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Benchmarking Examples - Are there any good ones?

January 18th, 2010

I’m going against the current here by telling you that you’d be hard pushed to find any good benchmarking examples. Sure you can always find evidence of how fat cat directors can justify their trip to Jamaica with a couple of business cards from folks they met at the bar, but this does not cut it as a good benchmarking example.

Here’s the problem: benchmarking is in most cases a complete waste of time and money. Let me explain with a short story.

Denise, Matt and I were up at Aviemore for a few days over the holidays (Daniel decided he’s just too cool now and stayed at home). A friend, Mike, and his family joined us.

Though there was no snow (yes the irony is not lost on me) but on the first night the temperature went down to minus 12 degrees and Mike’s car wouldn’t start in the morning.

Guess what he did to fix it? He called out a mechanic. Guess what the mechanic did, looked under the bonnet, identified the problem and fixed it. But the question is "what would the mechanic have done if he was doing a bench marking study?"

First he would have guessed at the problem, then he would have opened the bonnet of my car had a look, chatted to me about why the car was working well and what I did when it didn’t start in the morning, then he would have written a report handed it to Mike and left. A great example of benchmarking don’t you think?

When your service is failing, isn’t that what you’re told to do by those in the know? Spend our time looking at others, who according to their KPIs, are better than you and then hope for divine inspiration.

Not convinced I’m right? Here’s an example. Imagine you are a director of a utility company and you have a division of your business that makes money from the installation of pay as you go meters. But the division is failing and as a result losing money.

You get permission to have a look at other businesses that use the pay as you go model. What might you find?

You might get told by one company you benchmark that success in the pay as you go market lies in choosing the right demographics of the client group, another might show you their technology, and yet another might explain how card distribution is the key.

You head back to office with your PowerPoint presentation to make three recommendations: better demographics, better technology, better distribution.

Sorry wrong answer, do not pass go and do not collect a promotion and a new car. Here’s why, because if you’d spent the time studying your system you’d have seen that the pay as you go meters have a standing charge of 99p per week. This generates an income of around six million per annum.

But when a home is unoccupied the standing charge continues to accrue, when the new tenant takes up residence and puts their card in the meter the card is immediately debited by the accumulated charge.

The disgruntled customer then calls in (failure demand) and requests a call out to have the meter re-set. The cost for this is sixteen million pounds per year.

You see by spending time studying your own system, not only have you saved the cost of flight to the Caribbean you have just found a way of eliminating £9,000,000 in annual operating expense.

Call me hasty if you like but I think the girl that solved this problem deserves a bit of a bonus and heck, why don’t we throw in a new car just for good measure. I still reckon we’re up by quite a few million. And easy money at that, it only took three days to identify the solution.

I had the privilege of working with this amazing leader, she knows who she is (don’t you Rachel?).

So here’s the lesson, whether you’re going to visit other companies in New York or New Cummnock, don’t, it’s a waste of your time and your money.

As an old friend of mine always says, "If your car breaks down, you won’t learn anything by looking under my bonnet."

If you beg to differ in your opinion and have any good benchmarking examples please feel free to post a comment and let me know.

Many thanks,
Stuart Corrigan

PS: You can download the MP3 version of this blog entry>> HERE. (Right click on the link, click on ‘save target as’ and click ‘save’)

PSS: Our Process Mapping & Analysis workshop is now available for 2010 >> Find out more HERE

PSSS: If you’ve missed listening to the great interview on Radio 4 with the late Russell Ackoff - ‘In Business - Doing it wrong’, you can still listen to it HERE

Posted in Measures | 2 Comments »

Quality guru W.Edwards Deming would turn in his grave

January 6th, 2010

First I trust you all had fantastic Christmas and New Year. This post is on the subject of how to start the process of taking your business to the next level in 2010; as usual it involves getting data and also has some advice from a quality guru.

I’ve ranted about this in 2009 so no reason to stop in 2010 (I’m reaching my mid 40’s so I’m now officially allowed to be cranky).

Just before Christmas I was studying a system within social services. As a result of unclear rules, occupational therapists in the service weren’t sure how they should order a stair lift.

So different therapists applied their definition of the process in different ways and it meant that the budget was being used faster than necessary. Now I’m no quality guru but I’d have thought that ensuring that everyone was clear on how to do their work was always a good place to start when running any business.

But to do this you have to know how people work. And you can’t do that from behind a 17 inch screen.


In-fact point 6 of Deming’s famous 14 points states that we should ‘Institute training on the job.’

I wouldn’t have thought you needed to be one of the quality management guru’s to understand that rule, or would you? Look at the language, “institute training on the job”, in practice this means you have to be there and listen and learn so you understand what to train. An interesting quality philosophy don’t you think?

Naively I decided I wanted to get the answer to the question, ‘what is the correct budget for a stair lift?” And I even went right to the top to get the sacred knowledge.

