What can you cut and still get the result?
Part three of three.
Last week Jenny, the business manager, recorded herself building the monthly budget report for the board and then wrote down the steps. On Monday morning the principal hands that one-page list to Marcy, the development director.
Marcy has never built the report. She sits in the board meetings, though, so she knows what the board members open and what they skip. She has also told the staff for years that she hates busywork. She says it out loud, in meetings, without apology. The principal has always heard it as a complaint. This morning she is hoping it works as a skill.
Marcy reads the page and says, “I’d skip four, seven, and nine. Nobody on the board looks at them.”
Step four is a written explanation for every budget line that moved more than two percent. Step seven is a color-coded variance tab. Step nine is a printed packet, mailed to nine board members who read it on their phones.
The principal bristles. Each of those steps looked reasonable on the page.
They send next month’s report without the three. Nobody on the board mentions the missing steps. Though, one member asks a follow-up question about the tuition line, the only line that moved more than five percent. So step four goes back in. The principal and Marcy think back over the last several times a board member asked a question, and every one was about a line that moved five percent or more. They raise the threshold from two percent to five. Steps seven and nine stay gone.
Is this just more busywork?
If you did what the last two weeks asked, you now have a list of the systems that persist, a recording of each one, a page of steps, and a review date on all of it. You may be looking at that pile and wondering whether you built your staff a second job.
The worry is reasonable. Documentation is where busywork starts. A step gets added after a bad month and never comes out. A report grows a tab because someone asked once. Or, it's just the way we've always done it.
The page of steps you wrote is the tool that documents the system.
It works when people follow it, and people follow it while they trust it. When the process on that page wastes their time, they stop trusting it. They skip the step that makes no sense, then the next one that looks like it, and before long the page describes work nobody does.
You wrote it down so the school would keep running without you. A page nobody follows will not do that.
Most principals will deal with the worry the way they deal with anything that is not urgent. They will put the cleanup on the summer list. That list is where documentation goes to die.
Trim it once, while the page is new
The fix is a single pass, done now, before the page has a chance to harden.
Give the steps page to someone who knows the result you are after, did not write the steps, and does not run the system. Pick someone who will give you an honest answer.
Ask her one question: which of these would you skip? Tell her to be blunt.
Then test each cut. A step stays if the person who wrote the page can name a failure it has prevented. “We have always done it” does not count. “Someone might want it” does not count. Run the system without everything else for one cycle. If something breaks, put back only that step.
A step can also shrink. In the scene above, step four came back as a five percent rule instead of an explanation for every line. Keep what earned its place, at the smallest size that still works, and write the reason next to it. The next person who wants to cut it will see why it stays.
This week
Pick one system you recorded and wrote steps for. Start with the one that costs your staff the most hours.
Choose your reader: someone who knows the result, did not write the page, and will give you an honest answer.
Ask which steps she would skip. Ask her to be blunt, write down every answer, and do not defend the page.
For each step she names, ask the person who wrote the page whether she can name a failure it has prevented. If she can, the step stays and you write the reason beside it.
Run the next cycle without the rest. If something breaks, put back only that step, at the smallest size that works.
Save the trimmed page next to the recording, with next October still in both file names.
Your staff will remember what happened to the last page you asked them to write. If it grew into busywork, the next request gets a nod and a delay. If you trimmed it, and Jenny got back the time she spent on steps seven and nine, the next request gets written down on Tuesday.
Every system you trim is a small proof that writing things down makes the work lighter, and that proof is what gets the rest of your systems out of heads and onto pages. A short page people believe will outlast a long one they work around.
