Shadow, map, prototype, feedback, MVP, solution.
Most transformation projects fail in discovery, not delivery.
So we start on the floor. Every department, every workaround, every spreadsheet that quietly holds the operation together.
Shadow
We sit with each department and watch the work happen, including the parts nobody documents.
The first weeks are spent in the business, not in a meeting room. We sit beside the people doing the work and follow a job from the moment it arrives to the moment it is closed off.
We are looking for the things a requirements document never captures: the re-keyed spreadsheet, the phone call that replaces a missing system step, the person everyone goes to when the process breaks.
- Sit with every department that touches the process, front office and back
- Follow real jobs end to end, on real days, at real volumes
- Record the workarounds and the reasons they exist
- Access to the floor and permission to ask questions
- A named contact in each department
- Honesty about what is not working
Map
End to end operational procedures, drawn out in full, handovers and bottlenecks marked.
Everything we saw is drawn out as a single operational map: each step, who owns it, what it needs to start and what it hands on. Handovers between teams are marked, because that is where most of the delay and most of the errors live.
The map is reviewed with the departments that appear on it. If it is wrong, we fix it before anything else is built on top of it.
- Produce the end to end process map with owners and handovers
- Mark the bottlenecks, duplicated effort and manual bridges
- Agree with you which part of the process costs the most
- Time from department leads to review and correct the map
- Volumes, timings and any existing reporting you already have
Prototype
Something clickable, early, aimed at the part of the process that costs you most.
Before anyone commits to a full build we put a clickable prototype in front of the people who would use it. It targets the one part of the map we agreed costs you most, and nothing else.
It is cheap to change at this point. That is the whole purpose of doing it now.
- Build a clickable prototype of the highest value part of the process
- Use your real terminology, your real data shapes and your real edge cases
- Walk it through with the teams who would run it daily
- Sample records and documents, anonymised where necessary
- An hour or two from the people who do the job today
Department feedback
Back to the people who will use it daily. They tell us what we got wrong while it is still cheap.
The prototype goes back to every department it touches, not only the one that commissioned it. A change that helps sales can quietly break finance, and this is the point to find out.
We collect what is missing, what is wrong and what people would stop doing if the system worked as shown. Then we revise the prototype and go round again until the teams are confident it reflects the job.
- Run structured feedback sessions with each department
- Revise the prototype and re-test until it holds up
- Write up the agreed scope for the first working system
- Candid feedback from the floor, not only from management
- A decision maker who can sign off scope
MVP
A working system in one part of the business, live, earning its keep before it spreads.
The first release is a real system in one part of the business, used on real work. It is scoped to the agreed slice of the process and it is expected to earn its keep from the first week.
Running live early surfaces the integration and data problems that no amount of design work would find. We fix them here, where they are contained.
- Build and release the first working system to one team or site
- Integrate with the systems that slice depends on
- Support the team daily through the first weeks of use
- A team willing to go first
- Access to the systems and data the MVP needs to talk to
Solution
Rolled out, integrated with what you already run, documented and handed over.
With the MVP proven, the system is extended across the rest of the process and the rest of the business. Integrations with the platforms you already run are completed and the manual bridges from the original map are retired one at a time.
Everything is documented and handed over. Your team should be able to run it, extend it and, if you choose, replace us.
- Roll out across departments and sites on an agreed schedule
- Complete integrations and retire the remaining workarounds
- Document, train and hand over
- A rollout order that suits the business calendar
- Owners on your side for the system going forward