Too Much on Your Plate?

You're a busy executive, and you want to be effective and powerful, creating positive change in your organization. But lately it seems that there's just too much to do. There aren't enough hours in the day, and you never see your family because of all the work-life balance seminars you've been attending.

Here are a few time-management morsels for you to chew on, as you struggle to bite off the daunting pile that's on your daily plate:

1. Can We Just Stop Doing It? When a problem arises, we often add additional tasks, approvals, reporting, and steps to our processes to deal with that problem. Then, when the problem goes away, we keep on doing those extra steps forever even though they're adding no value. One executive had started personally reviewing all purchase orders when his company was in financial crisis, but had continued this practice even after the crisis had long passed and the system had been dramatically improved. The reviews were cumbersome, acted as a bottleneck, and didn't add any value, but he kept on doing it. Then he stopped, freeing up hours of his time each week, and eliminating the bottleneck.
2. Can We Change How We Do It? You've prided yourself on always answering your phone quickly, to show that you're focused on your customer and on providing good service. Unfortunately, you end up constantly being interrupted, even during meetings and important matters that need your undivided attention. The loss of productivity is huge, but you've "always done it this way!" One sales executive was able to go from frantic to calm, simply by training himself to turn off his phone (yes OFF, not Vibrate) and turn off his computer (yes OFF), when he needed to focus. He was shocked at how quickly people adapted to his slightly slower responses, and at how much more he could get done in a day.
3. Can We Do It In a Different Order? One work process required an initial two-minute approval, a walk to the photocopier, then some additional work by another department, then another three-minute approval. The result was three little inboxes, with three little piles of work waiting for the next step, and three little handoffs. Some minor changes allowed the photocoying to be included in a previous step, and allowed the two approvals to be combined into one three-minute approval. This saved one little inbox, one little pile of waiting work, one little handoff, and some walking. Multiplied by a hundred repetitions a week, this saved the approving manager an estimated five hours a week.
4. Can Someone Else Do It? A small insurance company would divert a certain type of policy to a senior manager rather than moving it through their regular process, because it needed "specialized knowledge". Since the manager was busy doing management stuff, these policies would sit and wait, weigh on his mind, and then he'd do a marathon session to get through it. By teaching the "specialized knowledge" to the people who did the regular policies, they were able to process these just as effectively, and without delays. The change saved hours each week for the manager, reduced failure demand on the regular staff - customers used to phone repeatedly to check progress on these special policies. Everybody won, including the customers.

Ask a few of these questions about all the tasks that you're juggling, and see if you can't free up a bit of time.

 
Good luck with what's on your plate.

One Gallon of Waste at the Hospital

"Do you remember that gallon of blah-blah-blah that I asked you to order last week? Do you know where it is?"

So started the conversation in the hospital ward, and the search began.

The file of paper requisition forms was searched.
The computer records were examined.
Two phone calls were made.
A search of the storage room was undertaken.
Thirty cabinet doors were opened and closed.
Another phone call was made.
Three people were asked if they'd seen the blah-blah-blah.
Two possibilities were suggested.
Two wild geese were chased.
Another staff arrived and said they thought it was back-ordered.
The computer records were examined again.
Two more phone calls were made.
The blah-blah-blah wasn't found.
A new requisition order was filled out.

This is just one gallon of waste, one tiny incident in the life of a busy hospital. This is one small example of how trivial our wastes can be.

This little incident won't even make the radar of management, won't be considered important in the grand scheme of things, but this is the stuff that drives people crazy. This is the stuff that contributes to error. This is the stuff that wastes time and money, day after day after day. This is what Lean, and 5S, and continuous improvement, and employee engagement is all about.

Why Not Drop Your Drawers?

9:37am Busy hospital ward. Drawer stuck shut. Three nurses banging, prying, pulling, sticking a ruler in - trying to get inside for supplies that are needed for one patient.

9:57am Three nurses still taking turns trying to open drawer. Lots of banging noise, reverberating through the entire ward.

9:58am Nurse calls Maintenance. Now two patients waiting for the supplies.

