Someone is leaving and the overview goes with them
A controller, an operations manager, someone who kept it running for years. The role can be handed over; what sat around it usually cannot, because it was never written down.
Does this sound familiar?
- What was agreed lives in one person's calendar and mailbox
- Their successor starts with months of digging before they can steer
- Nobody can say which decisions were taken over the past period, or why
- The last handover went exactly the same way
- The handover consists of two weeks of shadowing and a document nobody reads again
What we do
We record the goals of the role and freeze them, and from that moment we keep the registers: risks, issues, actions and decisions. Every month we collect the position in an hour of conversation and enter it ourselves. Your manager does not have to maintain anything; they only have to say where things stand.
What you are left with
The roles change hands, the registers and the history stay. Whoever sits in that chair tomorrow starts with the goals, the position per goal, and the decisions along with who took them. And at the close of every cycle there is one file covering the whole period.
Including when we are the ones changing
Our point of contact preferably stays the same for the whole engagement, but continuity does not depend on that. The history stays because it sits in the registers and the frozen snapshots, not in the head of whoever kept it. That is the same promise, even when it applies to us.
Is someone leaving soon?
Arrange a conversationOr is this closer to your situation?
Someone will look back, and then what is on the table counts
A buyer, an investor, a new shareholder. The financial picture is in the annual accounts, and that is the easy half. The other half is how the business was actually run, and that usually sits in people's heads.
Sale or investment →A board or a financier has arrived
A supervisory board, a bank with covenants, an investor with a seat, a grant body that wants to see something every quarter. From that moment on you are accounting for yourself structurally, and that is a different thing from giving the occasional presentation.
Board or financier →Your organisation grew and your overview did not
There was a time when you knew everything because you were there for everything. Now there are managers, and you hear what they consider important enough to tell you. Usually they are right. You just hear it once it has happened, and not while it could still be steered.
Your own overview →