Operational Leak
What is the operational leak?
The operational leak is the number of working hours per month an organisation absorbs in manual coordination, hand-offs, status-chasing and compensating for human dependency — work that exists only because processes depend on people rather than systems. It is expressed in hours per month and in full-time equivalents (FTE): a leak of ≈1,100 hours/month equals the entire monthly capacity of ≈7 full-time people.
Why measure the leak in hours rather than money?
Because hours are a fact and money is an assumption. The hours come directly from observed behaviour — how many approvals, how long hand-offs take, how much of a day is coordination — while a currency figure depends on loaded rates and overhead choices that vary by company and country. The HDI free screening therefore reports hours and FTE only; the full audit converts the leak into financial terms on cost assumptions agreed explicitly with the client, so the resulting number survives scrutiny in front of a CFO.
What makes up the leak?
Typical components, in rough order of size: manual coordination and approvals (moving work between people), duplicate control (re-checking what a system could verify), assembly work (compiling reports and status by hand from scattered sources), interruption load on experts (the "quick question" tax on the few people who know), and absence compensation (delays and workarounds while a key person is away). The Phase 1 heatmap shows which processes concentrate the leak; the Phase 2 audit decodes why.
Related terms
- Coordination dependency — the largest usual contributor to the leak.
- Bus factor — why absence compensation appears in the leak.