How this differs from hiring a consultant

An operations consultant would also interview your staff and hand back a document about where the time goes. It is fair to ask what this is instead.

Who gets interviewed

A consulting engagement is priced against senior time, so interviewing is rationed. A partner talks to the owner and a handful of people judged representative, and the rest of the company is inferred from that sample.

Here everyone is interviewed, because the interview runs as software on the employee's phone rather than as a person in a meeting room. That is the whole economic trick, and it changes what the output is entitled to claim. A map built from everyone can say this is what the company does. A map built from six people has to say this is what six people said, and then hope the six were typical.

The cost of the trick is that a machine interview is worse than a good consultant at the individual level. It does not read the room, notice the pause before an answer, or push on the thing somebody was reluctant to say. It compensates with coverage, not with depth per conversation. That is a real trade and worth knowing before you choose.

What the number is allowed to claim

The second difference is discipline about the headline figure.

Consulting reports tend to produce a saving with the methodology in an appendix, and an appendix is not where the argument gets had. The number arrives with authority already attached.

This report prints its basis under the headline in the same eyeline: how many processes, across how many people, employee-estimated per month. Self-reported ad-hoc time is discounted by half and kept on its own line so it can be argued with separately. The full derivation is in [how we put a number on work](/guides/pricing-hours-before-you-build).

That is not a claim to be more accurate. Estimates from a phone interview are soft. It is a claim to be more legible, which matters more the first time somebody asks where the number came from.

What a consultant does better

Three things, none of them small.

Judgement about the business. The map describes processes. It does not know that the process you are about to automate exists because of a customer you are trying to get rid of.

Change management. Getting people to actually work the new way is most of the difficulty in any operations project, and it is human work.

Everything that is not repetitive. Pricing, structure, market strategy. The audit is blind to all of it by design, and so is [what we will not automate](/guides/what-we-will-not-automate).

Which to buy

If the question is where the repeated work is and what it costs, this is the cheaper and more complete answer, because it covers everyone rather than a sample.

If the question is what this company should do, that is a consultant, and a process map is one input to it rather than a substitute.

The honest failure mode here is a company that buys a map when it needed a strategy. The map will be correct and beside the point.