Work
THE DIAGNOSTIC PROCESS:
EXAMPLE SCENARIO IN 3 STEPS
How a fix usually looks
These are examples of the sort of mess I am asked to look at. They are not a menu, and they are not jobs done for a named firm. Most first projects sit somewhere near one of them. Plenty of others do not. The diagnostic is there to find the one process that is actually costing you time, including the ones that are not on this page.
Client status, without the chasing
Picture a four-person agency. The account manager keeps a spreadsheet of live jobs, and she is the person clients write to when they want an update. They also write again for the file she sent on Thursday. If she is out, nobody else is quite sure which version is the current one.
In the tidied version, each job has a status: waiting, in progress, with the client, or done. The latest file sits on the job, and the client has a login that shows only their own work. Staff stop forwarding the same PDF. The spreadsheet can stay as a backup, but it is no longer the place people go to ask what is happening.
What the team gets is visibility across live jobs, without one person being the switchboard.
Once the job is accepted, the details scatter
The enquiry itself was logged. Someone did catch it. What frays is the hour after the job is accepted. The brief is still in the email, the photo is still in the chat, and the spreadsheet has a line that nobody much wants to maintain. From then on, the job has no single home.
In the tidied version, the job is the home. The file is attached, someone owns it, and the status shows whether it is still new or already being worked. People stop hunting through three places for the thing they were sent yesterday.
The yes, and the final file, stay on the job
A price, a draft or a handover gets agreed on email. The yes is real. A month later, the job itself does not show who approved it, or which file was the final one. Someone remakes the decision, or sends the old version.
In the tidied version, the file sits on the job. The status moves from waiting for approval to approved, or sent back, and the decision stays with the record. Email can still be where people talk. It stops being where the answer is filed.
What the team gets is a final version they can find, and a status that does not depend on someone remembering the thread.
If this is close . . .
If one of these is close to what is happening in your office, or the mess is a different shape, the next step is the same. A diagnostic looks at one process and comes back as a short written reply: what is getting stuck, whether a system would help, and what a first version would include and cost. Sometimes the honest reply is that a system is not the right next step, or that what you have described needs to be narrowed to one process before it is a sensible first project. Either way, you get a clear answer before anything is built.
