Clearing process debt before January

Measure before you fix anything

Ask a team where the time goes and you will get opinions. Ask them to log it for five working days in fifteen-minute blocks and you will get a bill. Keep the categories crude — deep work, meetings, coordination, data entry and copying, waiting on someone, firefighting — because precision here reduces compliance and you only need the shape.

Two patterns show up almost every time. First, coordination and copying together account for 20–30% of the week, and almost all of it comes from data living in two systems that do not talk. Second, one or two people are single points of failure for a recurring task nobody else knows how to run, which is why that task always slips when they are on leave. Both are fixable in a fortnight.

Sort each task into one of four verbs

Automation is the fashionable answer and often the wrong one. Work through your logged tasks and assign exactly one verb.

• Delete — the report nobody reads, the approval that has never once been refused, the weekly meeting whose decisions are all made elsewhere. Free, immediate, and the highest-return action available.
• Simplify — reduce a nine-field form to four, cut a three-stage approval to one threshold-based check. Cheap, and it makes any later automation far easier.
• Document — a task done monthly or less, or one that requires judgement. A one-page SOP with screenshots beats a Zapier chain nobody can debug.
• Automate — high frequency, stable inputs, deterministic rules, low judgement. Only after the previous three verbs have been considered.

The payback maths

Use a single formula and apply it consistently: build hours × loaded hourly rate, plus annual licence cost, divided by weekly hours saved × loaded hourly rate. A UK operations salary of £42,000 loaded at 1.28x over 1,750 productive hours is roughly £31 an hour.

Our rule of thumb: build it if payback is under 14 weeks, document it if payback is 14–40 weeks, and leave it alone beyond that unless it removes a compliance risk or a single point of failure. Add a maintenance allowance of 10–15% of build hours per year — automations break when an API changes, and an unowned broken automation is worse than a manual step because failures are silent.

The two-day audit agenda

1. Day one, morning: map the three workflows that touch customers or cash. One line per step, with owner, system used and typical wait time. Whiteboard or a shared doc — do not build a diagram tool habit.
2. Day one, afternoon: mark every hand-off between systems and every step where someone waits. Those two markers locate almost all of the lost time.
3. Day two, morning: assign the four verbs. Delete list first, and actually delete on the day — dormant reports, unread dashboards, meetings with no decisions.
4. Day two, afternoon: pick a maximum of two automations, write the SOPs for three documented tasks, and set January review dates with named owners.

Retire the tool graveyard while you are in there

Pull the last twelve months of software invoices and mark each line active, duplicate or dormant. A typical 25-person company finds two dormant subscriptions and one duplicate — often a second project tool adopted by one team, or a video product superseded by the one bundled with your suite. Cancelling before the January renewal date is the difference between saving a year of spend and eating it. Check the notice period: many annual contracts require 30 days' written notice, so December is exactly when this needs doing.

Do this before you approve next year's software budget in annual budgeting, and compare what you keep against the planning tools breakdown.