A percentage on work you never handed over

I will not sign a percentage guarantee on work that is never actually handed over. I have been offered that trade in a lot of rooms. The number is always impressive. The work behind it is always still sitting with the same people, who now have a copilot and a slightly faster Tuesday.

That is not a handover. That is a tool next to the work.

What I ask for first

A baseline. How long the work takes now, who touches it, where it waits, and what “done” means when a person is still in the loop. Then a sentence that says which of those steps the system is allowed to draft, and which it is allowed to execute. If you cannot write that sentence, you do not have an efficiency programme. You have a licence and a hope.

I teach this as the first of three moves: find the work worth handing over, write the gate, baseline it before anything changes. The third one is the one teams skip because it is unglamorous. Skipping it is how you end up with a 40% on a chart and the same queue on Friday.

What looks like handover and is not

A draft the person rewrites from the first line. A classification nobody trusts enough to stop checking. A “research” step that still requires the same three phone calls. If the human path did not get shorter, the system did not take the work. It sat beside it.

I would rather ship one write that a person can approve and undo than ten assistants that make the same work look modern. The percentage can come later. It has to be a percentage of something you actually moved.