Things That Shouldn't Take That Long
A consultancy sent through a quote last year. The work was scoped, the pricing was tiered, the resourcing plan was professional, and the timeline was ten weeks. I read it twice, and the second time I noticed how much of it was coordination: workshops, check-ins, sign-off rounds.
Out of curiosity, I sat down with Claude that afternoon to see how far I could get on the core of it. In about six hours I had a rough working version of most of the main pieces.
That's not a knock on the consultancy. A rough version isn't a finished one, and they were pricing in things I skipped: polish, handover, someone to call when it breaks. But it made me look hard at where the ten weeks were going. Most of it wasn't the building. It was the organisation around the building.
The thing around the thing
I keep running into this. It's the thread through most of what I end up writing about. Process automation, partner enablement, low-code, AI tools: they all come back to the same observation. A lot of work that takes weeks could take days, if the people doing it were allowed to skip some of the choreography.
One example from my own past. At a state water utility I built a board meeting management system, about two months of part-time work. It saved over two hundred hours a month. But building it wasn't the hard part. The hard part was getting the organisation to stop running the manual version long enough to trust the new one.
I don't think this is unique to me, or to enablement, or to Nintex, or to any industry. It's the texture of modern work. We've added so many layers of coordination that, in a lot of places, the coordination now outweighs the delivery. The thing itself is small. The thing around the thing is big.
Where AI fits
People keep asking whether AI will replace developers, designers, analysts and consultants. I think that's the less interesting question.
The shift I notice is that AI makes it cheap to try something before the meetings about it. You can build a rough version, put it in front of people, and have a much shorter conversation about something real. It doesn't remove the need for judgement or for the people who'd have to live with it. It just shrinks the distance between "should we?" and "here's what it looks like."
So when I say I'm interested in things that shouldn't take that long but do, I don't really mean the work itself. I mean how we've organised it: the assumed cadences, the implicit sign-offs, the reluctance to just build the thing and see if it works.
The best people I've worked with share one habit. When something feels like it's taking too long, they ask why, out loud, even when the answer is awkward. I'm still working on doing that more myself.
This blog is mostly a record of those questions, and what happened when I asked them.