Every private spreadsheet is a specification
Somebody wrote it because the system wouldn’t, which makes it the most honest requirements document in the building.
Field notes
Field notes
Short observations from inside live operations. Most can be seen in the first days of an engagement, the way a cook can hear a kitchen’s in trouble before a plate goes out. I’ve grouped them by what they tend to reveal.
What people build around it
The second system
When a team keeps a shadow process beside the official one, the shadow is where the real specification lives.
The workaround with a nickname
Once a workaround has a name people say out loud, it’s a path worn across the lawn, and it’s there to stay.
Copy and paste is a measurement
Every figure copied from one system into another is a missing integration, paid for in attention.
Where the paper still lives
Wherever the work drops back onto paper, someone once learned that the digital path couldn’t be trusted there.
Where the work waits
Nobody owns the queue
Work without an owner waits until somebody happens to notice it, like a parcel left at the wrong door.
Handoff by hope
Work handed over without acknowledgement is a baton passed without looking back, and the sender learns late whether anyone caught it.
The approval that is always granted
An approval nobody has ever refused has become a delay with a signature.
Look at the oldest open item
How long it’s been sitting there is a truer service level than any average on the report.
Where the deadline came from
Trace it back and it often didn’t come from the customer, or from anyone still in the room.
Who is actually holding it
The org chart is not the routing map
Nobody escalates up the chart, they escalate to whoever answered last time.
Ask who gets called at night
The escalation path nobody wrote down is the one that works, and it walks out the door when that person does.
The person who never takes leave
A single point of failure with a pulse, usually well regarded and usually unaware of it.
The tool with one power user
When only one person can operate a system, the organization is borrowing it, and it goes home with them each evening.
Count the asking
Notice how often somebody has to ask a colleague where something is. Nobody owns that number.
What the reporting hides
The meeting that exists to compensate
A recurring meeting whose only agenda is status is people doing by hand the reporting the system should do on its own.
The status update as product
When reporting on the work takes longer than the work itself, the reporting has become the job.
The report nobody opens
Sending a report out says little about whether anyone reads it. Ask who acted on it last week and watch the pause.
Two numbers, one truth
When finance and operations hold two versions of the same figure, the hours spent reconciling them are the real cost.
The rounding
Wherever people round a figure before passing it on, precision stopped mattering to somebody, and it’s worth finding out where.
What the work tells you
Watch the first ten minutes
How someone spends the first part of the morning shows what the system left unfinished yesterday.
The exception that is not rare
Once a third of the cases are exceptions, the exceptions are the process.
Ask what they check twice
Whatever people verify twice is something the system never made trustworthy the first time.
The training request
A training request usually means a system is asking people to carry knowledge it shouldn’t need, and the training becomes a permanent subsidy.
Silence after go-live
When nobody complains after go-live, it usually means nobody’s using it.
Recognize any of these?
Any one of these might just be a quirk of one team. Noticing several in the same operation is usually the point where a diagnostic is worth running.
How engagements begin