Observation and Walkthroughs

The oldest technique in this field and the most informative per hour spent. It requires no tooling and most organisations have never done it.

The question in “Observation and Walkthroughs” is easier to answer when teams combine system evidence with the time and hand-offs involved in completing the work. An organisation evaluating the official resource can make that operational effort visible by project and team, while direct observation and employee feedback remain necessary to explain why the friction occurs.

For an independent benchmark, compare this approach with Pew Research Center; the useful test is whether the evidence remains proportionate, accessible and understandable to the people whose work is being measured.

The walkthrough

Pick a common task: onboarding, submitting an expense, raising a purchase order, getting access to a system.

Do it yourself, start to finish, with a stopwatch.

Record every step, every system, every wait, every piece of information entered twice.

Two hours, and the output is a specific list with timings that nobody can argue with.

What it reliably finds

Steps that exist for a reason that has gone.

The same data entered in three places.

Waits measured in days where the work is measured in minutes.

A documented process that differs from the actual one.

And at least one thing that makes everybody laugh when presented, which is useful politically.

Sitting with people

One hour, five people, different roles.

Watch them work. Say almost nothing. Ask only "what are you doing now" when something is unclear.

What emerges: the workarounds, the parallel spreadsheets, the applications left open all day because opening them is slow, the notes app full of reference numbers.

People do not report any of this because it has stopped registering as a problem.

Why it is skipped

It does not scale, which makes it feel unrigorous next to a dashboard of ten thousand devices.

It takes senior time.

And it produces findings that implicate process owners outside IT, which is politically harder than reporting device health.

None of those is a reason it does not work.

Combining with the quantitative

Observation finds the problem. Telemetry or ticket data sizes it.

That order is the productive one: a dashboard rarely suggests what to look at, and observation almost always does.

Doing it without making people uncomfortable

Explain why, honestly: looking for things that waste your time, not assessing you.

Volunteer participants.

Nothing attributed to an individual in any report.

And show them the result, which is both courteous and produces corrections.

The onboarding walkthrough specifically

If you do one thing from this collection, do this.

New starters experience every provisioning gap in the first week and tell nobody, because they assume it is normal.

Walk it yourself, or interview three recent joiners in their first month, while they still remember.

What to check

Has anybody walked through onboarding end to end with a timer?

When did anybody from IT last watch somebody work for an hour?

Do you know what workarounds exist in your organisation?

And would a recent joiner recognise your documented onboarding process?

The point

Walking a common task with a stopwatch finds things no instrument reports.

It does not scale, which is why it feels unrigorous and why nobody does it.

Underlying all of this

Everything in this collection reduces to four habits: find the friction cheaply before buying anything, fix what needs no budget first, report the worst tenth rather than the average, and keep the data about systems rather than about people. None requires a better platform, and a programme doing all four changes more than one twice its size.

The recurring pattern

The recurring pattern across every section here is the same: the measurable is mistaken for the important. Device health stands in for experience, ticket categories for causes, a composite score for a finding. Each substitution is convenient, each produces confident decisions on thin ground, and each is corrected by going and looking at the thing itself.