It sat for eleven days. Nobody can tell you where.

What happens today

A vendor renewal, a product change, a member escalation. It moves between four people, two committees, and one inbox. Somewhere in there it waits.

When you ask why, you get four accounts that don't reconcile — not because anyone is covering, but because nobody was tracking ownership at the time. Every handoff was verbal or in email. The trail is real but it isn't recorded.

So the process improvement you fund next quarter is aimed at your best guess.

What changes

• Every decision has a named owner and a clock. Both start when the decision enters the queue, not when someone thinks to ask about it.
• Handoffs are recorded, not remembered. Who held it, how long, what they were waiting on, and who they passed it to.
• Aging surfaces before it becomes a complaint. Unowned or overdue decisions appear on your dashboard, by workflow.
• Cycle time becomes diagnosable. Not just “eleven days” — eleven days broken into the four holds that produced it.

What you’d actually see