Analyse – Act – Adhere
Three stages, always in this order. Diagnosis before action, and governance before exit. Most operational programmes do the middle one well and skip the other two, which is why the improvement lasts about a quarter.
Establish what is actually happening, separately from what is being reported. The two are rarely the same, and the gap between them is where the money is.
- Process and workflow mapping, as-is
- Root cause analysis — 5-why, fishbone
- Cost and consumption reconciliation
- Contract and SLA clause review
- Site walk and physical verification
Turn the diagnosis into a plan somebody owns. Not a recommendation deck — a set of controls, each with an accountable name, a clock and an artefact that proves it happened.
- Responsibility matrix over the control set
- Escalation matrix with turnaround times
- SOP and HOTO redesign, versioned
- Partner performance model — OME / SME
- KPI and MIS redesign for the review meeting
Keep the change alive once I am no longer in the room. This is the stage that decides whether the engagement was worth anything, and it is the one almost always left out of scope.
- Adherence scorecard, run by your own team
- Governance review cadence, in the calendar
- Second-line capability building
- Retraining tied to the breach that caused it
- Exception reporting by exception, not by volume
Written with en-dashes and in this order, always: Analyse – Act – Adhere. The order is the argument.
Where it applies
Thirty minutes, and you will know whether this is worth pursuing
A structured conversation about where your operation is losing money, not a sales call. Mon–Sat, 09:00–18:00 IST, on Google Meet, in English or Hindi. Nothing is required from you in advance.
Book a 30-min diagnostic callThe diagnostic I run in the first week of an engagement: what to freeze, what to measure, and what to fix first — in that order, because doing them in any other order is how cost programmes get reversed.
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