A Coaching Workflow Audit: Find the Work You Keep Doing Twice

Follow one session from idea to review

If planning feels busy but the staff still arrives unprepared, adding another checklist may not be the best first move. Trace one actual session from preparation through follow-up and find where the work is being repeated or lost.

A coaching workflow audit is a short review of that sequence. It asks who creates information, who needs it next, where it lives, and what happens when it changes. It can be done with a sheet of paper and a recent plan.

Choose one practice, camp session, or training workout. Reconstruct what actually happened rather than describing the ideal routine. Include the messages, files, last-minute questions, and after-session notes that usually disappear from a formal plan.

Keep the review about the process. The point is to make useful work easier, not to turn a volunteer staff meeting into a performance investigation.

Map five stages

1. Prepare: someone selects objectives, builds the session, and checks the available time.
2. Coordinate: staff, space, equipment, and athlete groups are matched to the plan.
3. Distribute: the people involved receive the current instructions.
4. Deliver: coaches run the session and adapt when necessary.
5. Review: observations become a useful change to the next session.

For each stage, record the owner, the input, the output, and the next person who needs that output. A handoff is unclear when the next person does not know what they are receiving or what they must do with it.

For example, “send practice” is incomplete. “The plan owner sends the current PDF to assistants by the agreed preparation deadline; each assistant checks the period and equipment assigned to them” describes an actionable handoff.

Use the map to notice gaps. If nobody owns equipment setup, adding more detail to the drill description will not necessarily solve the problem.

Mark duplication, waiting, and uncertainty

Look for three patterns:

• Duplication: copying the same roster, schedule, or instructions into several places.
• Waiting: a coach cannot finish preparation because a decision or file has not arrived.
• Uncertainty: people have information but cannot tell which version, assignment, or instruction applies.

Write an example beside each mark. “Roster names entered in both the camp rotation and check-in sheet” is specific enough to investigate. “Too much admin” is not.

Some repeated information is useful. A printed emergency contact process and a digital operational record may serve different needs. Do not remove a step merely because it appears twice. First identify why it exists and who depends on it.

Likewise, a short confirmation with the coach responsible for a major change may be worthwhile even after a general message was sent. The audit should distinguish useful confirmation from unnecessary rework.

Choose one improvement with a clear owner

Pick a bottleneck that occurs often and can be changed without rebuilding the entire operation. Good first candidates include one current-plan link, consistent template names, a clear equipment owner, or an agreed cutoff for routine assistant requests.

Define the change in plain language. Instead of “improve communication,” write “the plan owner posts one released plan and highlights changes to location, timing, and staff responsibilities.” Instead of “use the database better,” write “save the ten drills we use most often in the staff’s normal reference location.”

For a hypothetical camp, the audit might reveal that every station coach rebuilds the same rotation by hand. One shared rotation sheet and an assigned owner could remove that duplication. A new drill library would not address the identified problem.

Give the change a trial period and a review date. Keep a note of what you expect to improve so the staff can judge the result.

Check whether the change improved the next session

After the next few uses, return to the original example. Did coaches find the current plan without asking? Was the equipment ready? Did the same information still need to be copied? Use observations from the staff doing the work.

Keep the change if it reliably removes friction. Adjust it if the purpose is sound but the process is awkward. Drop it if it adds work without producing a useful result. A simpler routine is a legitimate outcome.

If the audit reveals a tool mismatch, use the coaching-tool review worksheet. If the problem is scattered reusable material, build a small coaching resource library. These are different responses to different problems.

Finally, match an existing CBF tool to the job when a planning system would help. Coach Bill’s approach is to organize the work coaches already need to do, then add only what makes that work easier to carry out.