Before the day
A short call to agree what we are looking at and who I need access to. If there is an obvious pain point, we start there; if the question is simply “where should we be improving?”, we start with how work enters the business and follow it through.
Morning: how the work actually flows
I sit with the people doing the work, not only the people describing it. That difference matters — the real process almost always contains steps that do not appear on any diagram, and those steps are where the time goes.
- How enquiries and orders arrive, and what happens in the first hour
- Which systems hold which information, and who moves it between them
- What gets checked, chased or rebuilt by hand each week
- Where information is missing at the moment somebody needs it
Afternoon: opportunities and constraints
With the flow mapped, we look at where bespoke software, automation, AI or system integration would change something real, and equally where they would not. Constraints get written down honestly: budget, appetite for change, capacity, contractual lock-ins.
Half the value of the day is deciding what not to do.
What you receive
A prioritised transformation roadmap: the opportunities identified, ranked by what is worth doing first, with an indication of effort and what each one would remove or improve. It is written to be readable by a board, not only by a technologist.
What happens next
Nothing, if nothing is worth doing — that is a legitimate outcome and I will say so. If there are opportunities worth pursuing, I scope the next step clearly and you decide whether to proceed. The roadmap is yours either way.
Who it is not right for
If the business already has a clear, agreed plan and just needs delivery, a Transformation Day is the wrong starting point — go straight to scoping the build. It is also not the right fit if the real decision-makers cannot be in the room, since the value comes from watching the actual work and asking the people doing it, not from a report handed to someone who was not there. And if the honest answer is “we know exactly what’s wrong, we just haven’t had time to fix it,” that is a smaller, cheaper conversation than a full day.
What it costs to skip
Businesses sometimes go straight to a build without a day like this first, usually to save the £600. The more common outcome is a build that solves the described problem correctly, while missing an adjacent one that would have been obvious from a morning spent watching the work happen — which tends to cost considerably more than the day would have.
