# Redesign Work and Workflow

Status: draft · v0.1.0 · Operating System
draft reference — not a fitted standard

Redesign how work moves before adding capacity, automation, or organizational complexity.

## Purpose
Create a controlled future-state workflow that improves an explicit operating outcome while preserving necessary quality, safety, regulatory, and human guardrails.

## Steps
1. Frame the outcome and design criteria — Make the reason for redesign and the conditions of a good solution explicit.
2. Map the current flow — Make actual work, decisions, waits, interfaces, data, systems, and exceptions inspectable.
3. Diagnose constraints and causes — Find where the mechanism fails instead of treating every visible symptom as the problem.
4. Design and compare future states — Generate coherent alternatives before committing to a favored tool or structure.
5. Validate and authorize the design — Test the mechanism at proportionate scale before irreversible implementation.
6. Transition, measure, and improve — Put the workflow into operation without losing control of the old-to-new passage.

## Connections
- upstream: Approve Workforce Need and Headcount (/processes/approve-workforce-need) — trigger: The approved response includes redesigning, reallocating, stopping, or automating work.
- downstream: Approve Workforce Need and Headcount (/processes/approve-workforce-need) — trigger: Redesign changes the need or leaves a material workforce gap.
- downstream: Implement a Business System (/processes/implement-business-system) — trigger: The approved workflow requires system configuration, integration, or automation.
- downstream: Operate and Improve a Process (/processes/operate-and-improve-process) — trigger: The redesigned workflow meets stabilization criteria.

## Measures
- Operating outcome: The context-specific outcome measure, compared with its baseline and interpreted with other influences made explicit.
- First-pass quality: Items accepted at the defined exit gate without rework divided by all items reaching the gate.
- End-to-end cycle time: Elapsed time from defined trigger to accepted exit, with work and wait time separable where feasible.
- Workflow adoption: Eligible work following the controlled workflow version divided by all eligible work.
- Exception demand: Exception events by type, cause, step, and disposition per unit of demand.
- Human and operating risk guardrail: Context-specific review of workload, overtime, safety, quality, privacy, accessibility, customer complaints, and control failures.