The Status Meeting Exists Because Nothing Reports Itself

Pick one process you are responsible for. An approval chain, a customer onboarding, a month-end reconciliation, a claim, an intake queue. Now answer one question without contacting anybody: how many items are in it right now, how long has the oldest one been waiting, and which step is it stuck on.

Most executives in companies between sixty and two hundred million dollars in revenue cannot answer that for at least one process they own. Not because the company is badly run, and not because the people are careless. The answer does not exist anywhere to be looked up. It exists distributed across several people's memories and inboxes, and assembling it is what the standing meeting is for.

Twelve filings in the trailing twelve months use the exact phrase "manual processes and spreadsheets" to describe this condition. That count is small because most companies in the same state describe it less plainly, or do not describe it at all.

The Honest Versions Of "No"

The question is useful because the negative answers are specific, and each one points at a different missing piece.

• "I can find out." Somebody can assemble it, in an hour or a day. The information exists; it has no home. Every management decision about this process carries that delay.
• "There is a report, from last night." The system knows about the records but not about the work. It can tell you what exists, not what is waiting or on whom.
• "The tracker is current if Ana updated it." The record is a document maintained by hand, so its accuracy is a person's discipline rather than a property of the process.
• "That depends what you mean by open." The process has no agreed states, so two people counting it produce two numbers and both are defensible.

Any of the four is the same finding in different clothing. The work is being performed, and it is not recording that it was performed.

The Process Leaves Documents, Not Events

There is a mature body of work on analyzing how processes actually run, and it begins from one precondition. The process mining manifesto (van der Aalst et al., 2012) sets out what is needed to discover, check or improve a real process: an event log in which each recorded event belongs to a case, refers to an activity, carries a timestamp, and ideally names the person who performed it. The reference treatment of the field (van der Aalst, 2011) makes the same point at length — without those four fields there is nothing to analyze, however much data the company holds.

A process run on spreadsheets and email produces the opposite of an event log. It produces artifacts. A file with no case identifier. An email with a timestamp and no activity. A folder whose modification date records the last save rather than the last decision. A meeting that leaves minutes and no per-item history. Each artifact is evidence that something happened, and none of them can be counted, sorted, or aged.

A system that stores your documents is not the same as a system that knows what your process is doing. Most companies own the first and assume it is the second.

The result is that the process cannot be measured, and therefore cannot be improved with any confidence. Every claim about it — that it is faster, that the backlog is smaller, that the error came from one particular step — is an assertion rather than a measurement, including the claims you make to the board.

What The Missing Record Costs

The cost is usually described as the meeting, and the meeting is the smallest part of it.

• Coordination absorbs the senior hours. The study of coordination in real development work (Kraut & Streeter, Communications of the ACM, 1995) found teams relying heavily on informal, person-to-person communication for coordination precisely where the formal mechanisms were weakest — and informal coordination scales with the number of people, not with the amount of work.
• The integration is systematically under-planned. Coordination neglect (Heath & Staudenmayer, Research in Organizational Behavior, 2000) describes a durable tendency to divide work carefully and to give far less attention to putting the pieces back together. The handoff is where the delay lives and it is the part nobody owns.
• The interruptions are not free. The cost of interrupted work (Mark, Gudith & Klocke, CHI, 2008) found interrupted tasks were completed in less time, but at the price of higher stress, frustration, time pressure and effort. Asking four people for a status is four interruptions, several times a week.
• The hand-maintained record contains errors. What we know about spreadsheet errors (Panko, Journal of End User Computing, 1998) reviews the field audits and laboratory experiments available at the time and concludes that errors in operational spreadsheets are common rather than exceptional.

Together those explain a pattern most operators recognize. The process is not slow because the work is hard. It is slow because it waits, and nothing announces that it is waiting.

Adding The Record Is Smaller Than Replacing The Process

The reaction this diagnosis usually provokes is that the company needs a system, and that a system means a year and a large budget. That conclusion is wrong in a specific and useful way. What is missing is not the ability to store the work. It is a record of the work moving.

Four fields per step: which item, which step, when, and who. That is the whole addition, and it is why this work is measured in weeks rather than in quarters. It sits beside the enterprise system rather than inside it, in the part of the process the enterprise system was never built to cover, and it changes nothing about how the work is decided — only about whether the process remembers that the decision was made.

Two things follow immediately once the record exists. The status question is answered by a query instead of a meeting, and the process becomes something an auditor can test rather than something an auditor has to take on trust. A third follows later: once the work carries its own history, the person doing the next step stops having to reassemble the context before they can act.

First Steps

1. Ask the question about three processes you own, in the same week. What state is it in right now, without asking a person. Write down which of the four negative answers you got.
2. For the worst one, write the list of states an item can be in. Five or six words each. If the people who run the process cannot agree on the list in one meeting, that disagreement is the finding.
3. Count the standing meetings that exist only to assemble status. Multiply the attendees by the hours by the weeks. That number is the recurring cost of the missing record, and it is usually larger than the cost of adding it.

Answer It With A Query

The test is deliberately blunt because it is the one qualifying question that separates a process which is merely manual from a process that is invisible. Manual is often fine. Invisible is what makes every decision about it slow, every improvement unmeasurable, and every claim about it an assertion.

A fifteen-minute call — nothing paid, nothing signed — takes one such process apart: what states it has, what record each step should produce, what has to be built, and what it costs. If the record already exists somewhere in your systems and the work is retrieval and reporting, that is what we will say, and you will have avoided a build.

Where something does have to be built, that work runs as a monthly engineering partnership, with the targets for each release agreed before it starts. The work runs in a repository we own, and paid-for deliverables transfer to you monthly — full history and documentation. The engagement runs in TopDo, our own system, so you can see its state daily — which is the same test, applied to us. After that, $15,000 a month puts one accountable person on keeping it running, with a written monthly report of what ran and what changed.

References

1. van der Aalst, W. M. P., et al. Process Mining Manifesto. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2012.
2. van der Aalst, W. M. P. Process Mining: Discovery, Conformance and Enhancement of Business Processes. Springer, 2011.
3. Kraut, R. E., & Streeter, L. A. Coordination in Software Development. Communications of the ACM, 1995.
4. Heath, C., & Staudenmayer, N. Coordination Neglect: How Lay Theories of Organizing Complicate Coordination in Organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior, 2000.
5. Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2008.
6. Panko, R. R. What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors. Journal of End User Computing, 1998.
7. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. EDGAR Full-Text Search. Filing counts cited are from full-text search over the trailing twelve months.