I doffed my cap and asked the question “what budget should I apply to a stair lift?” I waited with baited breath and got the following answer:

“It’s not that simple, let me ask you, how many angels can dance on a pinhead?”

Seriously that’s the answer I was given! Is it any wonder that people in this business haven’t got a clue what they are doing? Seriously I’m sure I felt the spirit of quality guru W. Edwards Deming enter the room and breathe a deep sigh before having a wee cry in the corner.

A better quality philosophy

So if you want to take your business to the next level you could do worse than making sure that everyone was actually clear on what they should be doing every day. And I bet that if you go and have a look at what people are doing you will see lots of stuff that you could fix, thus getting a double bang for your buck.

And on the subject of Deming’s 14 points you can get a free download in the form of a PDF that covers each one or scroll to the end this post to hear them in our presentation. And for those of you who want to take your learning to the next level you could do worse than get Deming’s book Out of the Crisis. I assure you it’s the best book you’ll read this year.

Oh and one final point does anyone know exactly how many angels you can get on a pinhead? I’d really like to see the chap’s face when I give him the answer.

Many Thanks

Stuart Corrigan

Posted in Quality, Change Management | No Comments »

Local Authority Planning - How the government and the lean gurus got it wrong

December 16th, 2009

If you are in local authority planning, grants distribution, information technology, pharmaceutical, roads resurfacing or any other project environment, stop what you are doing and put the kettle on because the information contained in this blog could be the most important you will ever get your hands on.

At the latter part of last year I was asked to speak to the great and the good in Scottish local authority planning.  The purpose was to give my thoughts on how to change planning for the better.  The advice was simple and unequivocal ‘get knowledge about how the system works before you make a change.’

I guess I must have been having an off-day because for whatever reason many went off and ignored this advice and missed a big trick in planning.  I’ve studied planning departments at the tail end of the lean gurus as well; they also failed to see the answer. 

So stay tuned as I’m about to reveal all.  And if you are one of the few that will actually go away and do something as a result of reading this blog you will see results very fast. 

Here’s what happened in planning.  The boffins decided that the problem was a lack of clean information coming into planning departments.  This resulted in plans being sent back to the client or agent for rework.  Fair enough, if you studied planning as a system you would indeed find that around 20% of applications have missing information. 

The result of this revelation was two actions, the first was to create a detailed specification of how the plans should be drawn up with a list of required information and the second was for all proposals to be subject to a pre-application meeting between the client and/or agent and the planner.    Both of these rules have now been embedded in the system. 

But nothing much seems to have changed.  The authorities I’ve seen are still struggling to meet their performance indicators and the planners are drowning in a sea of work, even more so now that they have to have pre-application meetings.  So why didn’t the solution work?

The answer was simply incomplete, in-fact it only dealt with one small aspect of the overall problem, akin to trying to lose a ton of weight by replacing your mid morning bacon butties with an apple, sure it will help a little, but you’re not going to see a significant change. 

Let me lay out the real problem (actually there are two).  The first is that in the planning departments I’ve seen there are simply too many open cases; the planners are flooded with work.  This happens as a result of wanting to tell a client that their case has been seen.   But it causes a big problem, multi-tasking. 

What happens is that in an effort to get more done everything takes longer and the lack of focus causes errors.  Think of it like this, imagine you have 10 tasks to do and you try to do a little of everything.  The result is that you are constantly picking up and putting down the tasks. Every time you pick something up you have to take a moment just to remember where you were before you can start again.  Consequently everything takes longer and is more likely to include mistakes.   

The second issue exacerbates the first.  Misguided ministers and managers believe that we need service standards to improve our performance.  But if they knew how to look they would see that it’s making us worse not better. 

In planning there is a 56 day service standard to give a decision on an application.  And the clock doesn’t start ticking until the application is error free.  Some planners have told me that, because they have so much work to do and there is pressure to hit the arbitrary 56 day standard, applications ping-pong back and forth until they are fit to enter the process. 

And when the application is in the process the 56 day service standard causes student syndrome.  Cases get opened and then put down again until nearer the deadline, just like a difficult essay.  Planners flip-flop between handling easy cases to hit that standard and trying to break the backlog of the more complex ones.  Sometimes an application goes over the 56 days and it gets left, the rationale being that service standard is breached anyway so it doesn’t matter if the case takes 56 days or 256 days, either way it’s late.

So what can be done to fix the problems?

  • Create a list of all planning applications in date order, oldest to earliest.
  • Create two schedules, the first for pre-applications and the second for determinations.
  • Schedule the work for the technical clerks and the planners.
  • Limit the release of work into the flow. Only allow planners and tech clerks to work on only a few cases at a time. 
  • Keep the service standard away from the planner; better still remove it all together. 
  • Create a new rule, work on the case until it’s finished, do it as fast as you can but do it right.
  • Have a system so that the manager’s job is to help the planner if they get blocked.
  • If a case is not in the flow then it’s not open.  This will give you visibility over the exact size of your backlog (which will soon disappear). 

But before I’ve even posted this blog, I can hear the objections. 

