19 For work a machine does, is a record kept of what it was given and what it produced, so that a second person could check it?
20 Could any automated step be switched off today without the process stopping?

0 of 20 answered