How to run a process audit on your own RTO
The questions we ask in a process audit, written out so you can run the first pass yourself before you speak to anybody — including us.
THE SHORT ANSWER
- A process audit maps each step, times it, and separates clerical work from professional judgement.
- Interview the people who run the process, not the people who designed it.
- Record the process as it actually happens, including the workarounds.
- The output is a timed process map plus an hours-available figure you can take to your board.
What a process audit is actually for
It answers one question: how many hours in this workflow are spent on work that requires human judgement, and how many are spent moving information between places? The second number is your automation opportunity. Everything else — tooling, models, integrations — is downstream of it.
Run it on one process at a time. Validation, enrolment or claim preparation are all good candidates because each has a clear start and end.
- 1Pick one process and name its trigger and finish"Validation of one unit's assessment tool, from the register flagging it as due to the panel signing the report." If you cannot state it in one sentence, the scope is still too wide.
- 2Walk it with the people who do it45 minutes, screen shared, no slides. Ask them to complete a real instance while narrating. You are watching for the steps that never made it into the documented procedure.
- 3Time every step and note the system it touchesRecord minutes, not impressions, and log each system: SMS, LMS, drive, inbox, spreadsheet. Every system boundary is a place where information gets re-keyed.
- 4Mark each step: judgement or clericalJudgement stays with your people. Clerical work — reading, cross-referencing, chasing, reformatting, re-keying — is the automatable pool. Be strict; a step that looks like judgement is often a lookup.
- 5Total the clerical hours and multiplyAnnualise the clerical minutes by frequency and multiply by your loaded hourly cost. That single figure is your business case, and it survives scrutiny because it came from a stopwatch.
The questions that surface the most
Four questions do most of the work in an audit, and they are all worth asking out loud in the room.
WORKED EXAMPLE
"Show me where this information lives." · "What do you do when it's missing?" · "What happens if you skip this step?" · "Who checks this, and what do they actually look at?" In one audit the fourth question revealed that a mapping document had been signed off by three people, none of whom read past page two — which explained a finding at the previous audit better than any policy review had.
What good output looks like
One page per process: a numbered step list with minutes, a systems column, a judgement/clerical split, annual hours, and a short list of quick wins that need no software at all. If your audit doesn't produce a number your CFO recognises, it isn't finished.
Frequently asked questions
A structured walkthrough of one compliance or administrative workflow with the staff who run it, timing each step and separating professional judgement from clerical work. The output is a timed process map and an annual hours-available figure.
One process takes about 45 minutes of staff time plus write-up. A full pass across compliance, student admin, finance and delivery is usually two to three weeks elapsed, most of which is scheduling rather than work.
The people who perform the steps, plus whoever owns the outcome — typically a compliance or quality manager. Avoid an audit conducted only with management: the documented process and the real process are rarely the same.
Yes. The five steps above are the whole method. External help mainly adds pattern recognition from other RTOs and an honest opinion about which steps should be deleted rather than automated.
Prefer we run the first one with you?
We audit one process free, and you keep the map and the business case.