People
Ownership, decision rights, capacity, leadership behaviour, stakeholder alignment and change adoption.
- Find where work depends on individual heroics
- Clarify who owns decisions and outcomes
- Identify overload, ambiguity and adoption risk
Operating Intelligence for scaling businesses
Find and fix the coordination drag slowing your business down.
Covalent Insights helps COOs, Chiefs of Staff and operational leaders understand how people, process, technology and data work together, then installs the ownership, operating rhythm and AI-enabled workflows needed to operate with confidence.
Built from experience inside complex, regulated and mission-critical environments
- Biopharmaceutical
- Public Sector
- Data Science & AI
- Technology
- Scaling Businesses
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The coordination gap
You do not have a strategy shortage. You have a coordination system problem.
Growth adds people, projects, tools, meetings and reporting. It does not automatically create the operating discipline needed to make them work together.
That is why a business can be full of capable people and still move slowly. Decisions wait for meetings. Ownership blurs between teams. Status stays green until it suddenly turns red. AI tools sit on top of broken workflows and make the noise travel faster.
Operating Intelligence is the discipline of understanding and improving how people, process, technology and data combine to turn strategy into coordinated action. Covalent finds where that operating system is breaking and gives leadership a practical route to fix it.
- “We have more systems but less visibility.”
- “Everything is green until it suddenly turns red.”
- “We doubled the team and somehow became slower.”
- “Leadership meetings create updates but not decisions.”
How we read the business
Execution breaks between the systems, not neatly inside one department.
We examine four interconnected lenses. Improving one in isolation often moves the problem somewhere else, so the value comes from understanding how the whole operating system behaves.
Process
Workflows, governance, operating rhythm, meetings, handoffs, escalation and portfolio controls.
- Remove process theatre and duplicated work
- Build routes for decisions and escalation
- Make the operating rhythm produce progress
Technology
Tool sprawl, system adoption, integration gaps, automation and practical AI use.
- Stop tools creating new silos
- Apply automation where the process is ready
- Use AI to improve execution, not accelerate disorder
Data
Reporting trust, data quality, operational signals, qualitative evidence and decision visibility.
- Expose the difference between activity and progress
- Make reporting useful before making it beautiful
- Give leaders enough signal to act earlier
People, Process, Technology and Data are the diagnostic lens. Operating Intelligence is the category they support. See the full model →
Free Operating Health Score
How healthy is the way your business actually operates?
Answer 24 questions across six dimensions and get an immediate score showing where your operating system is strongest, where it is creating drag and which dimension needs attention first.
Takes approximately 6 minutes · Immediate result · No preparation required.
- Decision velocity
- Ownership clarity
- Meeting effectiveness
- Workflow coherence
- Reporting value
- AI readiness
Start the assessment
The Covalent Method
Diagnose. Design. Deliver. Embed.
The Covalent Method turns an unclear operating problem into a diagnosed, designed and embedded execution system. It prevents the engagement ending with a report that nobody owns.
Phase 01
Diagnose
Build an evidence-based view of how work actually moves. Examine the four operating lenses, score the execution dimensions and separate symptoms from root causes.
Phase 02
Design
Turn the findings into a practical operating design: clearer ownership, better decision routes, usable governance, cleaner workflows and a prioritised implementation plan.
Phase 03
Deliver
Implement the changes with the people who will own them. Create visible progress, resolve blockers and make the new system work under real operating pressure.
Phase 04
Embed
Transfer the capability, runbooks and operating rhythm. The work is complete when the client team can sustain it without depending on Covalent day to day.
The flagship diagnostic
Stop guessing where execution is breaking.
The Operating Intelligence Diagnostic is a three-week assessment of how work actually moves through your organisation. It examines People, Process, Technology and Data, then measures the effect across six execution dimensions.
Every finding is tied to evidence. You receive a scored baseline, a visual map of the friction, the five highest-impact changes and a 90-day route forward.
Operating Health Score
A composite score with a breakdown across all six dimensions, each tied to its criteria and evidence.
Friction Map
A visual view of where work gets stuck, duplicated or lost between teams, tools and processes.
Priority Action Plan
The five highest-impact changes ranked by effort, cost and payoff, ready for your team to begin.