  • ‘Our customers will be furious that we haven’t looked at their case’- not as angry as when you tell them that you’ve looked at it umpteen times and it’s still not complete. 
  • ‘I can handle lots of cases at one time’- not if you’re a human you can’t.
  • ‘Our planners need the service standard to motivate them’- get real!

The problems I’ve discussed here are not restricted to planning.  They happen in the distribution of grants, information technology, pharmaceutical, roads resurfacing or any other project environment. 

To gauge if you are in a project environment have a look at the touch time of the work, if it is high in relation to the throughput time then it’s likely the above rules will apply to you. 

For more information on this subject, check out our free videocast made by Daniel Rodgers and Dougal Mather of Vanguard Scotland.

And finally I think there is a bigger lesson here than just planning, it’s the one I urged the government to take. “Before you make a change get knowledge”.  If you do you will see the whole problem and create a complete solution.

Many Thanks

Stuart Corrigan

Posted in Change Management, Public Sector, Measures, Project Management | No Comments »

Top 5 Questions & Answers of 2009

December 16th, 2009

The final installment: Question 5

Q: In Scotland in the addictions field we are all facing a huge shift in emphasis from a treatment modality (i.e. Methadone prescriptions) to Recovery (i.e. focussing on the holistic person - improving quality of life).  This is significant in terms of service redesign and a system overhaul.

I just wondered what kind of support you could offer - we want to change how we deliver services and the biggest problem we have is that our current system is under so much pressure we have no room to make that turning space.  How do you create turning space when the front end of your system is under so much pressure - the mid end is at capacity and there is little throughput at the backend.  Existing systems are convoluted and confusing for clients to negotiate and we are facing targets from the Scottish Government that have no bearing on whether or not the service we provide is of quality and what people want.

Stuart’s A: The question needs to be answered in two parts.  The first is how to create capacity and the second is how do you start to improve the wider system around addiction?  Let me try to deal with each separately.

  1. Creating capacity in the current system
    1. Without being glib, to create capacity requires knowledge of how the current system works today.  And in your system you have to know two things.  The first is the type and frequency of demand into the system, i.e. who wants help, how often and what help do they want. When you get this data you might find that there are some people who would be better served elsewhere, or some who are having to make multiple demands on the system to get what they need, hence destroying capacity.
    2. The second piece of information you need to get is your capability to serve those that need your help.  I.e. how often do they get what they want and how easy does the system make it for you to deliver what they need?

Let me give you an example.  A few years ago we did some work in cancer care.  They had similar problems to the ones you describe.  As you can imagine it was tough but very satisfying work.  We worked with the medical staff and hospital administrators to teach them how to study their system. They soon found that the nature of demand was predictable in terms of frequency.

But what they also found was that there were a percentage of the clients referred from doctors that should not have been referred and they made plans to work with doctors who needed additional help in the pre-diagnosis stage.  Additionally there were some patients that had been given the all the clear many years before and therefore had no higher likely hood of contracting cancer than someone who had no history of cancer. There were obvious opportunities to reduce the demand into the system.

Whilst I can’t and wouldn’t say that the same would be true of your system, gathering data on the type and frequency of demand would be my first port of call, it’s likely to provide useful data if not about how to reduce demand, then to prove the true levels of funding and staff you might need in your system.

Additionally when we studied the flow of a patient through the cancer diagnosis system, it was obvious that the process was cumbersome, slow and filled with red tape. And when systems are slow to respond to what matters to customers, they (the customer) tend to place more demand on the system to find out what’s happening.

Hence it’s likely that you would get some benefit studying what’s involved in your service provision. You may find that there is unnecessary bureaucracy and policies that would be better removed for those afflicted with the addiction and would reduce the cost of running the service.

Having created capacity by doing this I would suggest that it’s incumbent on you to make the wider system better and actually do things to help remove the addiction (yes a statement of the obvious I know).  But the question is by what method. I will deal with this in the second part of my answer.

  1. Optimising the larger system and improving care throughout the system
    1. As in my first response the answer to actually improving the whole system lies in understanding the points of failure in the system.  It may be that those points give the clues to what happens when a methadone dependant citizen reaches out for help and is let down, thus further exacerbating their addiction.
    2. To provide insight would require, in my opinion, a slightly different approach.  Rather than working forward, you work back.  Take 20-30 people who are in the system currently and work back though their typical journeys.  You may have to involve many different agencies: benefits, housing, the criminal justice system, accident and emergency, the local GP practice, and of course your own system.  As you study a typical journey you will no-doubt find predictable points at which help might have been effective and welcomed, or points at which help was wanted but there was no method for its provision.

Though this might prove a difficult task I’m sure it would be a worthy one.  My experience in multi-agency work with the criminal justice system and local authorities is that with the right leadership much can be changed.

