You just got hired to run operations. Or you just inherited a team that runs on tribal knowledge and muscle memory — where 'the process' is whatever the most experienced person remembers doing last time. Either way, the clock is already running and you need visible wins fast, without breaking what's working.
Don't try to document everything. That approach delays learning and kills goodwill before you've earned it. In the first 30 days, focus on exactly one high-risk process with recurring volume. One. The rest can wait.
Pick something where delays are already visible — to customers, to auditors, or to leadership. That visibility creates urgency and makes adoption easier. Nobody argues about fixing something that's visibly broken.
The four-week sequence: Week 1 maps failure points and handoffs. Week 2 turns that into a working template, even if it's rough. Week 3 adds ownership and approval gates. Week 4 reviews cycle time and bottleneck data — and makes one decision about what to change.
Keep the first version of the template small. Intentionally. A template that gets used every day, even an imperfect one, beats a comprehensive template that sits untouched. You can iterate. You can't fix adoption retroactively.
At day 30, compare cycle time, handoff delays, and completion rate by owner. Those three numbers usually tell you where to expand next — and they give you a defensible story for why it's worth doing again.