Another IT support company
An IT support company gets paid to keep answering tickets. I am trying to work out why the tickets keep happening.
Diagnose · consulting
Find the real cause of problems that keep coming back.
For leaders who keep seeing the same things. Work that has to be redone. Decisions that come out different every time. Nobody owning the problem. Hand-offs that drop the ball. A problem that changes its name every time it moves to another department.
- The same problem keeps coming back or moving between teams
- Every department hits its target and the company still misses
- You’ve tried to fix it more than once
- Nobody owns the whole problem
First step: a short call to see if this is a fit. If it is, the next step is a focused problem-mapping session or an Organizational Noise Audit. Not an open-ended project. You get a map of the problem and one change to test.
The practice
Most companies are set up by department. Their hardest problems are not.
I look at everything around a problem. The people. The technology. How the work flows. How decisions get made. How information moves. What people get rewarded for. Security. And the result the company really wants.
Why problems that cross departments are different
You can have good people in every seat and still get bad results, because the thing connecting them is causing friction, double work, and delay. That is the frustrating part. Nobody is failing, and it still is not working.
Every team is measured on its own work, so every team protects its own work. That makes sense, and it is mostly right. But it means the expensive problems, the ones that survive three reorganizations, sit in the gaps between teams, where nobody has the power or the view to fix them.
The problem should decide the method. The method should never decide the problem.
What it is really called
What a problem is called is rarely what a problem is
A technology problem
may really be a problem with how the work flows.
A security problem
may really be a problem with who owns what.
A project that keeps running late
may really be a problem with how decisions get made.
A customer service problem
may start far away from customer service.
A compliance problem
may really come from a process that is confusing.
A weekly meeting
may only exist because there is no better way to share information.
What this is not
What this practice is not
Saying this up front saves us both a meeting. If what you need is one of these, there are firms that do it well, and I will point you to them.
A security-only shop
Security is one way in, and I have done the work. But a lot of things called a security problem turn out to be a “who owns this?” problem in a security costume.
A compliance shop
I have done years of compliance and vendor risk. But passing an audit and actually working well are two different things.
A method for sale
I am not going to certify your company in a method. The problem should decide the approach, not the other way around.
A software seller in disguise
Sometimes the right answer is to buy nothing, use what you already pay for, or turn something off.
A firm that sells giant reports
A 200-page report nobody opens is just an expensive way to feel busy. I would rather leave you with one change we actually tested.
What makes this different: I look at the whole system, then make one change we can test.
A recommendation nobody tests is just an opinion in a nicer font. Every project is set up so we can tell whether the change really helped.