Three procurements had died at the same question: what is your process? Moreton Fiduciary could not answer it. The answer was sitting in a stack of newspapers, a fire safe, and four people’s heads.
Bernie Falzon got in at ten past seven, which was earlier than he needed to, and made the tea before he touched the papers. There were four of them, folded and stacked on the corner of his desk where the cleaner knew not to move them. He sat down, uncapped a yellow highlighter, and started on the death notices.
Lee had asked to watch this and Bernie had said, without any edge to it, that there wasn’t much to watch.
He read fast. Not skimming, exactly, but running down the columns the way a person reads a list of their own street. Every so often the highlighter came down and left a name in a band of yellow. He did the four papers in about twenty minutes, then went back through the marked ones with a pen and wrote a reference number in the margin beside each.
“That one,” he said, tapping a name. “She’s ours. Made a will with us in 2011, changed it in 2019 when her husband died. Her daughter’ll ring us Thursday or Friday, once she’s got through the funeral home.”
“How do you know she’s yours?”
“Because I know.” He said it without any weight, then heard himself and shrugged. “Twenty-two years. There’s about four thousand wills in the safe and I couldn’t tell you most of them, but I can tell you the ones that are going to come up. You get a feel for it.”
Lee wrote one line in his notebook: the first event in the whole system is a man reading the paper.
The question that killed three procurements
Adele Prosser’s office was on the first floor, above a dry cleaner and a business that seemed to be either a mortgage broker or a travel agent depending on which of its two signs you believed. There had not been a Moreton in the building since 1994; she had arrived as an articled clerk at twenty-four and bought out the last founding partner in 2016. She had spent, by her own accounting, the better part of two years trying to buy a case-management system.
“Three goes,” she said. “Three different vendors. All of them got to the same place and stopped.”
“Which place?”
“They send you a document. It’s called a requirements questionnaire, or a discovery pack, or a fit-gap workbook, and it always has the same question in it somewhere on the second or third page.” She pulled a folder off the shelf behind her and read from it without needing to look for the line. “Please describe your current end-to-end process, including all decision points and handoffs.”
“And?”
“And we can’t.” She put the folder down. “That’s it. That’s the whole problem. I have sixty-one people who do this work every day and not one of them can tell you what the process is, because there isn’t one process, there’s about a dozen, and they’re all tangled up in each other, and half of what happens depends on how fast someone else’s organisation moves. I’ve had four people try to write it down. The last attempt is on the wiki. It’s got a diagram in it.”
“Is the diagram right?”
“It was right in 2021.” She smiled, briefly and without much warmth. “That’s not fair. It was right for about six weeks in 2021, for one kind of estate, if nothing went wrong.”
Lee had heard a version of this in a lot of buildings, and the version he usually heard was a complaint about the vendors. This wasn’t that. Adele was not annoyed at the software companies. She was annoyed at herself, which was more useful and considerably rarer.
“What did you tell them?” he asked. “The vendors.”
“The first one, I made something up. I had someone draw a flowchart over a weekend and we sent it. They quoted off it and the quote was nonsense, because the flowchart was nonsense, and we found that out four months in.” She stopped. “The second and third, I told the truth, which is that we didn’t know. They both said they’d help us find out. Neither of them did. They wanted to sell us a system, and finding out what we actually do is not a thing you can sell.”
What a firm like this actually does
Moreton administers deceased estates. Somebody dies; the firm holds their will, or is named in it; and from that moment until the money reaches the beneficiaries there is a long sequence of things that must happen in an order the firm does not entirely control.
It has to establish that the death happened, which means a certificate, which means buying one from Births, Deaths and Marriages through a web shop that has no purchasing interface a computer could use, so a person sits and buys it like anyone buying a jumper.
It has to get authority to act, which means applying to the court for a grant of probate. The court either issues the grant or comes back with a requisition: a query, sometimes trivial, sometimes not, that has to be answered before anything at all moves.
