Suede Ops Assessment

Iron law: map the floor, not the org chart.

Every operation has two maps. The leadership map describes how the business is meant to run. The floor map describes how the work actually gets done, including each workaround, each unofficial spreadsheet, and each extra step that exists because something broke once. A system designed from the leadership map gets routed around, because the people doing the work can feel the mismatch on day one.

This skill produces the floor map and the numbers attached to it. It stops before deciding what to build.

The requester's numbers are given

Their hours, costs, volumes, error rates, and history are inputs, not claims to audit. No step here verifies, scores, hedges, or gates on a figure the requester supplied.

What does get audited is anything this skill produces: a benchmark it reached for, an estimate it filled in, a process step it inferred rather than heard. Mark every one of those inline as [assumed] and list them in the Output Contract, so a reader can tell the operation's own numbers from this skill's.

Never substitute an industry average for a number the requester has. Ask for theirs, or record the line as missing.

Before Starting

1. Scope — which processes, departments, or surfaces are in the assessment.
2. Access — what the requester has authorized you to read. Work inside it.
3. Who does the work — names or roles per process, separated into people who perform it and people who manage it.
4. Self-applied or on behalf — a founder assessing their own operation reads Step 5 differently from an outside team assessing a client's.

Read references/interview-guide.md before the first interview.

Step 1 — Interview the floor

Interview at least one person per process who performs it, not only the person who manages it. Where the two descriptions differ, record both and mark the performer's version as the floor map.

Run it as a walkthrough rather than a survey: the question is what happens next, repeated until the process ends. The guide carries the full question bank; these four earn their place in every interview.

• Walk me through this from the beginning, including the steps too small to mention.
• What do you type or copy by hand more than once?
• Where does work sit and wait, and who is it waiting on?
• If volume doubled next quarter, what breaks first?

That last one returns more than the rest combined. People work next to the weakest part of the operation every day and are rarely asked about it.

Count the exceptions rather than describing them. When someone says a path runs "only sometimes", ask how many of the last twenty cases took it. An exception that turns out to be a fifth of the volume is a main path nobody has drawn yet.

Follow up after two days. People remember the forgotten step, the second spreadsheet, and the quarterly exception once the interview has settled.

Gate. Every in-scope process has at least one performer interview. When the requester performs the process themselves, their own walkthrough is the performer interview — record it as such and move on rather than halting for a second person who does not exist.

Halt format. Stop. Name each process covered only by management description. Offer: schedule the performer interview, proceed and mark that process [leadership map only] throughout the blueprint, or drop it from scope. Wait for the choice.

Step 2 — Inventory every silo

A silo is any place operational information lives that other systems cannot see. Catalog all of them: software, spreadsheets, shared drives, inboxes used as databases, and the messaging channels where decisions actually get made.

Record per entry: what it holds, who writes to it, who reads from it, what it overlaps with, and its monthly cost.

Cite a proof path for anything claimed to be live — a last-write timestamp, a seat count, an invoice line, or a recent export. A tool nobody can produce evidence for is recorded unknown, never assumed dead or alive.

Steps with no system behind them are the finding, not a gap in the inventory. A process step that lives only in somebody's memory is tribal knowledge: record it, name the person the operation stalls without, and carry it into the ranking as key-person risk.

Gate. Every step from Step 1 resolves to one of three: an inventory entry, a named tribal-knowledge holder, or manual work that depends on no system at all. Physical and judgment work belongs in the third bucket; recording it as tribal knowledge invents a risk that is not there.

Step 3 — Quantify the friction in their numbers

Attach a figure to each bottleneck, built from three components. Show the inputs beside each result so a reader can check the arithmetic.

Component	Formula
Labor	hours per week × loaded hourly cost × 52
Error	cost per occurrence × occurrences per year
Throughput	work the team could not take on, priced the way the requester prices it

Throughput is the softest of the three, because it prices work that did not happen. Carry it as a separate line rather than folded into the total, and let Step 4 mark its confidence honestly.

Where a figure is missing, write missing: <what would settle it> on that line and carry it to the Output Contract. A bottleneck with no number is still a finding; it ranks below the ones that carry figures.

Quantify the process, never the person. Write "intake re-entry costs $40,000 a year", never "Dana wastes eight hours a week". The same arithmetic becomes a performance review the moment a name is attached to it, which is not what the requester asked for and not what the interviews were given under.

Step 4 — Rank the opportunities

Generating forty opportunities is easy. Knowing which six matter, which three come first, and which ten sound impressive and return little is the deliverable.

