Review the workarounds
A year-end review should ask where people had to create spreadsheets, duplicate records, call another team, or remember a rule that the system did not express.
Ask the team five questions
- Which workflow created the most avoidable delay?
- Which report did people not trust?
- Which customer promise was hardest to keep?
- Which manual step prevented a bigger incident?
- Which improvement would make next year’s work calmer?
Group the answers by workflow, not by department. The same issue may appear in parts, service, dispatch, and finance under different names.
Turn findings into decisions
For each candidate improvement, record the current state, target outcome, owner, dependencies, and a small first test. Separate quick workflow changes from platform or integration work.
Use the review to create a better starting point for 2027—grounded in what happened, not what a vendor promised.
Collect evidence before opinions
Sample tickets, delayed jobs, inventory adjustments, customer complaints, failed integrations, and reports that required manual correction. Compare what the system recorded with what actually happened. Ask frontline users which workaround protects customers and which workaround merely conceals a broken handoff.
Turn each finding into a small decision record: problem, evidence, impact, owner, dependency, target outcome, first test, and stop condition. Separate policy changes from software changes. A clearer status definition or approval rule may solve a problem faster than a new platform, while a repeated cross-system handoff may justify integration discovery.
Start 2027 with a short backlog
Rank improvements by customer or safety impact, frequency, confidence, reversibility, and effort. Choose a few items that can be measured in the first quarter and schedule a review date. Link the work to the Deventee process when you need an external partner, but keep ownership and success measures with the business that will operate the result.
Review the system of work
Look beyond software screens. Include policies, spreadsheets, inboxes, phone calls, approvals, training, and the informal knowledge that keeps work moving. The most important defect may be a missing definition or ownership rule rather than a missing feature.
Rank evidence, not volume
One severe safety or customer failure may matter more than dozens of minor annoyances. Score each finding by impact, frequency, confidence, reversibility, and effort. Keep the evidence attached so the backlog can be revisited without restarting the investigation.
Make the first quarter testable
Choose a small number of improvements with owners and review dates. Define what will be different for the person doing the work and how that difference will be measured. A short, adopted backlog is more useful than a large list that no team can carry.