10:37am Maintenance staff arrives with large rolling toolbox, pulled off of another task. He dissassembles the cabinet to open it up. Cheers of relief.

10:38am Groans of dismay - the needed supplies are not in the drawer. Out of stock!

10:39am Nurses phone other wards and central supplies, searching for stock of needed items. Two patients still waiting. Three nurses still scrambling.

10:41am Another ward has four available ! Nurse leaves to go get two.

10:48am Nurse returns with two; staff disperses to treat patients.

11:03am Maintenance completes the reassembly of the cabinet.

11:05am Conversation between maintenance and a nurse indicates that this is the "second time that drawer's been stuck shut. Somebody should do something about it. But nobody will! (Laughter)"

All of this waste adds nothing to the patient experience - it makes it worse. It adds nothing to the staff's experience, other than chaos and frustration. It costs money, disrupts care, and interrupts the flow of the daily work.

Many nursing stations are nicely equipped with cabinetry, complete with drawers and cupboards to neatly tuck things away, out of sight. And, most drawers and cabinets are packed with outdated useless stuff that make it hard to know what you have, what you don't have, and what you should have.

What if, instead, they had open shelves, with clear visual markings to show what and how many of each item should be there, when and how to reorder - the visual world of Lean 5S.

Sometimes you need to remove your doors and drop your drawers to improve the daily work.

A Little Recycling Incident at the Hospital

The nurse was pushing a wheelchair with a garbage bin full of cardboard on it. As she passed the seating area where I was waiting and reading a book, she asked another nurse "What do you do with your recycling?" As she saw hesitation in the other's face, she quickly clarified "Do you recycle?"

The other laughed and said "We gave up - we didn't know what to do with it, so we just throw it out now."

A third nurse who was passing by volunteered, "We've been putting it in the garbage room in a big clear plastic bag."

"Does it get recycled?" asked the first.

"I'm not sure, but since the bag is clear, we figured they could see what was in it so they wouldn't just throw it out."

The three spent a few more minutes speaking, hoping that it would get recycled and wishing for a better system, then the first nurse found a clear bag, put the cardboard in it, and left it, pushing the now-empty garbage bin on the wheelchair back to her ward. I don't think anyone will ever know if this particular cardboard actually ended up recycled or tossed, but it was well-intentioned.

People try to do what's right. Sometimes they give up when it seems futile, when there's no system, when it doesn't seem worth the effort any more. Sometimes they pesist, continuing to try and ask around, working with others to try to find a solution. And sometimes they innovate and just start doing something, anything, in an attempt to solve the problem with hopes that it will be successful.

It may seem obvious, but management needs to foster these messy little initiatives - creating an environment and providing support for people to make their own jobs better and better, day by day.

Three Lessons from a Client Visit

At a high-end high-tech firm, a complex project for a large client had gone sour. An emergency trip was arranged for the three most-involved and most-knowledgeable technical staff to go to the client site in an attempt to get the project back on the rails. With one senior technical lead and two junior technicians, they were to clarify the issues, do some in-depth testing and diagnostics, and attempt to come up with a solution during the three-day onsite visit. The meeting was arranged, flights and accomodations were booked and the agenda finalized.

Shortly before the trip, the project manager for these services initiated a conversation with the client's project manager and, out of the blue, decided to:

1. Reschedule the meeting for a day earlier, adding $1,200 to each of three plane tickets, and
2. Change who was going, removing the lead technical person, the one guy knew the most about the issues and most likely to come up with the solution. In his place, they sent a new services manager who had been with the company less than a week. The reason given was so that the client could "put a face to the name" of this new manager.

Since the lead technical person would have driven the entire trouble-shooting project, teaching and guiding the other two, the visit ended up being completely unproductive. Management arranged numerous meetings for the three visitors to meet and greet key people, several long lunches and meeting were held, and zero progress was made on the technical issues. The technical people were completely frustrated and disillusioned.

