The work nobody owns

Interview five people separately and each will describe their own work reasonably well. None of them will describe the thing that costs the most, because none of them can see it.

A handoff is where one person's output becomes another person's input. From the inside it is an event lasting a few seconds: you send the file, you post the message, you tick the box. What happens next is somebody else's problem, and it is invisible to you. From the outside, it is where the time goes.

Waiting is not idle time

The waiting between steps is rarely anyone sitting still. It is a message in a queue behind forty other messages, an approval that arrived on a Friday afternoon, a request that needs a person who is in meetings until Thursday. The work itself might be twenty minutes. The elapsed time is three days.

That difference appears in nobody's account of their own job, because from each seat there was no delay. There was a thing that arrived, and they did it promptly.

Stitching chains from separate interviews

This is the part that needs the whole team rather than a sample. Every interview records handoffs by name: who it goes to, and roughly how long it sits. When two interviews describe two ends of the same handoff, the chain can be assembled, and the waiting time between each step comes from the people on either side of it rather than from a guess.

A chain assembled that way tends to surprise an owner more than any single process does. Three steps that each felt fast, with a worst-case total measured in days.

Why nobody has fixed it already

Nobody owns it. Each step has an owner and each owner is doing their step well. The chain has no owner at all, so it never lands on anyone's list of problems, and internal process improvement almost always attacks the steps rather than the gaps between them.

It is also the part with the least glamorous fix. Many of these chains are resolved by a notification that fires when something has been sitting too long, or by removing an approval that exists because of an incident five years ago. Neither is exciting. Both are cheap.

What to check first, once you can see the chain

• Is the approval real? A surprising number of waits are approvals nobody has ever refused. An approval with a hundred percent approval rate is a delay with a signature on it.
• Does the next person know it is there? A great deal of the waiting is not decision time, it is discovery time. The handoff happened and the recipient found out later.

Neither of those needs software. That is fine. An audit that only finds work for the people running it is not an audit.