North & Form
System Mapping Case Study – 2025
Context
North & Form is a ten-person brand-and-strategy consultancy. In early 2025 they were handling twelve concurrent engagements — double their usual load — and feeling strain in three visible ways:
Partners could not see, at a glance, what stage each engagement had reached.
Junior consultants spent hours chasing updates instead of doing billable work.
Handoffs from strategy to execution slipped; client changes were still appearing the night before presentation.
No project failed, but manual effort was rising unsustainably.
Why They Came to Us
The partners were not looking for new software. They wanted an independent map of how work actually travelled through the firm — so they could decide whether to adjust roles, process, or tooling from a position of evidence.
What We Found
Over the days we interviewed team members, followed three live projects end-to-end, and reviewed every checklist, template, and tracking sheet in use.
Key observations:
Three separate trackers.
Status had to be reconciled every Friday, and partners disagreed on which list was the single source of truth.No formal boundary between Strategy and Delivery.
Execution teams spent roughly six hours per project recreating context the client and senior team had already agreed.Client files stored by consultant, not by project.
New team members lost 20–30 minutes each time they searched for the latest design or feedback round.
The issue was visibility, not effort. Work kept moving, but the system governing it remained undocumented and unseen.
What We Delivered
Project Ledger — a single, lightweight board linked to existing tools; every engagement now has five fixed stages and one owner per stage.
Strategy-to-Delivery Handoff — 15-minute ritual and one-page brief that locks client objectives, files, and next deadlines before production begins.
Shared Asset Library — structured folder template; new files are now named and stored automatically via a rule-based script.
Friction Report — nine specific points of drag, each tied to real hours lost, ranked by ease of removal.
No extra platforms were introduced; the audit relied on consolidating and clarifying what was already in place.
Results
Status-request messages in Slack down 58 %.
Strategy re-explanation time cut from ~6 h to 1 h per project.
Average project margin up 5.2 % (internal finance data).
Junior consultants onboarded to new engagements in two days instead of a week.
All findings published with client consent; quantitative data rounded to protect commercial detail.