What weak operational foundations cost professional services firms over time

In a previous article, I explored how to recognize when your operations have done their job in getting the company to where it is today, but are no longer fit for the level of complexity the business is now carrying.

 You may recognize those signs: recurring issues, slower decisions, teams working around friction. The harder question is: so what? Why change, when so many change initiatives fail?

 Most leaders have seen systems implemented but not adopted, automations that add complexity rather than remove it, and transformation efforts that consume time, money, and goodwill without delivering lasting impact. Change is hard. It is disruptive. And it is expensive.

 It can feel easier to live with the limitations you know than to risk replacing them with something that may or may not improve the situation. But for established professional services firms operating in increasingly complex environments, inaction is not neutral.

 Weak operational foundations carry costs; not always immediately visible, but cumulative over time. Below are some of the ways those costs tend to show up when they remain unaddressed.

Leadership fatigue and slower decisions

When decision rights are unclear, decisions tend to travel upwards by default. Over time, issues that should not require senior involvement increasingly land with senior leaders, not because they are strategic, but because it is not clear who has the authority to decide.

In some cases, more than one leader is asked for input on the same issue, resulting in conflicting decisions and the need for further alignment. In others, decisions stall while context is gathered, revisited, and re-explained. Either way, progress slows and uncertainty increases.

 Because senior leaders are often removed from the day-to-day detail, making these decisions requires additional effort. Time is spent reconstructing circumstances, dependencies, and potential consequences, or decisions are made based on assumptions that carry their own risks.

Over time, this shifts leadership attention away from steering the business toward resolving operational noise. Leaders remain busy, but their impact is diluted, and decision-making becomes unnecessarily time-consuming.

 The cost of this is reduced leadership leverage and diminished strategic bandwidth.

Hidden people costs and reduced capacity for change

As decisions slow and friction increases elsewhere, teams absorb the impact by keeping things running. Manual workarounds multiply, coordination effort grows, and energy is spent compensating for gaps rather than progressing the work itself. Even highly engaged teams feel the strain over time.

 Initially, this shows up as fatigue rather than failure. People stop volunteering for additional initiatives, postpone improvements, or disengage quietly. In some cases, they leave altogether. When that happens, the organisation loses not only a team member, but also accumulated context, relationships, and operational knowledge that is difficult to replace.

At the same time, the organisation’s capacity for change diminishes. When most effort is consumed by maintaining day-to-day operations, there is little mental or emotional space left to absorb new ways of working. Improvements may be introduced, but they struggle to take hold.

 Layering multiple changes at once (systems, structures, roles, products) compounds this effect. What results is not resistance, but overload.

 The cost of this is burned discretionary effort and reduced adaptability.

Hidden system and subscription costs

As operational issues accumulate, organisations often respond by adding tools or platforms to address specific problems. New software is introduced without fully reassessing whether existing systems could already support the requirement, particularly as platforms evolve and expand their capabilities over time.

 In parallel, workarounds emerge where systems have genuine limitations. Processes are stretched, duplicated, or broken into multiple manual steps to compensate. While these adaptations keep work moving, they introduce fragility and often depend on a small number of people who understand how everything fits together.

 Access and subscription management adds another layer. As roles evolve and responsibilities shift, access requirements change. When this is not reviewed regularly, organisations pay for tools that are underused, misused, or unnecessarily duplicated, while also increasing complexity and exposure.

 Individually, these costs can seem modest. Taken together, they create financial leakage and ongoing cognitive overhead that quietly tax the organisation.

 The cost of this is sustained financial leakage and increased cognitive load.

Fragmented and possible contradicting Data

As organisations add systems and workarounds over time, data is stored in more places and in different formats. When those systems are not well connected, the same information can exist in multiple versions, leaving teams and leaders unsure which data is current or reliable.

 This does more than slow reporting. Over time, confidence in the data itself erodes. Questions that should be straightforward require validation, reconciliation, or manual interpretation before they can be answered. What begins as a search for clarity often results in additional processes, shadow reporting, or personal spreadsheets to compensate.

 As a result, leaders spend increasing amounts of time verifying information rather than using it. Decisions are delayed, revisited, or made cautiously, not because of a lack of judgement, but because the underlying information cannot be trusted with confidence.

 When data becomes something to be worked around rather than relied upon, the organisation loses a critical decision-making anchor.

 The cost of this is reduced decision confidence and increased risk exposure.

Erosion of ownership and accountability

When operational foundations are weak, ownership rarely disappears outright. Instead, it becomes diffuse. Responsibilities shift depending on urgency, workload, or who happens to be available, rather than being anchored in clearly accountable roles.

 This shows up in subtle ways. Issues are discussed and actions agreed, but follow-through is inconsistent. Decisions are revisited not because circumstances have changed, but because it is unclear who holds end-to-end responsibility. Escalations occur not due to strategic importance, but because accountability is ambiguous.

 In response, capable individuals step in to keep things moving. They bridge gaps, carry context, and absorb responsibility beyond their formal role. While this sustains progress in the short term, it concentrates knowledge and decision-making in a few people, increasing dependency and fragility.

 Over time, ambiguity becomes normalised. Progress relies more on personal effort and informal networks than on clear ownership and structure, a pattern that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse as complexity grows.

 The cost of this is reduced organizational reliability and resilience.

Implications

Taken individually, each of these costs can appear manageable. Decisions take a little longer. Teams stay busy. Systems feel messy but workable. Data is imperfect, yet “good enough.” Ownership exists, just not always clearly.

 Taken together, they point to something more structural.

 As operational foundations weaken, the organisation increasingly relies on effort rather than structure to function. Leaders compensate by staying closer to detail. Teams compensate by working around friction. Individuals compensate by carrying knowledge and responsibility that should sit in systems and roles.

 Over time, this reduces the organisation’s margin for error. Decisions become harder to make with confidence. Change becomes more difficult to absorb. Dependencies multiply quietly, often unnoticed until someone leaves, a system fails, or external expectations shift.

 This is also where risk accumulates. Fragmented data, unclear ownership, and outdated access arrangements create exposure, not through neglect, but through gradual drift. Cyber security and data protection issues rarely announce themselves early. They emerge where visibility and accountability are weakest.

 The business may continue to perform. But it does so by leaning ever more heavily on people, judgement, and goodwill, a fragile way to sustain complexity over time.

Reflection

Weak operational foundations rarely cause immediate failure. More often, they create a gradual erosion of resilience.

 What makes them difficult to address is that the organisation continues to function. Clients are served. Work gets done. Results are delivered. But beneath the surface, more effort is required to achieve the same outcomes, and more risk is absorbed informally rather than managed deliberately.

The question, then, is not whether the organisation is efficient enough, or whether individual costs are visible. It is whether the way the business operates is still sustainable for the level of complexity it is carrying today.

 Operations are not just infrastructure. They shape how decisions are made, how responsibility is held, how information flows, and how change is absorbed. When they are clear and aligned, they create capacity and confidence. When they are not, they quietly tax leadership, teams, and the system as a whole.

 Addressing this is less about optimisation and more about restoring alignment, between structure, ownership, and the reality of how the organisation now works.