Discovery case study
A group mapped one business at a time
An investment and advisory group had never had its businesses written down end to end. Rather than one project for the group, each business got its own, so nothing that made them different was averaged away.
- 50
- Stakeholders interviewed
- 7,514
- Findings, every one traceable
- 324
- Discovery goals evidenced, of 361 mapped
- 516
- Documents analysed alongside
01What we found
Ninety per cent of what was mapped came back evidenced
Three hundred and twenty-four of the 361 discovery goals across the group were evidenced by someone who does the work, and 1,317 improvement opportunities were raised against them. Every one traces back to the sentence in an interview that evidenced it, so nothing in the set has to be taken on trust.
The opportunities, ranked by impact against effort, are in the full case study.
02How discovery works
A separate project per business, not one for the group
Stakeholders were interviewed on whichever channel suited them, with 516 documents analysed alongside. Running a project per business is what keeps a finding attached to the business it came from, rather than to an average nobody actually works in.
03What the group holds now
One structure per business, and a ranked set of opportunities against it
Each business has how it works written down and evidenced, and each has its own ranked opportunities. Read across the group they show which problems are local and which are shared — which is the question a group owner is really asking.
04The record
How the project actually ran.
The challenge
An investment and advisory group running several related businesses, where how each one actually worked had never been mapped end to end.
The approach
A separate project per business rather than one for the group, so nothing was averaged across businesses that work differently. Stakeholders were interviewed on whichever channel suited them, with 516 documents analysed alongside.
Outcome
Ninety per cent of the goals mapped across the group were evidenced, and 1,317 improvement opportunities were raised — each one traceable back to the interview that evidenced it.
Signal quality · 7,514 findings
- 1,252
- Corroborated
- 5,633
- Single source
- 629
- Disputed
Disputed findings are usually disagreements about how something is done, not whether it happened.
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Client anonymised at their request. Prepared by 1QLabs. Figures are read from the engagement's own discovery console rather than estimated.