Operations Assessment Questions: 25 Questions to Find Where You Lose Time and Money

These operations assessment questions are a starting point for any owner who wants to see where the business loses time and money. Ask them to the people who do the work, not only to managers, and write the answers down. Patterns show up quickly.

Demand and new business

1. How quickly do we respond to a new inquiry, during and outside business hours?
2. How many times do we follow up before we stop?
3. What share of inquiries become a meeting, a quote or a booking?
4. Do we know which marketing channels bring customers, not just leads?

Intake and onboarding

1. How does a new order, client or job enter our systems?
2. How often is information retyped from one place to another?
3. What information is usually missing at the start, and how long does it take to get it?

Delivery and service

1. Where does work wait the longest between steps?
2. Which decisions wait for one specific person?
3. How do customers find out the status of their order, case or project?
4. What are the most common mistakes, and what does each one cost to fix?

Billing and cash

1. How long from finished work to invoice sent?
2. How are overdue invoices followed up, and by whom?
3. How much time goes into reconciling payments?

People and capacity

1. If volume doubled next month, where would we break first?
2. Which tasks would the team most like to stop doing by hand?
3. What happens when a key person is out for a week?

Systems and data

1. How many tools does a typical task touch?
2. Where do we keep data in spreadsheets because the system cannot do it?
3. Can we get our key numbers without building a report by hand?

Management and growth

1. Which numbers do we review every week?
2. What decisions does the owner make that could follow written rules?
3. If we freed ten hours a week per person, what would they do with it?
4. Which customers have stopped buying, and does anyone follow up?
5. What one process, if fixed, would make the biggest difference this year?

How to use the answers

• Look for repeats. The same delay mentioned by three people is a real bottleneck.
• Put numbers on the top five. Hours per week, errors per month and revenue at risk.
• Pick one to fix first, with a metric, a baseline and an owner.

Where a diagnosis helps

The questions are easy to ask and harder to act on. Answers are often vague, and people describe how work should go rather than how it does. An AI Diagnostic uses these questions as a starting point, checks the answers against the data in your systems, sizes the cost of each leak and ranks what to fix.