Loading
Operations Diagnostic
Most engagements start with someone describing a problem they cannot quite name. This is the bounded piece of work that names it — and you keep the output whether or not you engage me afterwards.
A map of how the work actually flows
A prioritised list of what is broken
A costed plan to fix it
Two weeks · fixed fee, scoped on the intake
Phase 01 · Map
Not how the org chart says it does. Built from interviews with the people doing it, which is the only way to find the workarounds everyone relies on and nobody has written down.
I sit with the people doing the job and ask them to show me rather than describe it. What comes out is never the process on the wall. It is the spreadsheet somebody maintains at home, the approval that is really a message on a phone, the step that exists because of a system replaced four years ago and never questioned since.
That is the point, not a digression. The workarounds are where the cost is, and they are invisible from the top — not because anyone is hiding them, but because writing them down was never anybody's job.
What you end up holding is a picture of the work as it is done, with the handoffs marked and the places it stalls named. A surprising number of the arguments a leadership team has about operations simply end once everyone is looking at the same picture.
Phase 02 · Findings
Each item with what it currently costs you — in money, in time, or in risk. Prioritised, because a list of forty problems is not a finding.
A list of forty problems is not a finding. It is a way of looking thorough while leaving every decision exactly where it was. So each item is costed in the currency it actually spends: money, time, or exposure.
Once they carry numbers, prioritising stops being a matter of taste and the list orders itself. It is common for the thing everyone has been arguing about to come third, and for something nobody had raised to come first.
Where a thing cannot be costed honestly, it says so, and says what would have to be established before it could be. An estimate delivered with false confidence is worse than an open question, because an open question can still be closed.
Phase 03 · Plan
Sequenced, with dependencies named, and with the option to have me deliver it. You own it either way.
Sequenced, with the dependencies named, so it is clear what has to happen before what and where two things can run alongside each other. Every step has a shape for an owner rather than my name on all of them.
You own it. If you take it to your own people, or to somebody else entirely, it still works — and that is the test of whether it was ever a plan rather than a pitch with a plan's manners.
If you would rather I delivered it, the conversation starts from a document you have already read and argued with. That is a considerably better place to begin than a proposal you are seeing for the first time.
Why it is worth buying
It is bounded. Two weeks, a fixed fee, and a defined output. Useful even if you stop there, which is the only honest test of whether a piece of work was worth buying.
The plan is the proposal. There is no separate pitch and no unpaid scoping. If we go further, we start from a document you have already read and corrected.
It filters, in both directions. You find out how I work before committing to months of it, and I find out whether I can actually help. Both of us would rather know now.
Costed plan
About five minutes of questions, and you leave with a phased plan you can edit and keep — whether or not we ever speak. The fee depends on the shape of the operation, so it is worked out from what you describe rather than published as a number that would fit nobody.