What we actually look at
Every workflow has a documented version and a real one. The gap between them is where friction lives. In a diagnostic we walk the real version — screen-share, Slack scroll-back, ticket history — and mark four patterns: handoffs nobody owns, rework that never gets logged, knowledge held in one person's head, and steps that exist because a system can't do something it should.
The seven questions
- Who is holding this right now, and how would we know?
- What happens if that person is out for two weeks?
- Where does this get redone, and by whom?
- What's the last decision made about this, and where does it live?
- Which tool is the source of truth, and does the team agree?
- What would we automate first if we had a week and a budget?
- What have we tried before that didn't stick, and why?
The last question surfaces more than the first six combined. "What didn't stick" is where the political and operational reality of the business lives.
Where the real bottleneck usually is
Nine times out of ten it isn't the step everyone complains about. The complaint is a symptom of an upstream handoff that arrives incomplete, or a downstream decision no one is empowered to make. Fixing the visible step doesn't move the workflow. Naming the upstream cause does.