What a 60-Minute Process Diagnostic Actually Uncovers
One process, one hour, five sections
A diagnostic is not a workshop and it is not a discovery call. It is a structured interview against a fixed framework, applied to a single process, with the evidence written down as it is captured.
The framework has five sections:
- Scope — what the process is, where it starts, where it ends, and what a successful run looks like.
- Current state — the major steps, who owns each one, the systems involved, the handoffs, and where approvals sit.
- Friction — bottlenecks, rework, errors, duplicate entry, chasing, and knowledge dependencies.
- Impact — frequency, cycle time, active work versus waiting, and the operational or financial consequence.
- Opportunity — what to eliminate, simplify, standardise, combine, or automate, and the constraints any recommendation must respect.
Why the pre-work matters
The short snapshot completed before the session does one job: it removes the slow part of the hour. Instead of establishing what the process is, the session opens by confirming it and moves directly to where the value is — friction, impact, and priority.
The purpose of the pre-work is not to document the process. It is to make the first ten minutes of the session unnecessary.
What gets produced
By the end of the hour there is a written record of:
- The process trigger, endpoint, and definition of done
- A step-by-step current-state map with owners and systems
- The ranked friction points, with frequency and volume attached
- An estimate of annual operational exposure
- A prioritised set of improvements with named constraints
Anything uncertain is marked as needing verification rather than presented as fact. Estimates are labelled as estimates.
Who this suits
It suits an operator who already suspects where the problem is and wants it located precisely, sized honestly, and turned into a sequence of actions.
Score your candidate process first with the Process Priority Toolkit, then bring the highest-priority one to the session.