Where they started
Good work on top of a fragile model
The business was growing quickly, with upcoming sales drives and an ambition to onboard large enterprise cohorts. Its clients valued the service and its delivery specialists were doing good work.
Underneath, delivery relied on a patchwork of spreadsheets, a CRM nobody fully trusted, dozens of Slack channels and a handful of capable people who knew how everything fitted together. It worked at today's volumes because those people held it together. The question leadership asked was simple: will this hold as we scale?
Why it was frustrating
Capable people, working around the system
Staff kept their own versions of the data because the CRM, the customer database and parallel spreadsheets disagreed. Large client cohorts sometimes reached operations with around two weeks' notice, and occasionally a launch the following week.
Several core processes could be run by only one person, so a single planned absence needed a bespoke handover. The team already knew many of the answers. They had no time to put them in place while keeping the current model running.
What we did
We started with the people, not the org chart
Over one week we held structured one-to-one conversations with the people who own and run the core processes: operations, customer success, delivery specialist quality and leadership. We walked through every system in daily use with the people who use it, from the CRM and customer database to the launch trackers and the Slack workspace, and reviewed the internal playbooks and handover documents.
We followed the work across teams rather than within them, mapping how a new client actually travelled from signed deal to live delivery. Findings were tested with more than one person wherever possible. Where accounts differed, we recorded the difference rather than resolving it by assumption, and the draft was reviewed in detail with the operations team before it was finalised.
Every finding was rated in terms of risk and impact.
What we found
Sixteen findings, four themes
Seven findings were rated high for risk or impact, eight moderate and one low. The highest-rated findings fell into four themes:
Data
No single source of truth. The CRM, the customer database and parallel spreadsheets held conflicting information, so staff kept their own versions and the automation already available in the CRM went unused.
The joins between teams
The handover from sales to customer success was the main failure point. Large cohorts sometimes reached operations with around two weeks' notice, and occasionally a launch the following week.
Dependency
Launches relied on people remembering steps, and several core processes could be run by only one person. A single planned absence needed a bespoke handover.
Capacity and risk
Growth was arriving faster than operational capacity, and one compliance risk needed action immediately, regardless of any growth plans.
None of these problems reflected a lack of skill or effort. The people closest to the work had already identified many of the right answers. They simply had no time to implement them while keeping the current model running.
The key insight
The weak point was between departments, not within them
Each team performed well within its own lane. Work fell through the gaps at the joins: between sales and customer success, and between customer success and delivery. Incentives made it worse, rewarding deals closed rather than information handed over.
The structural conclusion was that the business did not need a narrower delivery-operations role, but a single role accountable for the whole client journey, from sale through delivery and back into the product, with the standing to hold each stage to the agreed process.