Yagnesh RamalingamThe Decision Latency Audit
A 90-minute working session your team can run without me: pick five recurring questions, time the path from ask to trusted answer, and see where the latency actually lives.
At a glance
- Time
- One 90-minute session
- Who runs it
- The people who ask the five questions, and the people who answer them
- You leave with
- The median wait from a question to an answer someone acted on
- Your slowest question, and any nobody has acted on
- Which numbers have more than one version, and which have no owner
How it works
Read this first. Then fill it in.
Best run with the people who ask the five questions, and the people who answer them.
Most analytics audits start with the stack. This one starts with five questions your leadership already asks every week, and refuses to look at a tool until those paths are timed.
What you actually time
Not query speed. The full path: who asked, who interpreted the ask, which definition they used, which source they pulled, who signed off on the number, and when anyone acted. The last two steps are where most of the weeks hide.
The five questions
- A revenue or pipeline question that recurs weekly.
- A cost or margin question that recurs monthly.
- An operational exception that currently pages a person.
- A forecast input that two functions currently compute separately.
- A question that died: asked once, never resolved, never asked again.
Fill in the template below as a team. For each question, count the days from when it was first asked out loud to when someone acted on an answer, how many versions of the number appeared in between, and whether one named person owns the definition. If nobody has acted on it yet, as with the question that died, mark it not yet acted on and count the days it has been open so far.
Before you run it
What is a decision latency audit?
A 90-minute session where the team times five recurring leadership questions, from the moment each one is asked to the moment someone acts on a trusted answer, and then compares where the time went.
Do we need data access or a tool to run it?
No. You time the path, not the query. The template runs in the browser, nothing is sent or saved, and there is no email gate.
What do we do with the result?
Start with the slowest question. If it has more than one version of the number, write its definition down. If nobody owns the definition, name someone. Fix those before you touch query speed.
The template
Time five questions. Fill it in together.
Everything you type stays in this browser tab. Nothing is sent or saved, so print it or save it as a PDF before you close the page.
Time five questions
If nobody has acted on a question yet, mark it “Not yet” and enter the days it has been open so far. Nothing you type leaves this page. Print or save as PDF when you are done.
Your readout
Fill in the rows above and the readout appears here. Only what you enter is counted.
If every question has been acted on in days your team is comfortable with, each had one version and every number has a named owner, the audit has come back quiet. That is a real result.
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Work with me
Found a number nobody owns? Bring it to a call.
A free 30-minute call with Yagnesh. You'll find out if the problem is the data, the definition or who owns it.