A Practitioner’s Guide to VSM and VSA in Knowledge Work Eleven months after launching a new expense approval system, I discovered that Stage 2 — the gap between Finance approval and Payables processing — was eating more than half of total cycle time. The bottleneck wasn’t the approval chain. It was the queue after approval.ContinueContinue reading “I Got Eight Weeks of Analysis Done in an Afternoon.”
Tag Archives: Business
Building a Finance Approval System From Scratch
We Built a System So We Wouldn’t Fly Blind Anymore. In late 2023, we identified a problem with how our finance team processed expense reimbursements, cash advances, and petty cash requests. The process worked… most of the time. But it was tenuous. Approvals happened in email, which meant requests sometimes got lost, went to theContinueContinue reading “Building a Finance Approval System From Scratch”
Predicting AI Was Not the Problem. Preparing for It Was.
Key distinction: The gap between knowing AI is coming and strategizing for it. We had the roadmap; the risk was not being able to connect the dots. We Had the Roadmap. We Just Didn’t Use It. In 2016, Ajay Agrawal and co-authors published a piece in HBR called The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence. The core argument was almost disarmingly simple:ContinueContinue reading “Predicting AI Was Not the Problem. Preparing for It Was.”
Being a VP. Moving from doing to transforming
I — along with others — have often wondered “What does it mean to be a VP at a company?” Others have felt the sentiment “That VP is doing director-level work. They are ineffective at their responsibilities.” That last one is especially concerning. But there’s also an oft-missed component of being a great VP. The roleContinueContinue reading “Being a VP. Moving from doing to transforming”
Storytelling
I find the art of storytelling fascinating. That you can spellbound people with a narrative is fascinating to me. But, also, someone can write a story so bad not only does it not make sense, the sentences run long (like this one), seem fragmented, disjointed, meandering, and poorly constructed that you simply want to dropContinueContinue reading “Storytelling”
Jeff Beaumont 