Posted in Change Management, Public Sector, Measures | No Comments »

Top 5 Questions & Answers of 2009

December 15th, 2009

Continuing our daily series, here’s Question 4:

Q: We all agree that a poorly designed and managed system/process is counterproductive to satisfy customer’s needs effectively and efficiently.  However, the process of changing the system for the better via a change in thinking, eventually comes down to delivering a process in a particular way (the need to accommodate variation not withstanding). The improved way of handling certain types of customer demand would therefore need to be specified and adhered to ensure predictable outcomes - is this not standardisation? What other name would you label the practices and behaviour of the redesigned system/process?

Stuart’s A: Standardisation can be put in place when the nature of demand has been established. Standard processes can be designed against standard demands.  For example let’s say that you knew that 65% of you customers called in to ask for the balance of their business account, a standard process can be established to provide the answer to that question.  However the problem occurs when standard processes policies and procedures are put in place with when no account has been taken of the nature of demand.

For example in the UK my bank (The Bank of Scotland) decided to standardise how they managed personal and business accounts.  If you were an operator in the call centre you would now not be allowed to deal with both.  So as a customer I used to be able to have a single operator transfer money from my business account and then pay bills with it from my personal account. The bank’s new standardised approach to dealing with business and personal customers differently means I now have to call twice.

Had the bank studied the nature of demand they would have made the system able to absorb demand, and would have had a process for handing a customer who had a business and personal account (assuming I was not the only one).

Hence the way to standardise is first to understand the nature of customer demand and make sure that the system can handle all the demands placed on it.  The most important issue is not what standard processes are required but what is the nature of customer demand and how can we make sure that our operators are enabled to handle everything.

Posted in Change Management, Measures | No Comments »

Top 5 Questions & Answers of 2009

December 14th, 2009

Question 3:

Q: I’d be interested in your thoughts on the current trend emerging from the Agile community on Kanban, or push versus pull systems? The latter deals with variability by not defining end dates and controlling queues and WIP limits (over-simplifying I know.)

Critical chain, as far as I can see, assumes that schedules are a good thing to manage. Pull systems tell you to manage the workflow (aka TPS).

Stuart’s A: Agile and Kanban are techniques applied to operations environments. The basis of Kanban, as you say, is that it manages flow and inventory by using buffers in a pull system. It allows operators to see defects and stops overproduction. Agile is typically used to manage variety and works best (as I understand it) in T-shaped plants where variety can be added at the end. For example in a car plant where lots of Land Rovers were being built the extras could be added at the end.

The problems occur when you try to apply the same techniques to a service system. What’s different is that that customer is involved at the point of transaction and decides what matters to them there and then. Hence the system has to have the ability to absorb the demand at the front of the system. Think of member packs in marketing communications. Though each pack starts as a white shell, the customer decides at the front of the system what they want in their pack. If the variety is added too late in the system then all that happens is waste is introduced as a result of going back and forward between the client.

In terms of Kanban it can be thought of like this: it’s helpful in processing and production environments to make sure that you understand where the capacity is constrained in the system i.e. who is most likely to be overloaded. The capacity constrained resource must be kept busy, must never do re-work and must get work clean. So because Kanban works in conjunction with a physical or time buffer a good place to start is to make sure that the capacity constrained resource is given clean work and never runs out of work as a result of poor flow. That said, in my opinion in most service organisations there is no real capacity constraint, the degree of waste (unclean info, functional design, rework, behaviour caused by targets and incentives) is such that if the system was changed you’d probably see 50%-60% capacity improvement.

The key in service organisation is to focus on flow.

In projects, Agile doesn’t apply because the network determines where the variety is added, there is no choice. However Kanban is used in critical chain. At the end of the network a time buffer is applied to provide an early warning of late running projects. Also the convergence point (the point at which all work comes together) is usually the constraint hence the resource around that point is managed to make sure that no time is lost here. In that way it’s not the schedule that’s being managed but the consumption of the buffer.

Posted in Variation | No Comments »

Top 5 Questions & Answers of 2009

December 11th, 2009

Here’s Question 2 in our series:

Q: I work in a large and complex life insurance and investment business and we have been changing huge areas of our business using the Systems Thinking method for over 18 months now.

My question is really about how a Systems Thinking approach fits with other perceived business drivers; particularly our declared objective to cross sell more of our products to existing customers, up sell more of the same and crucially retain more of our existing customers for longer.

I hope it is not an over simplification but the Systems Thinking argument I think goes something like this - Our purpose is to design our work to fulfil the “nominal” demand of our customers (eg provide a retirement income). If we do this well we will deliver a level of service that our customers expect, we won’t make mistakes, we will keep our promises and waste and failure will have as little impact as possible on both us (in terms of costs) and our customers (in terms of frustration and disappointment).

Customer satisfaction is a by-product of the way the work works. Like staff engagement it comes for free as we redesign our system against the value demands of our customers.

Because we are delivering what we promise (within our control) it is a natural consequence that customers stay with us and buy more from us. Our brand promise and the actual real experiences of our customers are aligned. There is no need to “Push” additional products or up sell at every contact opportunity - fundamentally this is not responding to customer demand (e.g. please change my address) but is part of our own agenda and will cost us money, might not work and could undermine our newly designed business.

