Case Study: Untangling Operations at a Regional Services Firm
How a 140-person services company cut project delivery time by 31% by fixing three hand-offs nobody owned.
Details have been generalized to protect client confidentiality.
The situation
A regional services firm of roughly 140 people had grown faster than its processes. Projects routinely ran weeks past their committed dates, margins were slipping, and leadership couldn't pinpoint why — everyone was busy, yet work kept stalling.
What we found
An operations diagnostic mapped the full delivery process and surfaced an uncomfortable truth: the delays clustered around three hand-offs that no single person owned. Work would sit for days waiting for a sign-off that everyone assumed someone else was handling.
- Scoping-to-delivery hand-off averaged 6 days of pure waiting.
- A mid-project approval step had a 40% rework rate.
- Final QA was a bottleneck handled by a single overloaded lead.
What we changed
We assigned clear owners to each hand-off, replaced the ambiguous approval with a lightweight checklist, and redistributed QA across three trained reviewers. None of it required new software — just clearer decision rights and a visible dashboard.
The result
Within one quarter, average delivery time fell 31%, on-time completion rose from 58% to 89%, and the leadership team finally had a reporting layer they trusted. Just as importantly, the firm kept improving on its own — because the diagnostic left behind a cadence, not just a fix.
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