​I want to tell you about a number that stuck with me this week: 27.

That’s how many hours an 80-hour piece of work got optimized down to, without changing the value delivered to a client.

It came from a story Chris Johnston shared while facilitating a Levership monthly check-in. He’s Levership’s CEO now, but years ago he was a client of ours running a cybersecurity firm.

I’ll let Chris’ words tell the story:

Chris: We had a piece of work we did, a security assessment, back in my cybersecurity days.

That project was fixed price in the market, so we knew if we could save time on it, we'd increase our profitability. We just didn't know how to do it formally.

It came up as one of our biggest opportunities as we were going through our 90-day cycles, the same kind of framework we walk our clients through today.

So we went through the improvement process with our coach and the team. We got everybody's voice, tested improvements, and got it into daily management.

At the end of that project, about three months in, we took it from 80 hours down to 56 on average.

You'd think, okay, great, that's a home run. But that wasn't the win.

The win was teaching the team how to do daily management. Saying out loud what got in your way normalizes talking about the bad stuff.

Not many companies do that. Not many people are comfortable with it.

So it gets buried. You stew on it, or worse, you go home and complain about work instead.

This gives people a voice in what prevented them from having a good day, and you actually get to capture it. That's the real win.

Because about twelve months after we hit 56 hours, with no outside help, no consultants, just our own team doing daily management, we took that same 80-hour piece of work down to 27 hours.

The team kept coming every day with what got in their way.

That built us a Pareto chart, and we just kept fixing the next biggest thing on it. It was phenomenal to watch.

The 56 hours alone would have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars across a year. But it was the daily management, the culture of people having a voice and asking how we keep making this better, that actually got us to 27.

Those are staggering numbers. And there's waste like that in every knowledge process we've ever seen.

You can't even picture the perfect process.

All you can do is get your team together, agree on the best you know today, and then learn. That's the loop. That's where you get 1% better every day. Even if you got 10% better this week just from one good huddle, that won't hold a candle to the 1% you compound over a year of doing this.”

So why am I bringing this up today?

Every business I talk to is rolling AI out somewhere in the organization right now.

And putting daily management in place around your processes is the only way to stay abreast as the capabilities of AI change.

Your team needs to be aware of how the sausage is made so they can continue to improve it. It’s more important now than ever.

Small, boring, repeatable.

That's how 80 hours turn into 27.

Talk soon,

Matt

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