Draw the handoff before you open the logs
When an overnight batch fails, the instinct is to open the newest log first. That habit burns hours. In our assessments we refuse the log until someone can point to each adapter on a canvas and say what it is supposed to carry.
The canvas is deliberately plain: boxes for applications, labelled arrows for adapters, notes for queues. Arguments start immediately — “that returns feed was retired” — and those arguments are gold. They tell you which connectors still have owners and which are folklore.
Only then do we sample. Application analytics without a map produces elegant explanations of the wrong system. With a map, a single rewritten customer identifier shows up as a collision between two arrows, not a mysterious CRM mood.
If your team cannot draw the handoffs in twenty minutes, that gap is already a finding worth writing down.