Five steps. Then you fly.

Before anything is touched, we’d like to know what we’re walking into. A short intake questionnaire — team size, engine, current tools, known pain points — and a kickoff with whoever is sponsoring the audit.

This sets the boundary of what we’re actually looking at — one team? one discipline’s pipeline end-to-end? — and what the report will and won’t cover.

Track A · Artifact reviewThe pipeline’s paper trail: folder structures, naming conventions, source-control history, the ticket board, review-cycle logs — how many rounds an asset typically takes, how long revisions sit. Done on our own time.

Track B · People reviewShort 1:1s with a handful of people at different points in the pipeline — an environment artist, a lead, someone downstream who receives their handoffs. We triangulate “what the system says happens” against “what people actually experience happening.”

Discovery is synthesised into a pipeline map — where assets sit longest, where handoffs create friction, where reviews stall, where scheduling assumptions don’t match milestone reality. Read diagnostically, not descriptively.

Then the report: findings ranked by impact and effort, with a small number of concrete recommendations — practical fixes, not a rewrite of your whole process.

A closing session walking the sponsor and leads through the report, so it doesn’t just land as a PDF nobody reads. What was found, why it matters, what it would take to fix.

Then agree on what moves first.