Method
Most operational reviews look at one department in isolation. Mine looks at the interaction between six things, because that's usually where the real problem is hiding.
More people won’t fix a broken process. Automation doesn’t fix a process you don’t understand.
Customer
Sale, onboarding, delivery, support, renewal and exit.
- Handoff failures between teams
- Delays customers notice before you do
- Customers chasing you for updates
- Avoidable escalations
- Inconsistent service depending on who picks up
- Cost-to-serve issues nobody has actually measured
People
Ownership, decision rights, capacity and capability.
- Key-person dependencies
- Management bottlenecks
- Senior people doing low-value work
- Human workarounds standing in for a real process
- Skills gaps nobody has named out loud
Process
The critical workflows that actually run the business.
- Duplication and rework
- Manual intervention where a system should carry it
- Unnecessary approval loops
- Poor handoffs between steps
- Error points nobody has traced back to source
- Unclear ownership of the outcome
Technology and data
Systems, spreadsheets and how information actually moves.
- Duplicate data entry across systems
- Manual data transfer where an integration should exist
- Reporting nobody fully trusts
- Low system utilisation against what you're paying for
- Automation opportunities, correctly scoped
Money
The operational causes of avoidable cost, not the books themselves.
- Unnecessary labour cost
- Missed or delayed billing
- Scope creep nobody priced in
- Delayed onboarding, delayed revenue
- Poor utilisation against capacity
- Lost expansion opportunity sitting in plain sight
Control
Whether leadership can actually see what's happening.
- Performance and capacity visibility
- Delivery and customer health visibility
- Risk visibility before it becomes a crisis
- Clear ownership of decisions
- KPIs that measure outcomes, not just activity
The question that runs through everything
What happens if volume increases by 50%?
Across every one of the six areas, I test what would break, what would need disproportionate headcount, what would become the bottleneck, and what depends entirely on one person who might leave. That's the difference between a process that works today and an operation that can actually scale.