What we do
Business & Organizational Consulting
Your processes made sense when there were twelve of you. There are sixty now, three of the steps live in one person's head, and nobody can say who owns the handoff.
When people call us about this
Organizations call us when something has quietly stopped working and nobody can point at exactly what. Usually it sounds like one of these:
- The same task gets done three different ways depending on who picks it up.
- Onboarding takes six months, because what a new person needs to know lives in people rather than in anything written down.
- Everyone agrees the process is broken, and no two people describe it the same way.
- Software was bought to fix this, and now you have the old process and a system.
- Growth exposed something that was always fragile and used to be survivable.
- One person is the single point of failure for something important, and everyone knows it.
What we provide
- Process mapping and redesign
- SOP development that people will actually use
- Operational and procedural documentation
- Workflow design and handoff definition
- Organizational assessments
- Project planning and implementation support
- Decision and approval structures
- Knowledge capture before a key person leaves
Typical situations
A regional association whose membership processing depended entirely on one administrator's spreadsheets and memory. We mapped it, wrote it down, rebuilt the parts that only worked by habit, and trained two other people to run it.
A manufacturer that had grown past the point where the owner could personally approve everything, and had never replaced him with a structure.
A nonprofit merging two programs with incompatible intake processes and a board meeting in nine weeks.
How the work runs
We start by talking to the people doing the work, not only the people who manage it — the gap between those two accounts is usually where the problem is. Then we write the current state down plainly, in one document, which most organizations have never seen.
From there we design the change, sized to the organization that has to run it afterwards. Then we build it, help put it in place, and come back once it has been running long enough to tell whether it took.
What you end up with
- A written, current description of how the work actually runs
- Procedures someone can follow on their second week
- Clear ownership of each step and each handoff
- Fewer decisions that have to route through one person
- A change that is still in place a year later, because the people who run it were part of building it
Is this what you are dealing with?
Describe it in your own words. We will tell you honestly whether it is something we should be doing.