Insights
Start With the Process Your Team Hates
The work people complain about is usually the work that is slow, unclear, and expensive. It is also the best place to begin.
Seth SagerMay 19, 20265 min read
Operations
Ask a plant manager, a buyer, or a quality engineer what they would stop doing tomorrow if they could. You will get a better roadmap than most strategy decks.
The processes teams hate tend to share a pattern. They are repetitive. They require hunting for information. They depend on one person who “knows how.” They produce a result that still needs checking.
- Buyers chasing overdue purchase orders.
- Planners combining reports every morning.
- Quality teams searching years of corrective actions.
- Engineers looking for the current specification.
- Managers building the weekly operating review by hand.
These are not side tasks. They are the connective tissue of the operation.
Start there. Go to the work. Simplify it. Build a system around the remaining steps. Measure whether the hated work got shorter, clearer, or disappeared.
If it did, you found your first loop.
What process does your team hate doing?
If a process takes too long, requires repetitive work, depends on scattered information, or repeatedly creates problems, it may be a good place to start.