Business Advisory
Some of the best advisory work begins on the floor
A day spent walking a production line, before a single cell was filled in. The MIS was faster for it.
3 min read
Business Advisory
Why your best process fix will fail without owner clarity
Businesses invest properly in redesigning a process, document it carefully, and find it abandoned within two quarters. The cause is almost never the design.
Anandhakrishnan BFounder5 min readARAN is often asked to look at a process that was redesigned eighteen months ago and never took hold. The documentation is usually good. What is missing is a single name against each step.
Ownership means four things
- One person, not a department. Two owners means no owner.
- Authority to stop the work when the step is not complete.
- A measure that shows whether the step happened, visible to somebody else.
- A consequence that is understood in advance, and applied.
Where any of the four is missing, the process holds while attention is on it and decays when attention moves. That is not a discipline failure by the team. It is a design omission.
Write the exception path
Most procedures document the normal case. Work breaks down in the exception, the urgent order, the customer who will not sign, the approver who is travelling. If the exception path is not written, people invent one, and the invented one becomes the process.
Processes are not adopted because they are correct. They are adopted because somebody is accountable for them.
Written by
Anandhakrishnan B
Founder · B.sc Physics, PGDMIR · Nearly three decades in finance, governance and operations
Has overseen the finance and administrative functions of more than 30 companies across diversified industries.
Speak to AnandhakrishnanRelated reading
More on the same ground.
Business Advisory
What a clean data room actually looks like
In a transaction, preparation is negotiating position. The party with answered questions sets the terms.
6 min read
Business Advisory
Pricing is a strategy decision that finance is asked to justify afterwards
Price is usually set by habit and competitive reflex, then explained by a costing sheet built to agree with it.
5 min read