You get a day of somebody watching how your week really goes, and a short written report a few days later. Here is what that day involves, who gets spoken to, what you need to prepare beforehand, and what you are left holding at the end.
An audit is a day. One of us spends it with you and whoever else does the work, watching how the week actually goes, and a short written report follows within a week. That is the whole thing.
£750 is real money, and nobody should hand it over for something they cannot picture. So here is the day, start to finish, including the part where the honest answer is that you do not need us.
This is one half of what we do — the other is the building and training that follows. The report also includes a written AI policy where you need one; here is what a workable one actually has to answer, and the single rule worth having in place before any of that.
Nothing. That is not modesty, it is the point.
A tidied-up week tells us far less than an ordinary one. We want the normal Tuesday, with the interruptions still in it, the job that always arrives late still arriving late, and the workaround somebody invented three years ago still quietly being used. If you spend a week getting ready for us, we end up looking at a version of the work that does not exist, and you have paid for the privilege.
So there are no documents to pull together, no process maps to draw, no list to write. If you happen to have those things already, bring them out by all means. If you do not, it changes nothing about the day.
The only thing worth doing in advance is telling the people you work with that we are coming, what for, and that it is not about them.
Everybody who touches the work, not only whoever books us in. The person who does the same job every Tuesday morning knows where the time goes far better than anyone who only ever sees the finished result of it.
The conversations are short and ordinary — half an hour here and there, fitted around what people are actually doing rather than booked as a row of meetings. We would much rather watch a job happen than hear it described, so a good part of the day is standing beside somebody while they work and asking the dull questions. Where did that come from. What do you do with it next. Who is waiting on you to finish. What do you do on the day it goes wrong.
Two things get said at the start of every one of those conversations, and they are meant. Nothing in the report is about anybody’s performance — we are looking at the work, not at the people doing it. And nothing anybody says comes back as “so-and-so told us”.
We also go through the software you already pay for. Business software has grown a great deal in the last two years and almost nobody has been back to look at what theirs now does. Finding that something already on your bill covers the job is one of the better outcomes of the day, not a wasted afternoon.
By late afternoon we are putting rough numbers against things: how often a job comes round, how long it really takes, and roughly what it would cost to hand it over. Rough is deliberate. Anything more precise at that stage would be invented.
A short report, in plain English, within a week of the day. It has four parts.
The shortlist. The two or three jobs worth handing to AI, each with a rough number against it — hours it would give back over a year, and what it would cost to build. Put in order, easiest first, so you can watch one work before committing to anything larger.
The leave-alone list. Everything we think should stay exactly as it is, and why. The jobs where judgement is the entire point. The ones that do not come round often enough to be worth building for. The ones where the current way of doing it is quietly very good, and replacing it would cost more than it saves.
What you already have. Where software you already pay for would do the job perfectly well, so you are not buying the same thing twice. Plenty of what comes out of an audit needs no help from us at all, and the report says plainly which parts those are.
A written AI policy, if you need one. If you are regulated, or you simply want something to show anyone who asks, it is written as part of the audit rather than sold back to you afterwards. How we think about that side of it is set out under doing it safely.
Then a follow-up call four weeks later, once you have had a go at the easy one. Included, not extra.
The report is yours. Work through it on your own, or hand it to somebody else to build from. There is nothing to sign at the end of the day and no second document with a bigger number on it.
A report that tells you to leave four things alone is doing its job every bit as much as one that hands you a shortlist.
That is a real possibility, and if it is the answer it goes in the report in those words.
There are honest reasons for it. The work might be varied enough that every job really is a one-off, in which case there is no pattern to hand over. The volumes might be too low for anything built to ever pay for itself. Or the thing actually holding the week up might sit somewhere else entirely — waiting on somebody outside your business, say — and no amount of clever software at your end shifts it.
That is a result rather than a failure. Knowing you can stop wondering about it for a year is worth something on its own, and it is a great deal cheaper to find out in a day than halfway through building something.
We would rather say it before you book than after, too. That is most of what the free call is for. You describe how the week goes, and if it sounds like an audit would tell you nothing you do not already know, we will say so and you will have spent nothing.
By the end of the day you should be able to say, in one sentence, what the first thing is, what it would give back, and what it would cost. If you can say that, the audit did its job. If you cannot, it did not, and we would want to hear about it on the follow-up call.
This is how we run the day rather than a standard anybody else follows — what is included, and what it costs, is set out in full on the audit page.
Twenty minutes on the phone, free, no obligation. Tell us how your week goes and we will tell you honestly whether an audit is worth your money — and if it is not, what we would do instead.