Score each opportunity:

• Value — the annual figure from Step 3.
• Complexity — start at 1 for the build itself, then add one point each for: every system touched beyond the first, every write path that changes, every exception branch from Step 1, and every human approval gate that stays. The floor of 1 is what keeps the simplest opportunity from dividing by zero.
• Rank — value divided by complexity, sorted high to low.
• Confidence — measured when the requester supplied the figure from their own records, stated when they supplied it from memory, missing when Step 3 could not fill it.

Report three groups explicitly: what to do first, what is real but later, and what looks impressive and returns little. The third group is the one that earns the assessment its fee, because it is the work nobody would otherwise decline.

Step 5 — Read the engagement signal

How an operation behaves during the assessment predicts whether it will use what gets built. This is an observation reported to the requester, never a reason to withhold or slow the work.

Signal	Observable
Strong	Interviews happen as scheduled; follow-ups answered within one business day; people volunteer pain points unprompted
Weak	Interviews rescheduled more than once; single-sentence answers to walkthrough questions; a request to skip the map and see a demo

Report what was observed and what it predicts. When the assessment is self-applied, read the same signals against the requester's own participation and say so plainly rather than scoring a team that was never involved.

Step 6 — Watch adoption for thirty days

Runs after a system built on this assessment goes live. One metric leads: Adoption Rate, the share of the workflows the system was built to carry that are actually running through it.

The denominator is the built scope, not every workflow Step 1 mapped. Measured against the full map, a system that deliberately covers six of twenty workflows reads as 30% adoption at perfect uptake, which reports a scoping decision as a failure.

Compute it from system logs. Asking people whether they are using something measures willingness to answer, not adoption.

The shadow system is the signal to watch for. Someone quietly keeping the old tracker as insurance is diagnostic information, not disobedience: it means either the training missed them or the system genuinely does not handle their case. Both are cheap to fix in month one and expensive in month four, when the shadow spreadsheet has become the real system again.

When Adoption Rate comes in low, check the assessment before blaming the build. A system designed from a rushed or leadership-only map produces a mismatch the team feels immediately, and Step 1's gate is where that gets prevented.

Halt format. When no logging exists to compute Adoption Rate, stop. Say so in one line. Offer: instrument the workflows first, agree a manual sampling method and its margin, or proceed without the metric and record that in the Output Contract. Wait for the choice.

Output Contract

FLOOR MAP
- process / steps / performer interviewed / [leadership map only] where it applies

EXCEPTIONS
- process / exception path / share of last twenty cases

SILO INVENTORY
- system / holds / writers / readers / overlaps / monthly cost / proof path or unknown

TRIBAL KNOWLEDGE
- step / holder / what stalls without them

FRICTION
- bottleneck / labor / error / annual total / confidence / missing inputs
- throughput, carried separately: work not taken on, priced, confidence

RANKED OPPORTUNITIES
- first / real but later / impressive and low-return, each with value, complexity, rank

ENGAGEMENT SIGNAL
- observed behavior / what it predicts

ADOPTION (when Step 6 has run)
- Adoption Rate / built scope used as the denominator / source of the log
- shadow systems found / cause assigned to training gap or system gap

ASSUMED BY THIS SKILL
- every [assumed] line, so the requester can separate their numbers from ours

OPEN
- unresolved halts, missing figures, and unknown systems

Boundaries

• Report the map and the numbers; do not cancel a tool, change a system, or decide the build. Step 4 ranks opportunities and stops there.
• Never verify, score, or hedge a figure the requester supplied. Audit only what this skill invents, and mark it [assumed].
• Never substitute an industry benchmark for a number the requester has.
• Attach costs to processes, never to named individuals.
• Interview only with the requester's authorization, and record a session only with the participant's agreement in that session.
• Read only the systems access was granted for. An uninventoried system is recorded as unknown rather than reached for.
• Do not carry a prior blueprint, handoff, or inventory forward as current truth when the live system can be read.

Routing

• Need the schema, write paths, automation-versus-agent calls, and build order once the map exists -> use suede-ops-architecture.
• Need what external customers say, need, and resist -> use suede-customer-research.
• Need lead lifecycle, scoring, stage, and CRM routing rules -> use suede-revops.
• Need the measurement layer and dashboards for a shipped product -> use suede-analytics.
• Need a new user reaching first value in a product -> use suede-onboarding.
• Need parallel lanes to run a large assessment across departments -> use suede-agent-teams, then return here for the method.
• From suede-ops-architecture: route a missing or leadership-only floor map back here before the schema is drawn.