Step back from the day to day of the process and look to the finish line - identifying the quickest way you can get there without compromising on the quality of the work, going over-budget or creating a load of hassle for someone else later down the line.

Stripping away tasks can seem scary both to you and your team but it is important to be brutal initially because you can always add things back in at a later stage. People often cling to the day to day tasks as a way of keeping busy and avoiding looking up at the cumbersome process they've actually created. The most dangerous phrase in business is "this is how we've always done it".

One thing to remember is (particularly if you are a manager doing this) to secure buy-in across the team in order to be effective. It is easy for colleagues to convince you of the necessity of something because it takes up a large chunk of their time and therefore they want to protect their workload to avoid becoming a spare part. It is far more effective to encourage everyone to give up their unnecessary tasks to enable them to take on more fulfilling and meaningful work, if you can convince colleagues that this is about growing as a company not penny pinching and that their job role will be far better and more suited to them once you are finished then it is easier to establish that buy-in and get to the root of that pointless busyness.