Discovery case study
The operating model nobody had written down
A residential developer brought its core functions under one roof in quick succession, then had to run them. Seventeen stakeholders, no workshops and no site visits, and a model the business could finally argue with.
- 17
- Stakeholders interviewed
- 4,329
- Findings, every one traceable
- 176
- Discovery goals evidenced, of 195 mapped
- 476
- Documents analysed alongside
01What we found
The handover between buying a site and building on it was not a handover
Development managers inherited concept plans and headline pricing without the underwriting assumptions behind them, so the case a site was bought on was re-derived rather than carried forward. It was the sharpest of several gaps that open whenever a function moves in-house faster than the process around it.
The rest of the gaps, and what each one costs, are in the full case study.
02How discovery works
No workshops, no site visits, no calendar to clear
Seventeen stakeholders across the in-housed functions were interviewed on their own time and their own channel, with 476 documents uploaded or generated for analysis alongside. Nobody had to stop delivering in order to be discovered.
03What the business holds now
A mapped operating model, and a ranked set of proposals against it
A business that had never had its operating model written down now has one, together with solution proposals ranked by impact against effort. Leadership was briefed from the live discovery console rather than from a deck written about it afterwards.
04The record
How the project actually ran.
The challenge
A residential developer moving from an outsourced, project-by-project model to an in-housed operating model, having brought its core functions under one roof in quick succession. Nobody had written down how the new shape was meant to work.
The approach
No workshops and no site visits. Seventeen stakeholders across the in-housed functions, with 476 documents uploaded or generated for analysis alongside the interviews.
Outcome
A mapped operating model for a business that had never had one written down, and a ranked set of solution proposals against it. Leadership was briefed from the live discovery console.
Key findings
- No structured handover between acquisitions and development: development managers inherited concept plans and headline pricing without the underwriting assumptions behind them.
Signal quality · 4,329 findings
- 928
- Corroborated
- 3,122
- Single source
- 279
- Disputed
Disputed findings are usually disagreements about how something is done, not whether it happened.
Your organisation could be next.
See what Agentic Discovery uncovers in your processes, your teams and your operations.
Client anonymised at their request. Prepared by 1QLabs. Figures are read from the engagement's own discovery console rather than estimated.