If this argument is correct we would be far better redesigning our service and getting the basics right before embarking on a major up-sell / retention / cross-sell programme across our operational business. Especially when over 1/2 the work we do is waste / failure.

As you might guess the logic above does not resonate with some key players in our business. In fact I’m not even sure that I have captured what an experienced “Systems Thinker” would propose.

What do you think - does pro active multi-channel CRM type retention and cross-selling have a place in a Systems Thinking service organisation?

Stuart’s A: Many thanks for your question.  This is a really important subject because I don’t think that there’s an obvious enough link between Systems Thinking and growing your business.  But I will do my best to give you my philosophy on the subject.

As you say it’s a given that in order to enable people to buy from you, they have to have a good experience and it has to be easy to buy.  Additionally when they make a service request it should be fulfilled quickly, with high quality and in such a way that it’s efficient for the organisation.  So the customer has a great experience, they tell others and you most likely get some organic growth. 

Additionally because the customer has had a good experience I think it’s logical to suggest that they are more open to hearing from you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will buy more.  This is when you have to think about Systems Thinking from a slightly different perspective.  Let me try to lay it out as a series of principles.

  1. Pull not push
    1. Having done what matters to the customer (or met their nominal value), you have won their trust.  Now you have to ask permission to talk them on a regular basis.  So once you have done what they asked, you ask a question “Can we talk to you once per week/month/year with highly relevant information to your circumstances.  Also you need to make sure that the offer is designed from the customer’s point of view.  It talks in terms of what they want to hear, not what you want to tell them.
    2. But you must make sure they have a good experience first!  I tried to get a quote during a famous insurance company’s ‘quote me happy campaign’, it was a terrible experience.
  2. Create even more value for the customer
    1. Assuming that you know what matters to the group of customers with which you want to converse, you have to now add value.  You do this by providing content that is associated with your product, even though it will not necessarily lead to a short term sale for you.  For example let’s say you provide annuities for retirement.  And you know what matters to your customers is income maximisation, tax avoidance and providing for a spouse after death.  You put together information booklets/CDs/DVDs etc that are easy to understand and have useful content that can help customers meet their goals. In other words you become a reliable source of expert information, a trusted adviser.
    2. Then every so often you put an offer in communication that a client may want to buy.
    3. But there’s no point doing this if when they’ve asked you for something and you messed up.
    4. You also need to plan the whole process so that it’s slick and easy for the customer to get something if you offer it.
  3. Reduce waste to free up capacity
    1. It need not be the case that designing and administering the whole sales funnel should cost money, because if you have freed up staff from the improvement of flow then you can use them in the new marketing processes.
    2. Also you should gather data on the lifetime value of a client so that you know how much you can afford to spend on each client.
    3. But yes before you go working on outbound processes make sure that you’re making the most of the inbound stuff.
  4. Gather capability data, then test rigorously and maximise
    1. Before you go designing new outbound processes first gather data on what works now, then start to tweak these to optimise their performance.  For example change headlines, pictures, copy, offers, testimonials, check the frequency of mailings, check your database and see how much failure demand a campaign attracts.
    2. Make sure that everyone who wants to spend money with you actually does spend money with you.  Last week I saw a car I liked on a website, I filled in the details and then waited, I thought my phone would ring within minutes.  Four days later they called and it was too late.
    3. Dump the processes that perform poorly and put more money behind those that perform well.
    4. Make sure you know exactly how each process drives traffic and converts.
  5. Keep learning
    1. Once maximised, look at others to see how they have leveraged their operational capability. The most obvious thing to do (but UK businesses don’t) is to use your improved capability to make a guarantee.  Can you think of how you can leverage your new and improved service to give clients more confidence so that they try you out?

I think that a company that has previously worked on push CAN move to a different model, especially as it’s cheaper and much more aligned to growth and profitability.  The challenge is that it takes time and patience to improve the operational capability such that you win over the confidence of a client. And that depends on whether management are willing to do the work to build relationships with clients before they ask them to buy more.

Finally, I’m thankful that you took the time to write, as using Systems Thinking as a means to an end is a subject close to my heart.  Too often I’ve looked at how well I’ve done Systems Thinking rather than asking how I can leverage the operational and measurement capability to create more demand in the market.

Posted in Strategy, Change Management, Creating Value | No Comments »

Top 5 Questions & Answers of 2009

December 10th, 2009

Over the year blog readers have asked me lots of interesting things and I wanted to share some of the best questions and answers with you over the next few days. They might help you if you’re dealing with similar problems.

Here’s the first:

Stuart’s Q: What is the biggest problem you have in your change programme?
A: Getting the decision makers to change the way they think about change programmes and how to deliver them effectively (they tend to be treated as “projects” with a start, middle and end)

Stuart’s Q: How difficult has it been to solve it?
A: Very

Stuart’s Q: What has caused you to want to solve it now?
A: In the current climate with the odds of job losses ever increasing - we cannot afford to embark on expensive, conventional change programmes that may look good on paper but fail to deliver on the ground.

