A professional-services firm, and a familiar arrangement: every department kept its own version of the truth. The numbers lived in one system, the tasks in another, and the real status of most work lived in the heads of the people doing it. None of the versions agreed, and none of them were wrong, exactly. They were answering different questions.
The gap
Leadership pays for this arrangement in a specific way: a simple question takes a week. Someone has to notice the question, chase the pieces across departments, reconcile the versions, and format the result, and by the time the answer arrives it describes last week. Meetings were spent comparing numbers instead of deciding anything.
What was built
One view, over the systems they already had. It shows what is done, what is pending, and where things are stuck, reconciled the same way every time, current as of now. Nobody enters anything into it. It reads from where the work already lives.
What changed
Leadership opens a page instead of commissioning a report. The weekly comparing-of-numbers meeting became a deciding meeting. And the people who used to assemble those reports got their afternoons back, which is its own kind of raise.