An operations team can spend a full day answering requests and still have little time for the work it planned. A status question leads to a lookup. A missing approval prompts another message. Someone needs a report that was assembled for a different person last week.
Responding is part of the job. When the same requests keep returning, it is worth looking at how they arrive and what answering them requires.
Look for repetition
Collect examples over a normal working week. Group requests by the information or decision they need, rather than by who sent them.
Some may be questions that an existing system could answer. Others may involve an unclear responsibility, an approval that is difficult to track, or information people cannot find.
Ask the team which requests interrupt concentrated work and which can be handled together. Frequency alone will not tell you their cost.
In an $80M professional-services example, an operations lead was handling roughly forty ad-hoc requests a week that could have followed a standing process. The interruptions and switching cost consumed much of a senior salary and pushed planning into the evenings. The number of requests was only part of the problem; their effect on the rest of the day mattered too.
Find out why people keep asking
A missing process is one possibility. An existing process may also be difficult to use, poorly explained, or out of date.
Talk with the people sending the requests as well as those answering them. A new form will not help much if it asks for information the requester does not have or sends the work to the wrong person.
Improve one recurring request
Choose a request with enough volume or consequence to justify attention. Agree on where it should enter, what information is needed, who handles it, and how the requester can see its status.
The change might be a clearer responsibility, a shared record, an integration, or a small internal tool. Automation can help once the process and the exceptions are understood.
Check whether the team's day improves
Measure more than the speed of the first reply. Look at how often the request is resolved, whether it returns, and how much effort the team spends handling it.
The useful outcome is time the team can put toward other work, with the request still handled well.
If recurring requests are taking over your team's week, talk it through with Ron. We can help identify where a process or system change would be useful.
Ron Davis
Founder
Three decades building enterprise platforms. Started Joust to close the gap between strategy decks and the work they're supposed to change.