By the end of the first week I had a clear picture of the team: two coordinators who were experienced and efficient, one who was experienced and had developed some workarounds that made her fast but created inconsistency, and two who were new enough that their primary need was structure and documentation.
I started with the documentation.
Not because it was the most visible thing or the quickest win. Because documentation is where an operations department lives or dies, and I knew how to build it and I had learned, in eighteen years, that building it right the first time is faster than fixing it six years later.
The exception log I built at Pinnacle was different from the one at Morgan Freight, because the clients were different and the carriers were different and the specific requirements were different. I built it from what I observed and what the team told me and what the client records showed.
By the end of my third week, two of the coordinators had said, independently, that the new protocol documentation had made a specific type of carrier exception twenty minutes faster to resolve. Twenty minutes per exception, across a team of five handling eight to twelve exceptions a week.
This is what operations management is. Not dramatic. Compounded.
The Alder account, at Morgan Freight, was stabilized. I know this because Diane mentioned it, briefly, when she and I spoke in January on a professional call about something unrelated. She said the service review had gone well enough and that there was a new operations coordinator managing the account who seemed capable. She said the account was no longer in remediation.