Case study · Professional services
The system everyone had quietly stopped trusting.
Their core business system was broken, so the whole team had built workarounds and stopped believing the numbers. We fixed it in one bounded project.
The situation
A broken system is worse than no system.
The business ran on a core operating system that no longer worked the way it was supposed to. So people did what people do: they built spreadsheets and side processes around it, and they quietly stopped trusting what it told them. Once a team stops believing the numbers, every decision gets slower and every disagreement gets harder to settle.
What we did
We scoped it as a bounded, fixed-fee project, not an open-ended engagement, because the problem was specific and so was the fix.
- Found where the system had actually broken, rather than treating every symptom the workarounds had created.
- Fixed the core so the data flowed the way it was meant to, and retired the spreadsheets that had grown up to compensate.
- Left them with one system of record the team could trust again, and the documentation to keep it that way.
The result
One source of truth, and the workarounds gone.
The system did what it was supposed to again, and the shadow processes that had grown up around it went away. The team went back to trusting a single source of truth, and the whole business got faster at the thing a broken system had made slow: deciding.
One of eight. See the other results, or find your own weakest link.
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