What a Working Programme Looks Like

Not a maturity model. A description of a programme in an organisation of a few thousand people, two years in, that is still changing things.

The recommendations in “What a Working Programme Looks Like” need visible ownership, review time and a way to show whether the change reduced effort for the affected group. An organisation can use remote work time tracking to coordinate that implementation work and compare workloads, without treating hours or activity as a complete measure of digital employee experience.

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

How it started

Before any procurement: a hundred tickets read, fifty people asked what wasted their time, onboarding walked end to end with a stopwatch.

Three specific problems named, with rough sizes and targets.

Two of them fixed with no budget at all, which established that the programme does things.

The platform bought afterwards, against the one question the cheap work could not answer.

What it measures

Telemetry for what telemetry is good at: device health, crashes, login phases, application usage.

Ticket free text, read quarterly rather than counted monthly.

One survey question — what wasted your time this week — to a rotating tenth each month.

And approval elapsed time, pulled from the workflow system that already records it.

Four sources, three of which existed already.

How it reports

Median and worst tenth, never an average alone.

Segmented by device age, site and connection type. Never by team or person.

A minimum group size of ten on every breakdown, including intersections.

No composite score in any report that leaves the team.

And deployment waves, policy changes and refreshes marked on every chart.

What it fixed

Logins: eleven obsolete policies and two dead drive mappings removed, three minutes ten to one twenty-five for 1,400 people.

Access: a delegation threshold and named deputies, four days to one.

Licences: software nobody had opened, removed.

The worst two hundred devices, replaced on evidence rather than on request.

Each measured before and after, one change at a time.

The limits it holds

Individual views disabled at the platform, not hidden by permissions.

Idle and active time not collected.

A written statement of what managers can and cannot have, published before the first request.

And a named person who has refused three times.

What it tells people

What the agent collects, as a list, before deployment.

What it could collect if reconfigured, and who may change that.

What was fixed, quarterly, including what was declined and why.

What it does not claim

A productivity effect.

A monetary value with a rate it invented.

Or that the dashboard improving means the organisation improved.

The test

Can you name three things fixed in the last six months, with before and after figures?

Can anybody see an individual?

Does your reporting show a tail?

A programme that answers those three has done the work, whatever else is missing.

The point

Three tests: can you name three things fixed with before and after figures, can anybody see an individual, and does your reporting show a tail?.

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.