Stuart’s Comments:
There are two strategies you need to solve this problem, the first is around pre-eminence, the second is getting the leaders to recognise the issues for themselves but you can’t get this without pre-eminence.

Here’s what I mean. We both agree (I assume) that you need to get the leaders out into the work so that they can see for themselves that the problem is the design and management of the work and that this can only be changed by different thinking, not a project. 

But trying to get them out into the work for two days is nigh on impossible (and I know we agree on that). So your best bet is to not even try until they ask you. This is about how you position yourself. This is called pre-eminence. 

What you have to do is write a white paper on the subject. You don’t address management treating change as a project directly but you do slip it into the paper. 

And then you write and write and publish and publish, by doing so you make yourself the pre-eminent adviser on the subject. Then when your management team start to see you as the expert your relationship changes and they start to take your advice.

The general premise of a white paper is that you address the areas of your subject that no-one else talks about i.e. the grey areas or the things that go wrong. 

The structure is:

  1. A good title: “Why change fails in local authorities”
  2. A thesis: ”This paper addresses the main reasons why change fails in local authorities, it concludes that what leaders need is to think of change as an ongoing way of working rather than project based work.”
  3. Pose the questions you want to address: How many change programmes have failed in the UK over the past few years?
    1. What are the main reasons for failure?
    2. What leadership attributes are required to run a change programme?
    3. How is this different from what most leaders do?
    4. What are the key stages in running a successful change?
    5. What do leaders need to do to make it stick?
  4. You include a resource box to offer a strategy session to avoid programme failure, here is the link to mine so you get the idea

Let me be honest, this won’t solve all of the problems all of the time but you will get treated differently and will have a better chance of getting the leaders to do what they should, spend time in the work. And in doing this your job is to get them to see how that the problems in the work are systemic and cannot be sorted by running a project. Here is the link to my scoping session, feel free to use the text. 

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Five keys to high customer service at low cost

December 9th, 2009

(A story of cold sausages, a string quartet and climate change protestors)

I was in London last week with some friends. On Friday morning we were sitting in a restaurant having breakfast. Then my blackberry went ballistic; message after message telling me that the link to the free guide on presenting data wasn’t working. And to make matters worse the team in the office didn’t have the PDF of the guide, so they couldn’t help.

Big problem, you see we use a web hosting company in the US and their system was down. So the first thing I did was to drop my fork and knife and ping a note back to everyone to let them know we were trying to resolve the situation.

Eventually I tracked down one of the team (who was on holiday) who had a copy of the guide (for who didn’t manage to pick it up click here) and we got it sent again as an attachment. And I as I chewed my way through my, now freezing cold, bacon and eggs I pondered the messages.

  1. Trust is fleeting. It doesn’t really matter how much good you think you’ve done it can all go pear shaped in a moment.
  2. Reliability is king. I continually hear people moaning that things are tough in the current climate. So you have to make the most of every opportunity. This is the same in the public sector, if you don’t keep your promises you get hit with failure demand, the cost to me was a cold breakfast, what would it be for you? So make sure every process delivers.
  3. Knowledge will save the day. Stuff happens, things go wrong, I get that. But the key is to know the predictable nature of the failure. Is it a one off or is it predictable? The problem is that most managers don’t know, as a result they react to special causes as if they are every day occurrences and make a storm in a team into a hurricane. So you need measures that help you understand and improve performance, do you have that?

I was now firmly in the bad books with everyone. Denise, for spending two hours on my phone (I hope you appreciate what I do for you), Sean for bugging him on his holiday and you for a missing link. But there was light at the end of the tunnel and another message.

We left Covent Garden to the sound of music, not the Julie Andrews musical, but a string quartet. We stood and watched for a while, they were brilliant. Then they upped the ante, they started dancing with their violins! The crowd went wild and started throwing money at them.

And yes there’s a message here, if you want to do well, even during tough times, you need more than just reliability…

  1. Be unique. This can come in the form of a product, a service, or how about a guarantee. Most people can’t offer a guarantee because they are too scared that they will mess up. Though that problem soon disappears when you have knowledge about how the work works.

And if you’re in the public sector and you’re reading this and wondering how it applies? My thoughts are that what would make you unique would be the delivery of consistently high service at low cost, do you agree?

