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: Technology
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”
AI Rewards Thinkers and Replaces The Rest
The more time I spend with AI, the more impressed I become. Recently, it helped me write a preliminary report for an economic impact study and map several internal workflows to identify service level gaps. Also, I used AI to analyze a systemic drinking water shortage problem where I live in West Africa. I hadContinueContinue reading “AI Rewards Thinkers and Replaces The Rest”
Don’t out think AI. Out human AI.
Ironically, an AI generated image to prove the point: where can we add value? As AI capabilities rapidly close the gap on what only humans could do, I leaned on these insights from Toni Cowan-Brown and Benedict Evans on *Another Podcast* to guide my thinking. Give it a listen: AI and SaaS. “I hadn’t thought ofContinueContinue reading “Don’t out think AI. Out human AI.”
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.”
Jeff Beaumont 