How a review runs

Nothing is sent in advance except one sentence from you: which routine worries you. No questionnaire, no folder of figures, no pre-reading.

The visit is then fixed for a morning when that routine actually happens. Cashing up is watched on a Friday, because Friday is the day it goes wrong. A delivery routine is watched on a delivery day.

You tell the person who runs it that someone is coming to write it down. Nobody is told it is an inspection, because it is not one.

The routine is watched once, start to finish, from a spot out of the way. Nobody is asked to demonstrate it. A demonstration is tidy and the real thing is not.

Notes go down in the order things happen, with a time against each step. The times matter at the drafting stage: a step that takes eleven minutes and a step that takes forty seconds cannot share a line on the sheet.

Interruptions are written down too. A routine that stops twice for the phone is a routine with two exceptions in it.

Three questions are asked, in this order, at each step of the routine.

• When does this step start? That answer becomes the trigger line.
• Who does it when you are not here? That answer becomes the holder line.
• What have you seen go wrong here? That answer becomes the exception line.

The third question is the one that earns the week. Owners rarely volunteer an exception, because to them it is just a thing that happens sometimes. The person doing the step always has an answer ready.

Each routine becomes one sheet: heading line, trigger, numbered steps, exception, holder, signature block. The specimen sheet shows every line with its purpose.

A sheet that will not fit on one side of A4 is two routines wearing one name, and it gets split. The split is noted so you can see what was done and why.

The word DRAFT sits on the heading line of everything written this week. It stays there until you sign the sheet, so a half-finished sheet pinned to a wall cannot be mistaken for the agreed one.

On the last morning you read the sheet out loud while the person who runs the routine listens. Corrections arrive in the first minute, and they are usually about words rather than steps.

Their wording wins. If they say the cage and the sheet says the stock trolley, the sheet is changed on the spot, in front of them, and read again.

A sheet nobody objects to is read once more slowly. Silence on a first reading usually means the step was skipped, not that it was right.

You are handed a file. One sheet per routine, a single-page list naming who holds each sheet, and a short note of the routines that still have no sheet.

Two formats, both yours: a print-ready page per sheet for pinning where the work happens, and the same text in an editable document so you can change it next year without asking anyone.

Nothing carries on afterwards. If you want the file revisited when staff change, that is written into the engagement at the start, not assumed at the end.

The test of the file is not whether it reads well. It is whether a second person can run the routine from it on a day you are not there.