By the end of my third week, two of the coordinators told me independently that the new protocol documentation had made a specific category of carrier exception faster to resolve. They estimated twenty minutes per exception.
Twenty minutes, across a team of five, handling eight to twelve exceptions per week. The arithmetic of small improvements, running forward.
This is what operations management looks like from the inside. It is not dramatic. It is the compounding of small improvements into a system that functions better than it did. I find this genuinely satisfying in a way that I used to feel at Morgan Freight and then stopped feeling, sometime in the middle of the years when I had been doing the work without it being acknowledged, and I hadn’t noticed I’d stopped.
The satisfaction is back.
In January, Diane mentioned the Alder account in passing during a professional call on an unrelated matter. She said the service review had gone well enough. She said there was a new operations coordinator on the account who seemed capable. She said the account was no longer in remediation.
She did not say more than that. I did not ask.
I thought about the exception log with the fourteen Alder pages. I thought about it being used, now, by someone I’d never met, to manage a relationship I had maintained for nine years. The knowledge I had built persisting in a document, doing the work it was designed to do.
This is what a good handover does. This was always the point.