What came back
Why what returns returns cheaper
Returns on this record came back at a median of just under half weight, and the mechanism is a filter: somebody has to want a thing enough to restart it, and.
The daily stand-upBack twice a week instead of five, standing and timed
week 0 · crept back after 3 weeks
Chasing unpaid invoices every weekBack in full
week 3 · crept back after 2 weeks
The spare key logReplaced by something else doing the same job
week 10 · crept back after 14 weeks
Two people on every delivery
week 4 · crept back after 9 weeks
Crept back 4
Four removals were written down with the week each of them stopped. Every one of them produced an event inside the 78 weeks watched. Of these, four crept back. Four of the eleven that crept back without anyone deciding.
Twenty-four returns, median weight forty-seven and a half per cent. That number is the most useful thing on this site for anybody deciding whether to attempt a shorter week, and it deserves an explanation rather than just a citation.
The filter
A procedure that goes back in has passed through something the original never passed through: somebody had to want it enough to act.
The original procedure did not need anybody to want it. It was introduced once, for a reason, and thereafter it ran because it was running. No subsequent person had to justify it, resource it or decide it was worth the time, because nobody was being asked.
Restarting is different. Whoever restarts a thing is spending their own effort or their own credibility, now, against a visible alternative — which is not doing it. That is a real decision, and it is made against the part of the procedure that is actually costing them something.
So what comes back is the load-bearing part, and the rest does not.
What the rest consisted of
Looking at the twelve reduced returns, the parts that did not come back sort into four kinds:
- Frequency nobody had ever examined. A monthly count that was monthly because it started monthly. Four of the twelve.
- Distribution. Figures circulated to everybody that four people used. Two of the twelve.
- Ceremony. The standing and the timing that turned an hour into twenty-five minutes. Three of the twelve.
- Universality. A rule applied to all cases that only mattered above a threshold. Two of the twelve.
None of those is waste in the sense of somebody being careless. Each is the result of a procedure being set up once and never being asked to justify its own dimensions.
The thing this is not
It is not evidence that organisations are full of unnecessary work. That reading is available and it is too strong.
Every one of these procedures was doing something. The reduced versions are doing less of it, and the record is seventy-eight weeks long — short enough that a reduction in the coverage of a rare event would not have shown up yet. A quarterly reconciliation moved to annual has been performed once since the change.
The honest version is narrower: procedures accumulate dimensions that nobody has examined, and a removal is the only event that reliably forces an examination. What comes back is a procedure that has been sized by somebody, possibly for the first time.
Why this does not apply to the problems
The five costly removals did not pass through the filter, and that is the whole of why they were expensive.
Nobody wanted them back, because nobody was inconvenienced. There was no person spending their own effort against a visible alternative. The thing that eventually restored them was an event — an audit, a renewal, a resignation pattern — and an event does not negotiate.
Of the five, one went back at full weight immediately after the incident, two were replaced by substitutes at around half, and two produced costs that were simply absorbed with nothing restored at all.
A removal reversed by wanting comes back sized. A removal reversed by an incident comes back at whatever size the incident demands, which is usually the original.
The practical reading
If most of the saving in a shorter week comes from procedures being resized rather than abolished, then the useful target is not the number of removals. It is the number of procedures that get examined.
That reframing changes what a good transition looks like. A transition where thirty-eight things were removed and twenty-four came back at half weight has resized twenty-four procedures and abolished fourteen. A transition where eight things were removed and all eight stuck has abolished eight and resized nothing.
The first is a bigger result, and by the usual accounting it looks like the worse one.
What to measure instead
Two numbers, both available from the same list:
- How many entries have been through a conversation about their size — removed and restored, or removed and reduced, or removed and replaced. On this record, twenty-four.
- The median weight of what came back. On this record, just under half.
The second is the one that converts into hours, and it is the only figure on this site that an organisation can take to the people who have to approve the thing.
The dimension that never came off
One dimension survives every reduction on this record, and its survival is the clearest evidence that these reductions were made by habit rather than by analysis.
Nobody changed who does the thing.
Twelve procedures came back smaller. In all twelve, the people performing the restored version are the people who performed the original. Frequency came off, scope came off, distribution came off, ceremony came off. Ownership did not move once.
That is not because ownership was correct. At least two of the twelve are performed by whoever introduced them, years ago, for reasons that have long stopped applying, and in one case by somebody considerably more senior than the task warrants.
Ownership survives because the person restarting the thing is the person who was doing it, and they are not going to reassign themselves in the course of quietly resuming a habit. The one reduction that went through a formal conversation — the second reviewer threshold — is also the only one where who performs it was discussed.
A reduction made by habit will trim everything except the thing that only a decision can change.