Understand and measure how the operation runs today before changing systems, workflows or operating models — then use the same measurement to run the rollout and validate the result afterwards.
The same programme, with and without a measured current state.
Transformation in a complex operation is hard for an unglamorous reason: the systems, the process and the way people actually work have drifted apart, and part of the real process was never written down at all.
Every business case has to answer the same set of questions before anyone can responsibly sign it. In most programmes they are answered from institutional memory, a current-state deck built during the last initiative, and a round of workshops with whoever was available.
A programme that starts without a measured current state does not usually fail loudly. It absorbs its contingency in re-scoping, discovers the edge cases during user acceptance testing, and finishes unable to demonstrate the benefit it was funded to deliver.
Most tools in this category are used once, at the start, to draw the current state. The same measurement is worth more if it runs through the programme and out the other side.
Map the current state as it is performed, edge cases included. Discovery runs across the applications and teams in scope without a log-extraction project and without software on employee devices, so the programme does not spend its first phase building a picture.
Phased delivery is where adoption is won or lost. The same discovery, re-run against the new way of working, shows whether people are using the new system as designed — and where they have gone back to the old workaround.
Benefit realization is an evidence problem. Measuring the production environment against the original baseline shortens the stabilization period and turns the benefit claim into something an audit team can check.
This is the part that is easiest to skip and hardest to recover. Once the system has changed, the old operation no longer exists to be measured.
The exceptions and variants that normally surface during testing are visible in the current-state map, when they are still cheap to design for.
Discovery does not depend on subject-matter experts being available, and it asks nothing of the workforce — no-install recording with non-intrusive desktop-recording software, no change to how people work.
Scope, effort and expected return are derived from measured activity, so the numbers in the approval paper and the numbers in the post-implementation review are the same numbers.
Before and after are measured the same way, which is what makes benefit realization a comparison rather than an assertion.
Transformation programmes and cost programmes usually want the same discovery with different arithmetic on top of it. If the immediate ask is an operating-cost number rather than a modernization scope, start there instead.
Fewer stories, stronger evidence. Each of these carries its context, its method and its source.
A back-office operation measured, changed and measured again on the same terms.
Back-office customer management operations at Pitney Bowes. Results achieved in under 90 days.
What a current-state baseline found before anything was re-engineered.
3,053 claims across 107 subtypes. Identified opportunities, not realized savings; the 69% applies to active time only, which was 65% of total time.
Scott Gorman was SVP Operations at Genworth Canada, now Sagen, at the time of the engagement.
Bring the scope of a programme you are about to approve, or one already underway that cannot yet describe its current state. We will show what a measured before-state looks like on that work, and what it changes about the plan.