The Story

Requests reached the team through whatever channel each market happened to prefer — an email, a chat message, a mention at the end of a call. Individually each one was reasonable. Collectively they meant there was no shared record of what had been asked for, what had been agreed, or what had quietly been promised by someone in a meeting three weeks earlier. The obvious answer is a process, and the obvious answer is also the reason these things usually fail. Markets were protective of their own priorities and reasonably sceptical that a central intake route would serve them. From where they sat, it looked like a mechanism for being told no more slowly and more formally. What changed that was making the queue visible before making the process mandatory. One route covering data, analytics and digital requests, with status you could follow from submission through to delivery. Once people could see where their request sat relative to everything else, the process stopped looking like a gate and started looking like an answer to a question they had always had. The result was a single maintained view of regional demand and, more importantly, prioritisation decisions people trusted because they could trace them. The cost was a genuine extra step for requesters. The lesson I took is that visibility earns the compliance a mandate never quite does.

These are the problems I find worth the effort: unglamorous, constrained, and consequential. If you have one like it, I would like to hear about it.

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