Most operations reviews arrive as a long document, full of observations everybody already agreed with, ranked by how easy they are to fix. They make people feel examined and they change nothing.
A useful one answers three questions, and an ordinary one answers the first only.
The three questions
How does this actually run today? Not how the process document says. What people actually do, including the workarounds, because the workarounds are the findings. Somebody keeping a spreadsheet beside the system is telling you the system does not do the job.
What is it costing? In money, with the arithmetic shown. "Handover delays are a concern" is an observation. "Handovers between the two teams cost about £40,000 a year in waiting time, worked out as follows" is a finding somebody can act on or argue with.
What is worth doing about it, and what is not? Ranked by what each is worth, not by how easy it is. The easy ones get done anyway. A review earns its fee by naming the expensive problem nobody wanted to look at.
What a finding needs
- Evidence attached. Where the number came from, so a sceptical person can check it.
- A cost, or an honest statement that it cannot be costed. Some things genuinely cannot be, and saying so is better than inventing a figure.
- What it would take to change, roughly. A finding with no sense of effort cannot be weighed against anything.
- Who would have to act. A finding nobody owns is a paragraph.
Two audiences, one document
A board needs to read it and an engineer needs to be able to check it. Most reviews pick one and lose the other: either a summary nobody can verify, or forty pages of detail no director will open.
The way through is to make every claim short, and make the evidence for it available underneath. The board reads the claims. The engineer reads the evidence. Neither is asked to trust the other.
Say when the answer is to change nothing
The most valuable sentence in a review is often "this is fine, leave it". It is also the rarest, because a review that recommends nothing looks like a review that was not needed.
If a reviewer finds something worth doing in every area they look at, that is worth noticing about the reviewer.
How to commission one so it is useful
Say what decision it is for. A review commissioned to inform a specific decision is sharper than one commissioned to have a look. "We are deciding whether to renew this contract" produces a different and better document.
Give access to the people doing the work, not only their managers. The gap between the two is usually where the findings are.
Ask for the arithmetic, not just the conclusions. If a number cannot be explained, it cannot be defended when somebody senior disagrees, and it will be quietly dropped.
Agree in advance what happens to it. A review with no scheduled decision after it is a document that gets read once. The best time to agree the follow-up meeting is before the work starts.
The uncomfortable part
A good review will say something the person who commissioned it did not want to hear. That is most of what you are paying for. If you know in advance which findings would be unwelcome, say so at the start. It is better than discovering it in the room.
This is part of what we do under Operation review. See the services, or tell us what is not working.