A Consultant's View: The Same Problem Everywhere I Go
- Jason Chiu
- Oct 24
- 4 min read
Coming off a busy quarter as we continued expanding into new industries, it was interesting to me to see one issue that consistently kept surfacing, which is costing organizations far more than they realize.
In one project with a marine cargo handling organization, a continuous backlog of injury claims from their members had stalled Return-to-Work (RTW) programs. The result? Extended claims that in some cases defaulted into long-term payouts simply because the employer did not have the capacity to revisit their injury claims and initiate RTW. This in turn drove increasing WorksafeBC base rates across their industry.
In another example, I was involved in analyzing municipal 3-1-1-type services (interesting fact: these datasets are commonly open and published, see City of Vancouver Open Data Portal for 3-1-1). The intent behind them is good, that is to centralize citizen inquiries; however, when inquiries can range from non-emergency issues, to requests for city services, or just citizens looking for information, the process becomes highly interdepartmental. As volumes grow, coordination slows, and response times stretch.
This was common whether I was working inside a city department, talking to medical practitioners, or visiting tradespeople...the challenge repeated itself.
Different industries. Same problem. Everyone's buried under the coordination of work.
Some call it inquiries, others call them cases, files, or tickets. The story's the same: work comes into your teams from many channels, with little visibility, leaving staff scrambling to keep it all moving, while more work piles up from behind.
Does the following pattern sound familiar to you at work?
Work orders come in from multiple channels: emails, phone calls, walk-ins, external web portals, and internal systems.
Once "captured" or "picked-up", it splinters into spreadsheets, trackers, or inboxes... and sometimes written on sticky notes on a monitor, or worse, in someone's head (let's hope they remember it after the long weekend)!
Then, it stays siloed with whoever touched it last. People take vacation, get sick, or are pulled onto other priorities, and suddenly progress stalls.
Leadership only hears about a growing backlog. Staff get overwhelmed with the workload. Attrition happens. Eventually the answer is, "we need more headcount".
But it's not a lack of effort; it's actually a lack of visibility.
Teams can't manage what they can't see, so it's a lack of an optimal workflow. Each request, ticket, and claim represents a moving piece of work, and when those pieces don't move together, the whole system slows down.
What helps teams find clarity and break free from the rut...
Just to be clear, we don't go in like some conventional big consulting firms and recommend implementing the latest CRM or Project Management hub that costs upwards of six-figures or more. Instead, we start with what our clients already have, sometimes convincing management to pause an upcoming system project.
Our discoveries often involve us spending time on-site with frontline staff to gain a first-hand experience of their day-to-day work. By co-locating and embedding into the operations, we simulate daily tasks, tracing how information moves through teams, onto other departments and systems. This gives us the most accurate snapshot or feel of the business. And if we were lucky, we sometimes even got a glimpse of odd irate walk-in, or the frustrated caller -- these of which were goldmines of insight.
Once we understood the current work, we co-created an ideal process and built simple PoCs (Proof-of-Concepts) to validate.
So here's what I learned:
1) Centralize how work comes in. Create a single point of intake.
Map where work orders originate: email, phone, walk-in, portal, etc — and funnel it into one place. Even a simple internal form can bring order and give you a true sense of demand.
Although there may be some initial resistance to change, gradually team members saw the value in using a common form to capture intakes, regardless of how they came in.
We worked with our clients to prototype and iteratively crafted a centralized intake form solution using lightweight tools readily available to them in Google Cloud or Microsoft 365. Our goal was speed and resolution, not compliance or perfection (that's for the smart IT folks to handle). Success to us was showing teams the importance of consolidating the intakes in one place. Ironically, sometimes using non-enterprise tools helped IT teams squelch any concerns about rogue skunk work solutions, and instead our PoCs communicated the desired solution faster than a PowerPoint pitch.
2) Make the work visible across all levels.
Show where each case sits in a "bucket": 1) new, 2) in progress 3) pending, and 4) done.
It doesn’t have to be high-tech; even a simple physical visual management board helps teams and leaders see the flow, and not just the noise. As each case progresses, we move a sticky-note between the buckets, and ultimately make the invisible visible.
We can start seeing trends like:
where are cases piling up?
who's taking on the most work on the team (...and who's not)?
which cases may be unintentionally neglected?
3) Measure what matters.
With the visibility of work established, metrics emerge naturally.
By summarizing this data into dashboards, teams start to notice trends such as response times, resolution rates, and aging tickets and adjust proactively. High-performing teams own their metrics -- they don’t wait for management to tell them what’s wrong.
Dashboarding can take many forms -- from a simple Obeya (big-room view of goals and performance) to Gemba boards used in field operations. The goal is shared awareness.
A takeaway from the field
Most teams aren’t resistant to change -- they’re just overwhelmed.
The solution isn't to immediately put in a million-dollar platform, or to seek headcount. Rather, it’s to make the work visible and manageable.
Start with what you already have (maybe it's a few packs of sticky notes). Enable the three key aspects discussed above 1) centralizing intakes, 2) tracking where the work is, and 3) visualize the trends and develop metrics.
Once people can see the flow of work, they stop firefighting and start improving.
