Taking things out
Size the review window to the thing
A six-month review of a change whose slowest consequence takes fourteen months is not a short review.
The standing item for any other business
week 8 · still not missed
A written agenda for every one-to-one
week 6 · still not missed
The suggestion box
week 6 · still not missed
Weekly timesheets broken down by task
week 3 · still not missed
Not missed 4
Four removals were written down with the week each of them stopped. Four of them have not been asked for in the 78 weeks since. Four of the fourteen nobody has asked for, seventy-eight weeks on.
The third habit is the one that cannot be fully satisfied, and being clear about why is more useful than pretending otherwise.
The arithmetic
Removals on this record produced events at lags from one week to sixty-four. Counting in absolute weeks from the start of the transition, the five problems surfaced at weeks nineteen, twenty-four, thirty-four, fifty-three and seventy-three.
A six-month review ends at week twenty-six. It sees two of the five.
A twelve-month review ends at week fifty-two. It sees three.
An eighteen-month review sees all five, and the fourteen entries that have still produced nothing may yet produce something after that.
Why you cannot simply review later
Because the decision cannot wait. People arrange their lives around a working pattern, and running an arrangement for eighteen months without deciding whether it is permanent is itself a decision, and a worse one than either answer.
The review and the decision have different natural lengths, and the usual response is to shorten the review to match the decision. The alternative is to separate them.
Separating them
Three things, none of which delays anything:
Make the decision on the six-month evidence. That evidence is real: output, satisfaction, retention, and whatever the removals have reported. On this record it was a good result and the decision to make it permanent was correct.
State the window in the report. One sentence. "This covers twenty-six weeks." It weakens nothing and it stops the reader inferring a longer claim than the data supports.
Keep the list alive past the decision. Named person, two calendar entries, twenty minutes each. The review continues after the decision is made because the thing being reviewed is not the same as the thing being decided.
The decision is about the working pattern. The review is about thirty-eight removals, which have their own timetable and do not care when the project closed.
What the continuing review consists of
Not a repeat of the six-month exercise. Output and satisfaction will have been absorbed into ordinary reporting by then.
It is the list, and three questions:
- Which entries have produced an event since last time, and what?
- Which entries are we actually doing again without having decided to? — on this record, eleven of them, and seven surfaced in answer to exactly this question.
- Which entries still have nothing against them, and what date will next make their absence visible?
Twenty minutes. The third question is where the remaining risk lives and it is the one that gets skipped.
The report that follows
A page, at twelve and eighteen months, and it has no audience. That is the honest position: by then the arrangement is permanent, nobody is asking, and the document's main visible content is a short list of things that turned out badly.
On this record no such report was written. The eighteen-month pass happened because one person still had the spreadsheet and thought of it. Everything on this site is downstream of that accident, which is worth saying plainly — the lesson is not that this organisation did something exemplary. It did the ordinary thing and got lucky in one respect.
The version for somebody who will not do any of this
If the choice is between a full practice and nothing, the single highest-value act is a calendar entry at twelve months, owned by a named person, attached to a file containing the list.
Not a review. Not a report. An appointment with a document.
On this record that one entry would have surfaced the reconciliation and the shadowing — two of the five — at twelve months rather than through an audit and a pattern of resignations. The third would still have taken sixty-four weeks, because nothing short of asking a specific question would have found it.
Two out of five, for the price of a calendar entry, is the best return available anywhere in this record.
What a date against an entry looks like
The recommendation to put a date against each entry is easy to state and slightly fiddly to do, so it is worth showing the shape of the output.
| entry | first visible | date |
|---|---|---|
| printed rotas | next week | — |
| month-end figures | month end | 31st |
| second reviewer | next routine change | — |
| the reconciliation | year end, or an audit | 31 March |
| contract reading | next renewal | 14 June |
| shadowing | next new starter | when hiring |
| the refusal log | when a refusal recurs | (blank) |
Most entries get a dash, meaning the absence will be obvious within days and the entry needs no further attention. A handful get a real date and go in a calendar. One gets a blank.
That blank is the entire output of the exercise on this record and it identifies the hardest case before anything has happened: the removal whose absence has no scheduled occasion at which it becomes visible. It took sixty-four weeks, and it was the only entry of the thirty-eight for which no date could be written on the day it stopped.