The service manager and project manager reassured the client that they were "taking the problem very seriously" and were "doing everything possible to find a solution" and were quite proud and vocal about how good the optics were that we "sent a high-level team down to address your issues".  So, the client was able to put a face to the name of the new services manager, but changed the name of the company to "mud," as the technical problem was almost completely ignored on this trip.

Three management mistakes in this scenario, and three resulting lessons to learn:

1. Managers didn't respect the Gemba. Managers need to support the people who are doing the actual, customer-focused, value-added work. In Lean terminology, this is the Gemba, the place where the real work happens. The customer needed a technical intervention, this should have been a technical trip, and the team should have been a technical team. Management face-time is important, but not at the expense of actually solving customer problems and meeting customer needs. This change was disrespectful to the technical team, disrespectful to the customer, and put management wants ahead of the Gemba, of the real work.

2. Managers imposed decisions on workers. The workers were trying to solve a technical problem. The project had anticipated some problems and there was budget for technical trips like this. The client and the technical staff agreed that further remote trouble-shooting wouldn't get them anywhere (they'd been trying to solve this problem remotely for several weeks with no success). Management unilaterally changed this to a management visit, making the trip completely ineffective, and stretching out the customer problem even further. Damage to morale within the technical staff was huge.

3. Managers created barriers, rather than removing them. Effective managers work to consult with staff, and remove barriers, provide resources and help workers get what they need to get the job done. In this case, the managers created barriers and literally prevented the work from being done. Top-down, command-and-control thinking is damaging and ineffective - there are better ways.

The problem remained unsolved for several more months, as this trip had eaten up the remaining travel budget for the project. Eventually, the crisis escalated enough to prompt a repeat trip with the original technical team. On that trip, they were able to solve the problem.

Look Ma, No Order Form

A mid-size national company prided itself on customer service. The company was willing to do things for its customers that larger competitors wouldn't do. They believed that their willingness to bend over backwards was the key to their success, and this was probably true. But it was also clear, based on employee suggestions, and very clear when looking in from the outside, that their almost religious commitment to being flexible was actually making their service worse in ways that management wasn't able to see.

As part of being flexible and offering good customer service, management refused to provide an order form for use by their customers. In this company, orders were received at a centralized sales center from customers all across the country. This company, with one hundred million dollars annual sales, prided itself on accepting orders in whatever format the customers wanted to send them. So, their customers would place orders by phone, fax, email or online, in free-form text, with whatever information they wanted to include, differing from order to order and from customer to customer. There were no guidelines, no attempts at standardization. When asked about the possibility of providing an order form to help streamline the order process, management's response was "There's no way we'd do that to our customers. We believe in good customer service!"

So, some orders would list specific product codes, others would describe a product in words, others would say "same as last order", despite the fact that six different people from that customer site might order product and it was rarely clear which "last order" they were referring to. Some orders might include desired shipping dates and delivery methods, others would not. Some orders might include a purchase order or payment method, others would not. Many would have incomplete addresses or contact information, or would miss some other key pieces of information that were necessary to process the order.

So, on many, many orders, the Service Agents would have to call back, clarify, guess, interpret, assume, look up information, and fill in the gaps that customers left when submitting their orders. Fully one quarter of each Service Agent's day was taken up with trying to complete and clarify missing and required information on incoming orders. They would inevitably have to involve the customer in this process, often repeatedly, in order to resolve all the issues.

How much easier would it have been for the customers, and for the Service Agents, if the customers knew up front what information was necessary when placing an order; if they had a simple, straightforward order form to guide them? Customer service would have been much smoother, with less telephone tag and back-and-forth communication.

This company was certainly successful, but they could have been so much more successful, with a lot less stress and busywork. In their mind, good customer service meant "doing whatever it took to rework the customers' orders and fill in all the required information." This approach just ended up creating more work for both customers and Service Agents.

How much wasted effort could have been avoided with even a little bit of standardization?

How Many Calls Did You Handle Today?

The managers of a small internal call center tracked the number of calls handled each day. In efforts to improve customer service, pep talks and incentives were put in place to reward the team if they could increase the number of calls handled without increasing staff. It worked, and within a few months the same group was handling about twenty percent more calls. