Kill, Automate, Delegate: removing 30 percent of work in 30 days without breaking delivery

Kill, Automate, Delegate: removing 30 percent of work in 30 days without breaking delivery

Busywork hides risk and slows growth. A focused 30 day reset can remove roughly a third of low value activity, free senior time for customers and product, and improve quality. The sequence matters: kill before you automate; automate before you delegate. Guard delivery with a few hard rules; treat time like a P and L line; run this as an operating change, not a side project.  

Week 1: kill what does not create value

Inventory time and outputs. Pull the last four weeks of calendars plus a snapshot of Slack and Docs usage. Tag meetings and recurring outputs by owner, audience, and decision.

Apply three rules

• No decision or deliverable: cancel
• Reports with no reader: archive
• Initiatives with no owner or KPI: pause

Reset defaults: 25 minute meetings; half the attendees; agenda required; status async by default. Protect compliance, customer SLAs, and safety activities; move those to stabilization in Week 4. Research on decision making is blunt: fewer than half of decisions are timely; many leaders say at least half of the time spent deciding is ineffective. Publish the kill list with a named approver so the cut holds.  

Evidence pack to publish

• Meeting hours by org; top ten recurring meetings by hours
• Decks produced more than twice per month with the same content
• Tickets reopened or escalated by queue and by step

Week 2: automate the repeatable steps

Pick the ten highest friction tasks by hours, error rate, or escalation pain. Start with the lightest viable tools: CRM rules; document templates; API zaps; an internal AI aide for summaries, drafts, reconciliations, and ticket hygiene. Before you script anything, run a quick process mining pass on ticketing or billing logs to spot rework and long tails.

Guardrails for automation

• Log prompts and outputs; keep a human in the loop for anything customer facing
• Restrict models and data with role based access; mask PII; version SOPs as you automate
• Measure saves in hours removed; do not call it done until the manual path is retired

Ten common wins

Reconciliations; status notes; meeting notes plus follow ups; doc assembly; invoice data pulls; lead enrichment; system handoffs; support triage rules; draft proposals; QBR packs.  

Week 3: delegate with clear decision rights

Redraw roles and decision rights with a concise RACI. Stand up small internal services for common work so teams request help through an intake form with a simple SLA. Ship three templates for high frequency tasks: proposals; QBRs; incident notes. Handoff sequence: shadow; own; run.

Decision speed rule

• Reversible team decisions: under 24 hours

• Cross team decisions: within 72 hours

• Strategic decisions: at exec cadence

Pair delegation with SOPs and examples; delegation without enablement creates rework.  

Week 4: stabilize so the cut sticks

Replace status meetings with dashboards. Run a weekly exception review and a monthly kill or keep audit.

Track four numbers

• Hours removed: target 20 to 35 percent in 30 days for office roles
• Time to decision: reduce median by 30 to 50 percent on type 1 and type 2 decisions
• Open ticket backlog: no net increase after Week 2
• Defects escaped to customers: flat or down across the sprint

If any trend redlines, pause cuts in that area and fix the upstream process. Pilot an agent for triage or data prep where risk is low and logging is strong. Adoption moves quickly; organizational change is what turns pilots into outcomes, so start small, measure saves, and retire experiments that do not move a metric.  

What to cut versus keep

Kill

Reports nobody reads; recurring meetings with no decision; internal status decks; pilots that never reached users; duplicate reviews.

Automate

System handoffs; document assembly; reconciliations; data pulls; meeting notes with follow ups.

Delegate

Approvals under a threshold; standardized outreach; level one support triage.

Zero based thinking keeps you honest: rebuild time and spend from zero based on value, not last quarter’s habits.  

A simple operating metric sheet

• Hours removed: 20 to 35 percent in 30 days for office roles
• Time to decision: 30 to 50 percent faster on reversible and routine cross team calls
• Open ticket backlog: stable or falling after Week 2
• Defects escaped: flat or down across the sprint

If a metric goes red, fix the process rather than adding another meeting.  

One sprint; clear outcomes

Run a 48 hour time and output audit; publish a kill list with a named approver; replace status meetings with a live dashboard. Automate the top ten repetitive steps; redraw decision rights so approvals stop queuing behind two people; lock a cadence so the cut holds. Most teams see senior bandwidth free up, cycle times fall, and defects drop because less context switching means more attention where quality matters. Week 1: baseline and kill list; Week 2: ten automations and three templates plus a lightweight process mining view; Weeks 3 to 4: delegate with SOPs and SLAs; pilot one agent for triage where fit; lock the dashboard and exception review so gains stick.

How Alvren can help

We go beyond strategy. We take a practical, flexible, and custom approach to every engagement; tailored solutions, no off the shelf playbooks. With lean teams and a fast turnaround mindset, we pair high level advisory with hands on execution to help traditional and transformative companies solve complex challenges, design and implement strategies, embrace innovation, and drive measurable impact.

From strategy to execution. We identify, plan, build, transform, scale, and protect with one core team and one integrated process. Whether it is a focused sprint, a strategic launch, or long term support, we operate with the urgency of an internal team and the clarity of an outside partner. Under one roof we bring strategy and business structuring, technology development and innovation, go to market strategy and execution, and growth optimization and value realization.

Built to deliver. We coordinate in house and external specialists, backed by a global network that stays from first workshop to live rollout and beyond, closing the gap between vision and execution.

Next steps

• Book a 30 minute discovery call
• Send your calendar exports, ticket logs, and a sample doc set so we can prepare
• Receive a one page scope, timeline, and a clear go or no go choice within two business days

Sources

• McKinsey on decision speed and wasted decision time. Fewer than half of decisions are timely, and 61 percent say at least half of decision time is ineffective.
• Knowledge at Wharton on the 25-minute meeting.
• Deloitte Global Process Mining Survey.
• Deloitte, State of Generative AI in the Enterprise, 2024 year-end series.
• BCG on zero-based budgeting and zero-based transformation.

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