Establish what holds.
Frame the decision. Reconcile the evidence. Test competing explanations, including the one that prompted the engagement.
Output Findings, uncertainties & next tests
Approach
Is it the problem
you actually have?
If I walked in and told you what your problem is before reading your data and understanding the system, I would be doing exactly what the vendors do: telling you a confident story after reading one chapter of the book.
I will hear your hypothesis. Mine comes after the records.
Make the tradeoffs explicit.
Compare plausible courses of action against economics, operating constraints, and the consequences of being wrong.
Output Options, decision criteria & scope
See it through.
The findings become a plan with named owners, review points, and measures that show whether it worked. A diagnosis that stops at the recommendation is not finished work.
Output Roadmap, ownership & review cadence
Why the picture drifts
Everyone is doing
what makes sense.
Vendor reports say it is working, and you still could not say what you would lose if you cut one. Managers agree in the meeting, and what was agreed does not happen. A change you approved months ago has no owner who can say whether it worked.
None of that means you have the wrong people. Everyone is doing what makes sense from where they sit, paid the way they are paid, reporting what they are asked to report. Your departments are very good at hitting their numbers. The catch: the picture you decide on is built from those same scoreboards, so it inherits their blind spots. The problem you think you have came from the reports that are hiding the one you do have.
What I do about it
I start where
the numbers start.
I go through the records myself: the CRM, the pay plans, the vendor reporting, what customers wrote publicly. I trace how the picture you see gets built, and I try to prove the explanation wrong before anything gets solved.
Sometimes it holds, and you proceed knowing it does. Often the store is solving a different problem than it has, and finding that out early is the cheapest thing I will ever do for you. The diagnostic is a fixed fee and I do not sell the fix, so I earn nothing by finding something wrong.
Start with a conversation.
One hour. If it is not a fit, you will know by the end of it.