Research tool 001
Dependency Audit.
A five-day protocol for finding the places where your sports operation relies on a person when it should rely on a system.
Use this when
You are repeatedly interrupted to solve routine issues.
A colleague's absence exposes gaps nobody noticed before.
Important information lives in messages, memory or personal spreadsheets.
You are worried the operation would struggle through a leadership transition.
Protocol
Find the dependency. Remove one cause.
Capture
For five working days, log each moment where delivery requires one specific person to remember, approve, explain, decide or rescue something.
Classify
Tag each item as decision right, unclear ownership, missing information, undocumented process or relationship knowledge.
Count
Look for repeated dependencies. Frequency matters more than how irritating one incident felt.
Remove
Choose one repeated dependency and change the system: assign ownership, document the critical information, define the decision rule or redesign the workflow.
Retest
Two weeks later, check whether the issue can now be handled without the previously essential person.
Working log
| Incident | Person required | Why required | Category | System change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Keep the exercise deliberately small. The goal is not to document the whole operation. It is to expose one recurring dependency worth removing.
Contribute to the wider research