Executive Briefing
A leadership session covering the score, the evidence and a direct recommendation on what to do first.
90-Day Roadmap
A sequenced plan with owners, dependencies and checkpoints, ready to run internally or with Covalent.
From findings to implementation
The Diagnostic shows what is broken. The Reset fixes it.
The 90-Day Operating Reset implements the five priority actions identified in the Diagnostic, embeds the new operating rhythm and measures the change with a before-and-after Operating Health Score.
Days 1–30
Stabilise
Confirm the five actions, owners and definition of done. Deliver the first visible improvements and establish the weekly delivery rhythm.
Days 31–60
Embed
Implement the structural changes, run the new forums and decision routes with your team, then transfer ownership and re-measure.
Days 61–90
Prove
Harden all five actions, complete the runbooks, re-run the full score and brief leadership on what changed and what remains.
The standard is simple: if Covalent disappeared on day 91, the changes would still be running 90 days later.
Priced on scoping.
About the founder
Built by an operator who has worked inside complex execution environments.
Grant Cooke · Founder of Covalent Insights · Operating Intelligence advisor and operator
Grant has built his career inside environments where unclear ownership, fragmented systems and weak operating rhythm create real delivery risk. His experience spans national incident response, enterprise transition programmes, PMO leadership, complex Data Science and AI portfolios, and legal-to-technical workflow design.
Covalent Insights brings that operating experience together with practical judgement on AI, governance, workflow and organisational design. The aim is not to make the client dependent on another consultant. It is to leave leadership with a clearer system, better evidence and an operating rhythm the organisation can sustain.
- Chartered Project Professional
- Fellow of APM
- Chartered Manager
Why Covalent
Two ways to fix your operations. You only own one of them.
Most operational help is sold as an ongoing retainer or an interim seat. You rent the capability, and when it leaves, the improvement leaves with it. The Covalent model is scoped and fixed. We diagnose, implement with the people who will own it, and hand over the runbooks and operating rhythm. You pay for a result, and the system stays in your business.
3 weeks
To an evidence-based baseline
Day 91
It still runs without us
ChPP · FAPM
Chartered credentials
Fixed
Scoped price, no open-ended retainer
- Your team owns the operating system after we leave
- Every finding tied to evidence, not opinion
- The action plan works whether or not you retain us
- Runbooks and operating rhythm handed to your people
- A measured before-and-after Operating Health Score
- A clear route from findings to embedded change
- A fee tied to a result, not a meter that keeps running
Retainer
Month after month
- An interim seat you have to keep paying for
- Reporting that looks tidy but hides delivery risk
- Governance that creates meetings without decisions
- AI experiments that never scale past the pilot
- Dependence on the consultant, rebranded as account growth
- Frameworks left behind that nobody owns
- A monthly cost you keep having to justify to the board
Three ways to work with us
Start with evidence, then go as far as the problem needs.
Operating Intelligence Diagnostic
£12,000 +VAT · fixed
A three-week, evidence-based assessment of how work, decisions and reporting move through your organisation.
- Operating Health Score baseline
- Friction Map and five priority actions
- Executive briefing and 90-day roadmap
Most impact
90-Day Operating Reset
We implement the five priority actions, embed the operating rhythm and prove the change with a before-and-after score.
- Five actions implemented, not repeated
- Embedded rhythm under your ownership
- Before-and-after Operating Health Score
Fractional Operating & AI Advisor
Retainer
Ongoing decision support, assurance and quarterly improvement once the core work is embedded.
- Protects the system as you scale
- Senior judgement on AI and governance
- Not used to operate what you should own
Insights
Practical thinking on how growing businesses operate.
Evidence-led thinking on coordination drag, operating design, AI judgement and the interaction between People, Process, Technology and Data.
- What Is Operating Intelligence?
- Your Most Reliable Person Is Not an Operating Model
- Green Until Suddenly Red
Join The Upgrade Loop
A regular note for operational leaders on making growing businesses easier to run. No noise.
Make it visible
You can feel the coordination problem. Now make it visible.
Start with the Operating Health Score or book a Diagnostic conversation. We will look at where work, decisions and reporting are losing momentum and whether a full evidence-based assessment is the right next step.
Based in Surrey, United Kingdom · Working with scaling and PE-backed businesses across the UK and internationally.