Missing targets.
Every month.
The engineering team at John Co. was missing its monthly output target consistently. Not occasionally — every month. The business response was standard: review the target, apply more pressure, raise expectations.
Nobody had stopped to ask the obvious question. Why is the team missing the target in the first place?
The assumption was performance. The reality was process.
"The team wasn't underperforming. The process was. Management responded by adding more targets on top of a broken foundation."
Half a day.
Per project.
Every time.
Every new project required an engineer to set up folders, copy templates, name files, and populate job details from scratch. No standard method. No checklist. Every project started differently.
The time cost was between half a day and a full day per project — consumed before any actual engineering work had begun. With a team running multiple projects simultaneously, this was quietly eating the capacity the business thought it had.
to setup alone
documented
differently
Four friction
points.
No standard project setup method Every engineer approached new project initialisation differently. Folder structures varied. File naming was inconsistent. There was no baseline that everyone worked from.
Documents missing at the point of need Critical documents were either absent, in the wrong location, or named inconsistently — meaning engineers spent time searching before they could start work.
Risk questions answered inconsistently The risk questionnaire matrix was being completed differently by different engineers because nobody had written down how to answer it. The same project type produced different risk profiles depending on who completed it.
Single point of failure Process knowledge lived with one person. When that person was unavailable, the team stalled. Questions escalated. Work stopped. The bottleneck wasn't capacity — it was concentration of knowledge.
The visible problem
was never the
real problem.
The business saw a performance problem. The target was being missed, so the response was to focus on output — more pressure, higher targets, closer monitoring of results.
The root cause sat one level deeper. Not performance. Process. The team had no documented standard for how work was initiated. Every project started from zero. Every engineer made their own decisions about setup, naming, structure, and risk assessment.