Part four. The Turnaround
Positive deviance
Somebody in your organisation is already doing it right. Find them before designing anything.
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Before designing a new process, look for the people already getting the outcome you want with the resources everybody else has. They almost always exist and they are almost never asked. The idea comes from public health, where teams looking at childhood malnutrition found households whose children were well fed on the same income and the same food supply as everyone else. The families had unremarkable habits nobody had thought to document. Find the account manager whose handoffs never come back, the engineer whose estimates hold. Then find out what they actually do, which takes longer than you expect, because they will tell you they do nothing special and they will believe it. A practice that already works inside your constraints will survive. Nothing you design in a room has that going for it.
Before designing a new process, look for the people already getting the outcome you want with the resources everybody else has. They almost always exist and they are almost never asked.
The idea comes from public health, where teams looking at childhood malnutrition found households whose children were well fed on the same income and the same food supply as everybody else. The families had unremarkable habits nobody had thought to document. The intervention that worked was spreading those, not importing an external programme.
The operational version: find the account manager whose handoffs never come back, the engineer whose estimates hold, the support lead whose escalations resolve. Then find out what they actually do, which will take longer than you expect, because they will tell you they do nothing special and they will believe it.
What you are looking for is a small, unglamorous deviation from the written process. They send a two line note before the handoff. They ask one extra question at intake. They copy one person nobody else copies.
This matters because a practice that already works inside your constraints is enormously more likely to survive than one designed in a room. It has been tested against your actual customers, by your actual staff, under your actual pressure. Nothing you design will have that going for it.
Two things worth doing, neither of which costs anything
Read the standard in full, free and in the open, before you pay anything or give anyone an address.