The Low-Value Work Audit Nobody Runs

Every mid-market operation I've ever walked into has a number for software. A number for the people on payroll. A number for travel, for facilities, for the vendor nobody remembers hiring. What it almost never has is a number for the most expensive thing in the building, which is senior judgment spent on work that never needed it.

Here's the thing. Nobody's hiding this on purpose. It just doesn't live anywhere. There's no invoice for a procurement lead reading the same lengthy SOW for the third time. There's no line item for a director reformatting a spreadsheet an intern could have built. It's spread across calendars, buried inside jobs everyone's proud of, disguised as "that's just the work."

Let me give you a real one. Early in my career, certain purchases needed a sourcing justification form. You filled it out by hand, uploaded it, routed it for approval, all to prove you'd actually negotiated and competitively bid what you were buying. Good control, on paper. In practice, it ate hours out of the week of the one person who'd already done the hard part, the actual negotiating, and now had to prove it in triplicate. That form is the whole problem, in miniature. Multiply it by every senior person in your building doing their own version of it, and you start to see the real size of this.

Why nobody runs the audit

Think about who'd actually own this. Finance can't see it, there's nothing to invoice. IT can't see it, the work happens in someone's head, not in a system. And the people doing it rarely complain, because to them, this is the job. They were hired for judgment, and somewhere along the way that judgment got buried under the cross checking, the reconciling, the chasing people down for signatures.

So the most expensive inefficiency in your operation is the one with no owner, no dashboard, and nobody in the room arguing for it. It just sits there and compounds.

When I was running a $400M+ indirect spend program at a leading semiconductor manufacturer, with a contingent workforce north of 10,000 people, the pattern never changed. My most experienced specialists were losing valuable time to work that didn't need their experience. Not because they were slow. Because nobody had stopped long enough to redesign the work around what they were actually good at.

A team of senior people losing time to low-value work isn't a footnote in a performance review. It's lost time and money, sitting in plain sight. You just have to be willing to count it.

How to actually run it

You don't need a consulting army or a six month engagement. You need two weeks and the discipline to look. Here's the version I'd run first, starting Monday:

1. Pick one high judgment role, the one you already suspect is worst.
2. Have that person tag two weeks of their own work into two buckets: "only I can do this" and "someone, or something, else could do this." No tools, no science. Just honest tagging.
3. Take everything in the second bucket and write down how it actually runs, the trigger, the steps, the systems it touches, the decision behind it. This is the part everyone skips. It's also the part that matters.
4. Multiply the hours in that bucket by loaded cost. That number is your ceiling.
5. Rank what you found by value, effort, and risk, and decide what gets redesigned first, and just as important, what you deliberately leave alone because judgment belongs there.

That's it. What comes out the other end isn't a wish list. It's a number you can defend in a board meeting, and a short, ranked plan for getting it back.

The part nobody wants to hear

This audit is unglamorous. There's no demo, no dashboard, no ribbon cutting. That's exactly why nobody runs it, and exactly why the money is still sitting on the table.

You can't automate, redesign, or hand off work you've never measured. So start by counting what your best people shouldn't be doing anymore. The number will be bigger than you expect, and the fix was never cutting people. It's giving those people their judgment back.

What are the things that only YOU can do? Start there, then build the audit around everyone else's answer to that same question.

Paula Taylor is CEO & Founder of AI Edge Strategy. She spent 25+ years in enterprise operations, including as Global Director of Indirect Procurement at a leading semiconductor manufacturer, where she managed $400M+ in indirect spend and a 10,000-contractor contingent workforce program.