The document that finally made me measure this was a market entry plan for a client expanding into the Gulf. Thirty-one pages. Solid work, done by two of our best people.
It went through nine rounds.
Round nine changed the order of two sections and softened a recommendation that round three had specifically asked us to sharpen. Between the first draft and the signature, six weeks passed, and I could not point to a single decision the client would have made differently because of rounds four through nine. What I could point to was the invoice, which was unchanged, and the senior hours consumed, which were not.
The Efficiency Problem Was Not Where I Assumed
My first theory was that our drafts were not good enough. That is the flattering theory, because it means the fix is craft and craft is something you can work on.
So we tracked it properly. Every deliverable, every round, who commented, what changed, and how many days each round consumed. Ninety-odd deliverables over roughly a year. The pattern that came out of it was uncomfortable and quite specific.
Rounds one and two changed substance. Numbers were challenged, assumptions were corrected, scope was clarified. That is review working exactly as intended.
From round three onward, two-thirds of all comments came from someone who had not commented on the previous version. A regional director looped in late. A finance lead who wanted the pricing section reframed. Somebody's colleague. Each new reader was reviewing the document for the first time while the document itself was on its fifth version, so they reopened questions that had been settled two rounds earlier and had no way of knowing they were settled.
A printed consulting deliverable covered in review comments after several revision rounds. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.
We were not producing weak first drafts. We were producing perfectly good drafts into a review process with no defined membership, and then absorbing the cost of that as unbilled senior time.
The Cost, In Numbers I Did Not Enjoy Seeing
Averaged across the year:
- 5.8 revision rounds per major deliverable.
- 19 days from first draft to sign-off, of which roughly 11 were waiting rather than working.
- Around 7.5 hours of senior time per deliverable spent on rounds three and beyond.
- An average of 2.4 new commenters appearing after round two, each arriving with no memory of what had already been decided.
That last figure is the one that stings. Across the year it came to just over 300 hours of the most expensive time in the firm, or roughly $42,000 of capacity at what we would have charged for it, spent almost entirely on re-litigating decisions rather than making them.
None of it appeared anywhere in our financials as a problem. Revenue was fine. Margin was slightly thin and we blamed pricing, which is what everyone blames.
What We Changed in the Engagement, Not the Document
The fix had four parts and all of them happen before a single page is written.
- One named approver, written into the scope of work. Not a committee. A person, by name, who owns sign-off. Other people may contribute comments, and those comments route through the approver, who resolves conflicts on their side rather than forwarding them all to us as equal instructions. This alone did most of the work.
- A named review group, fixed at kickoff. Anyone not on that list at the start does not get added at round four. If a regional director genuinely needs to see it, they see the first draft with everyone else.
- Two included rounds, a third priced. Stated plainly at proposal stage, never used as a penalty. Clients have been fine with it. What it really does is signal that review is a resource with a cost, which changes how carefully round one is done.
- A fifteen-minute live walkthrough before any written comments. We talk the approver through the logic before they read it alone. Roughly half the comments we used to receive were people misreading intent, and a short conversation prevents an entire round of written correction.
The second and third items look like commercial protection. They are really about decision rights. Frameworks like the RACI model exist because most delivery delays are not caused by hard problems; they are caused by nobody having agreed on who decides, and consulting deliverables are close to a worst case for this because every stakeholder feels qualified to have an opinion on a document.
Consultants walking a client approver through a deliverable before any written review comments begin. Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash.
What Happened Over the Following Two Quarters
Average rounds fell from 5.8 to 2.1. Time from first draft to sign-off went from 19 days to 8. We recovered somewhere around 90 hours of senior capacity a quarter, which we spent on new engagements rather than on rewriting old ones.
The client-side effect was the one I had not predicted. Engagements got faster to close out, which meant clients saw results sooner, which meant renewal conversations happened while the work still felt recent. Slow sign-off had been quietly damaging our renewals and we had never connected the two.
The same operating discipline shows up in how a digital marketing agency like ours has to run campaign approvals, where an unapproved ad set or a landing page stuck in review is not a document sitting idle, it is media budget burning against the wrong creative. Consulting hides its delays better. That is precisely why they last longer.
The Broader Version of This
Most operational inefficiency in a professional services firm does not look like inefficiency. It looks like diligence. Another round is careful. Adding one more reviewer is inclusive. Nobody in the room is behaving badly, and the cost is real and completely invisible because it is absorbed by salaried people who will simply work later.
Harvard Business Review's ongoing coverage of decision-making tends to focus on the quality of decisions. In a delivery business, the more expensive variable is often the architecture around them: who is allowed to decide, when they were told they were the decider, and what happens when someone new arrives with a view.
If you want a single thing to measure this month, count the revision rounds on your last ten deliverables and note who commented on each one. If new names keep appearing after round two, your problem is not writing quality. You are being paid to produce a document and are quietly funding your client's internal alignment process on the side.
If your delivery timelines keep stretching without anybody doing anything wrong, count the rounds before you blame the drafts. We rebuild client processes like this at Rhillane Marketing Digital, the digital marketing agency I run across Morocco, Dubai, and the United States.