Having seen the quartet I now had a warm feeling, everything was all right with the world. Or was the warm feeling something else. Was it climate change? The protestors in London that day certainly believe it’s the latter. And don’t get me wrong I’m all for a good rant and saving the planet, but…

We wanted to cross the road and the protestors were shouting at everyone as they crossed the line; time for another lesson. In some sectors your message might not be to everyone’s taste, so don’t make it worse by being difficult to deal with (one pedestrian got so infuriated he even burst a protestor’s balloon; that could have gone nasty). Here’s the lesson:

  1. When you want people to comply with your message or process, don’t infuriate them by being difficult.

We ended our weekend by a visit to a Japanese restaurant chain in terminal 5 called Wagamama, it was brilliant. And it had a number of amazing characteristics:

  1. They told us when what was going to happen and when we would get our food. Then they delivered on their promises.
  2. They had a simple method to keep track of who was getting what and who still had to get their meals. They wrote the number of the dish on the menu. That way if a customer didn’t get the right food, the waiter knew before the customer.
  3. They were unique. The food was unusual but very tasty.
  4. It was easy and flawless.

Isn’t it funny how things go full circle?

P.S. This week I have an e-book of some questions I’ve answered over the past few months. The questions range from how to improve support for drug users, how systems thinking works in businesses that need to grow and get new clients, whether Kanban is appropriate to service organisations, and a few more. You can get the short book by clicking here (and yes I’m praying that it works).

Many Thanks

Stuart Corrigan

Posted in Public Sector, Strategy, Project Management, Service Failure, Creating Value, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Presenting at Job Interviews

December 4th, 2009

On four different occasions I have surveyed the readers of my presentations newsletter and asked them a question: “What aspects of business presenting do you find most challenging?”

Every time I’ve asked the question I get the same response, “presenting at an interview” the readers reply. So if you also want to slay the beast that is presenting at a job interview, then you are in the right place.

So this week’s free gift is an ebook on presenting at an interview

Posted in presentation skills | No Comments »

Change Management Strategies - Dying to help

November 26th, 2009

First I want to say thanks for all the emails I get every week giving me suggestions and ideas for the blog. I read them all. Also to those of you have written with questions I hope that you have found my answers useful. Thanks again for taking the time to read and interact.

Now on with the blog, this week’s was inspired by a story from Scott Finnie. Scott wrote to tell me about an article he read in a magazine.

“Hello Stuart,

It’s just over a year since I attended the process mapping workshop with Azmi and I’m still very early in the journey to enlightenment. Systems Thinking has however brought a new ‘waste aware’ lens to my life and given weight and depth to my customer-centric intuition. So for that I’m very grateful.

Anyway, to the main point of the message. I receive various industry journals one of which (”Call Centre Focus”) has an article this month entitled “Dying to Help”. It chronicles the very sad case of France Telecom, where 24 members of staff have committed suicide in 18 months. The latest victim - a 51-year old contact centre worker - caused the company to halt its re-organisation, suspend the programme’s mastermin, and scrap staff performance indicators in its call centres.

As a response, that sounds like a potentially decent start by the company (albeit late - why the previous 23 deaths didn’t cause alarm isn’t covered in the article).

That however, is the only modicum of good news. The rest of the article is given over to tips and suggestions for agents to deal with stress in the contact centre. Let me list them for you:

1. Learn to manage your time more effectively
2. Adopt a healthy lifestyle
3. Know your limitations
4. Find out what causes you stress
5. Avoid unnecessary conflict
6. Accept the things you can’t change
7. Take time out to relax & recharge your batteries
8. Find time to meet friends
9. Try to see things differently, develop a positive thinking style
10. Avoid alcohol, nicotine and caffeine as coping mechanisms

In other words, an entire article focused on the 5% (the people) and no mention of the 95% (the system). There’s a passing hint that maybe helping employees deal with stress might be treating the symptom rather than the cause: “communicate context and purpose to employees”, “…as a manager you are responsible for peoples’ workload and their feelings of satisfaction…”

But there’s no mention - and I suspect no understanding - of the need to work on the system. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s nevertheless quite depressing when a supposed industry best practice magazine prints such a misinformed message.”

My reaction, maybe like yours, was to want to write a piece on the poor quality of this advice and how it’s in rife our organisations.But then I took a deep breath and thought ‘no, be helpful, what should the contact centre have done?’

1. Study the nature of demand and response. I suspect that much of the problem is that there is a high volume of failure demand calls (calls caused by a failure of the system to do the right thing for the customer).

There’s a simple logic here, if you give people crappy work to do their life will be crappy. And having customers moan complain and shout at you will certainly ruin your day. Prolong that and you will soon become tired, angry and depressed.

And to make matters worse…what if in addition to being shouted at you are unable to help? This is a common issue in service organisations. The system is designed (not deliberately) so that the agent can’t do what matters to the customer.

And then just to tip the agent over the edge they will get a 1:1 from their manager asking why they’d not hit their call targets. Here’s an example, I needed to transfer money from my business bank account to my personal account last week. My passkey had broken. Despite the fact that the bank knows more personal stuff about me than my wife does, the agent couldn’t help.

She told me that I should have had my accounts linked, I responded by telling her that I’d completed 4 forms and that accounts hadn’t been changed. I ended the call and we were both disgruntled; me because I didn’t get what I wanted, her because she was disempowered.

2. Act on the system . Having understood the main types of failure as well as transactions where the agent was unable to add value guess what the manager should do? You got it; fix it, it’s not difficult really.

