Where work stalls between teams
Most delays don’t happen inside a department. They happen when work passes from one team to the next, and that’s mostly what we write about here.
Approvals and sign-offs
Purchase orders, contracts and releases, and the days they spend waiting between people.
Where approvals actually get stuckGuideMost approval bottlenecks have nothing to do with strict rules. The request is waiting between two people, and nobody’s watching that gap.4 min read
Speeding up city procurement approvals without touching the rulesWhen a city purchase order takes six weeks, the procurement code gets the blame. The code sets thresholds. It doesn’t decide how long a request sits in someone’s inbox.3 min read
The sign-off that went to someone who’d leftApproval chains built around names break the moment someone changes jobs. Routing to roles fixes it, and you don’t need to replace your ERP to do it.2 min read
Plant floor
Downtime, OEE and the shift change, and why the floor stops trusting the numbers.
Why nobody on the shop floor believes the plant dashboardGuideA plant metric the floor doesn’t trust is worse than having none. The fix is mostly about who defines the numbers and who owns them, not new sensors.3 min read
OEE dashboards need the shift lead, not a redesignMost OEE dashboards are accurate and still ignored. A better chart won’t change that. Getting the people who generate the data to own the number will.2 min read
Repeat downtime usually starts at the shift changeThe ticket closes, the line restarts, and the same fault trips three weeks later on another shift. The cause was written down. The next shift just never saw it.2 min read
Service requests
Registrars, records desks and permit counters, and the queues they don’t know they’re running.
The queue your office doesn’t know it’s runningGuideRegistrars, records desks and permit counters all run real request queues. Hardly any of them can see theirs, and the delays get blamed on staffing.3 min read
What a registrar’s office can borrow from a call centreIf a routine re-enrolment request takes three weeks, the work probably isn’t the slow part. The request is waiting somewhere nobody can see.2 min read
FERPA audits are about the paper trailMost registrar offices handle records requests correctly. Where they come unstuck is proving it, with a complete log of who asked, who approved and what was released.2 min read
More writing
The people stuck in the middle of all this, and what they actually need.
A Tuesday in the city finance officeOne ordinary day for a city finance director, spent mostly finding out who has things. Maria is made up. If you work in local government, you’ll know her anyway.2 min read
The first 90 days as CFO, and the approvals nobody can findNew CFOs who map how requests really move tend to find the same thing: approvals running on email, no deadlines, and a team that stopped noticing years ago.2 min read
What people are really buying when they buy workflow softwareNobody wants workflow software. They want a specific worry to go away, and that worry, more than the feature list, decides whether the tool gets renewed.2 min read