Free Low-Hanging Fruit Audit Tool: Quick Efficiency Wins for Local Governments — The Local Edge Tools
Why Do a Low-Hanging Fruit Audit?
We find 80% of waste hiding in plain sight. Real example: One mid-sized city department was burning $20,000 per year on redundant licenses and manual approvals — until I mapped it.
How to Do It:
The Local Edge Podcast Episode 2 – Streamline Local Government Operations and Reclaim 20% Staff Time
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Start simple. Block a couple hours a week for a process walk-through. Grab your team, or just grab a notepad and do it yourself. List every single recurring task that you've got and ask yourself: Is it automated? Is it outsourced? Or is this some task from 2019—some zombie process?
Pro Tip: Focus on Procurement First
That's where bottlenecks lurk.
Get your own editable copy (free forever):
Table Overview: Low-Hanging Fruit Audit Tool
This is just a quick and easy, low-hanging fruit audit with some formulas already built in.
Column A: Section. Look at areas like Technology, Data, Vendors, and Processes.
Column B: Task/Process. List the items correlating to Column A (e.g., Duplicate software licenses, Manual data entry, or Zombie processes).
Column C: Effort (1–5). Score the effort needed to fix it (5 being super easy).
Column D: Impact (1–5). Score the potential impact (5 being huge savings).
Column F: Priority Score*. This column has a built-in formula that multiplies Effort (C) x Impact (D). This gives you a clear priority score (e.g., 5 x 5 = 25).
*The highest priority score is the lowest-hanging fruit you can tackle today!