The problem is that fixing the system requires an admission from the manager that their thinking about the design and management of the work is the problem. And that it’s likely that this thinking is ubiquitous in the organisation.

So change requires that managers get knowledge about how the work works (or doesn’t) and then learn to give up their ideas about managing top down, using service standards, targets and incentives within a functional design.

Look this is really important. If you want change you can get it, fast. And it’s easy, get knowledge about the work, use the knowledge to make change and then find out if what you have changed has made things better. Then repeat.

Though I do have to say that I think an industry sector magazine could give better advice than ‘find time to meet friends, and avoid alcohol’, that’s weak, they should have said ‘drink more!’

So let’s finish with some good news of people we helped to do it the right way. The roads department of the City of Edinburgh Council won the Guardian Public Sector Award for Frontline Engagement on Tuesday night; you can read their story here.

Also Alison Angus who worked as part of the team who made the change tells how they did it in the interview I did with her last night. Click here and listen or download for listening on your MP3 player.

——————————————————————————————

Finally I want to thank the 198 people who have bought the system that Ron and I put together for call centre sector improvement.

Here’s some feedback from those who’ve seen the system:

If you want to improve service, morale and reduce costs, you’d better get this system” - John Seddon

“A simple and effective yet powerful guide to service improvement” - Steve Thomson, Marketing Manager Edinburgh

“If you have any interest at all in making life better for your customers and staff, you need this system” - David Steen, Service Centre Manager, Wilmslow

As per usual, if you have questions about change in the service sector email me directly. If you have a comment about the blog. post it on the site.

Many Thanks
Stuart Corrigan

PS If you think a friend or colleague may like this blog please pass it on.

Posted in Measures, Change Management, Motivation, Service Failure, leadership, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Change Management Strategies:Top Tips for Building a Strategy

November 20th, 2009

STOP PRESS:

Once you’ve got your free MP3, check out what I have for you at the end of this blog.

You’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve managed to twist the arm of a business guru so you can get some top tips on building a strategy. Robin Field, ex Chairman and CEO of Filofax, was for many years, the business partner of Richard Koch. Richard wrote two best selling strategy books, ‘Smart Strategy, and The Financial Times Guide to Strategy’.

Robin worked alongside Richard, to turn around failing businesses. In 1998 Robin took charge of Filofax. At the time it was a dying business and its shares were trading at 30p per share. Within one year he turned the business around and during its floatation the shares changed hands for £2.10 per share with a return on investment of 27%

In this short interview Robin explains:

  • Why CEO’s should work on only the vital issues in a business
  • How to build your strategy from the customer backwards
  • The 3 most important activities when taking over as a new manager
  • The exact strategy he used to turn around Filofax (you’ll kick yourself when you hear it, it’s so simple)
  • What goes wrong in the handover of a business that involves family members
  • How being lazy is a great attribute for running a business and running your life. Yep, less work with more success!

I believe that this is an interview you’ll want to keep and play at your next team meeting. To download it just go to this page, right click on the link then select ’save target as’.

Download the MP3 Interview here

I truly hope that you get value from the recording. I also have an interview lined up with Jim Mather, the Scottish Minister for Enterprise. If you have a question you’d like me to put to him please mail me directly at stuart@vanguardscotland.co.uk with ‘minister’s question’ in the subject line.

Now listen up, I have something truly unique for you

Over the past 11 years that I have been using the Vanguard method I have kept detailed notes of how to apply it within service organisations. Every time the method was upgraded either by myself or another member of the Vanguard team I made a note.

Eighteen months ago I started to document in sequential detail exactly how to use our method to turn around a failing organisation, or make an already good organisation great.

The book was ready to launch in July but having read it, John Seddon, Vanguard’s chairman, asked me not to release the book. In his view it simply gave away too many of our secrets.

Since July I’ve literally begged (on your behalf) to be allowed to give you a copy. John agreed on the condition that I customise the book. So I had Ron Skea, our call centre expert, make the examples in the book specific to service centres.

But the good news is that book applies to any service organisation (except of course project environments).

So don’t let me down. I’ve promised John that those who bought the entire system would not pass it around or steal our ideas. Though you are free to use the information to dramatically improve service, slash your costs, boost morale and for those in the private sector, vastly improve your competitive advantage.

The system actually comes with three e-books that show you how to complete the check, plan and implementation stages of a change programme. There are templates for gathering demand, and process mapping. You also get the whole thing in MP3. And there are bonuses!

It’s available from Monday. If you register before the launch you get a 50% discount, just

click this link.

And if you’re worried that for the price of a visit to the cinema you get no value from the system, it comes with a guarantee of a full refund.

You have until Monday to register for the 50% offer, after that I release it to the market.

And when we do other versions of the book, you get free updates for life “mine not yours”.

Many Thanks

Stuart Corrigan

Posted in Strategy, Change Management, leadership, Creating Value | Comments Off

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