Map Your One Workflow: The Operational Clarity One-Pager

You can’t improve what you can’t see. Before any tool or automation, get one workflow out of everyone’s heads and onto a single page. This is the exact first step we take in a paid assessment — here it is in starter form. Pick the one workflow that frustrates the business most, and fill this in.

1. The basics

• Workflow name: the plain name people use for it (e.g., “getting a quote out”).
• Trigger: what starts it? (a customer email, a phone call, a form…)
• Done looks like: how do you know it’s finished and successful?
• Owner: who is accountable for the whole thing end to end?

2. The steps, in order

List every real step from trigger to done — the way it actually happens, not the tidy version. For each step, note who does it and in which tool.

3. The hand-offs

Every time the work passes from one person or tool to another, note it. Hand-offs are where things get dropped, delayed, or re-typed.

4. Where it breaks

Mark the steps where things go wrong: the re-typing, the “let me check with…”, the waiting, the errors. Be specific — “step 3 gets re-keyed into the accounting system by hand” is gold.