500+ hours per month recovered

Audited the manual data workflows of a government court system, identified where staff were double-entering data, reconciling conflicting reports, and building workarounds to compensate for a case management system that wouldn't give them back what they'd put into it — and fixed it.                                                

The Problem

When I arrived, ongoing reporting across the organization was fragmented. Data lived in a case management system that staff had painstakingly filled in — but couldn't get back out at the level of granularity they needed. So they'd built workarounds. Elaborate Excel processes, pulling from multiple reports that didn't match each other, manually reconciling the differences each month, and entering the same data in more than one place to keep everything consistent.                                               

My team didn't have direct access to the underlying data sources. The reports that existed had been built outside our team and weren't sufficient. The gap between what the case management system held and what people could actually use had been filled, entirely, by human labor.                                                                            

What I Did

 We started by sitting with the people doing the work. Not to audit them — to understand them. What were they pulling? From where? What didn't match, and how were they deciding which number to trust each month? What had they built in Excel, and why? What were they actually trying to know?

The workarounds people build when systems fail them are usually ingenious. They're also a map of exactly what's broken.

One example that stuck with me: a team had essentially recreated their case management system's own data entry fields in a parallel tracking document — because the options in the system had never been properly defined or cleaned up. We brought everyone together to define what each option actually meant, removed options that were redundant or too similar, and standardized what remained. Once the case management system reflected what people actually needed, we could generate an ongoing report directly from it. The parallel document disappeared.

That pattern repeated across the organization. We'd find the workaround, trace it back to the underlying gap — a definition problem, an access problem, a reporting problem — and close it. We built relationships with IT so we could request the data access end-users needed. We did governance work — defining options, standardizing language, removing ambiguity — so the system could be trusted. And we built the reports that let people manage their caseloads from one place instead of five.

The Result

 Over 560 staff hours per month recovered — 320+ from analytics automation and 240+ from process redesign — without adding headcount, without restructuring teams, and without asking anyone to do their job differently in any way that felt like a burden.

That last part surprised us. Going in, we worried that asking people to change how they entered data — to use different options, stop using certain fields, standardize language they'd developed their own versions of — would meet resistance. It didn't. People knew their workarounds were workarounds. They weren't attached to them. They were doing the extra work as a means to an end, and when we offered a path to half the work with the same result, the response was gratitude.

The lesson has stayed with me: change resistance is usually about adding friction, not changing direction. When you remove friction instead — when what you're asking people to do is genuinely easier than what they were doing before — the change manages itself.