Only then can it collect the assets. That means writing to banks, to share registries, to land titles, to superannuation funds, each of which has its own forms, its own timeframes, and its own opinion about what constitutes proof. Then debts, then tax, then distribution, then the file closes.
The thing that surprised Lee, when Bernie walked him through a live file, was how little of it was work.
“That’s four days of actual doing,” Bernie said, “spread over about fourteen months. The rest is waiting. Waiting on the court. Waiting on the bank. Waiting on a beneficiary in Manchester to sign something and post it back.”
“So what do you do all day?”
“Chase.” There was no complaint in it at all. “I chase. That’s the job. I’ve got a spreadsheet of who I’m waiting on and I work down it.”
Frozen
The number came out on the second day and it stopped the conversation.
Lee had asked how many estates were open. Adele said about eleven hundred. He asked how many of those were waiting on the grant, and she said she’d have to check, which she did, and the answer was four hundred and thirty.
Four hundred and thirty estates in which nothing could legally happen. Not slow, not backlogged: frozen, by law, until a court said otherwise. Some of them had been sitting for five months. Every one of them had a family somewhere on the other end wondering why the firm they were paying had gone quiet.
“You cannot touch a dead person’s money until a court says you can,” Adele said. “Everyone in this building knows that. It’s the first thing you learn. But I’ve never once seen the number.”
“Nobody’s ever counted them?”
“Nobody’s ever needed to. Each officer knows their own. Bernie knows his forty. Nobody’s ever put all of them on one page.”
Lee thought about the wiki with its six-weeks-in-2021 diagram, and about a vendor asking for the end-to-end process, and about a man with a highlighter who was, functionally, the trigger for every one of those eleven hundred files.
“Right,” he said. “We’re going to need a bigger wall.”
Two weeks
The engagement he proposed was two weeks of event storming, and Adele’s first reaction was that it sounded like a lot of everybody’s time for a lot of coloured paper.
“It is,” Lee said. “That’s what it costs. Ten days, and I want your officers in the room, not their managers, and I want Bernie in it for all of it.”
“He’ll hate that.”
“He’ll hate the first morning.”
The room they used had been a boardroom and had stopped being one when the firm shrank its board. It had a wall that ran nearly seven metres, and by the end of the first day that wall had orange cards on it in a rough line, each one a thing that had happened, past tense, in the life of an estate. Death notice spotted. Will located. Death certificate ordered. Probate application lodged. Requisition received.
Bernie hated the first morning. By the second morning he had stopped waiting to be asked and was writing cards himself, and by the afternoon he was arguing about the order of two of them with an officer half his age, and Lee left them to it, because that argument was what the cards were for and had never been possible before, there having been nowhere to have it.
The second week zoomed in on the places where the first week’s wall had gone loud: the grant, the release threshold at the banks, the moment an estate came back from the court with a requisition and quietly went to the back of somebody’s queue.
Priya Raman, who managed the office and had inherited the wiki from three people who had each given up on it, stood in front of the wall on the last afternoon with her arms folded.
“This is the thing I’ve been trying to write for four years,” she said.
“It is.”
“It’s four metres wide.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t put four metres on a wiki page.”
Lee had been waiting for someone in the building to say that out loud, and it was better that it came from her than from him.
The page in the drawer
He wrote the invoice on the Sunday and, as he had done on the day of every invoice for thirty years, he wrote one page by hand to go with it. Not for the client. The page never goes to the client.
What they said was wrong: we can’t describe our process to a vendor.
What was actually wrong: nobody has ever held the whole shape at once, so every attempt to write it down has been one person’s slice, and slices go stale.
What he did: put it all on one wall in front of the people who do it.
What it cost, and what he’d do differently, and then the page went into the drawer in the shed, on top of the others, under the wax for a board he kept meaning to wax.
The wall was still up in the old boardroom. It would not survive the month; walls never do. Photographs of a wall are not a wall, and Lee had a fortnight’s worth of the most valuable thing this firm had ever produced about itself stuck to a surface that someone would eventually need for something else.
That was the problem he took home with him.
One Table, One Row Per Card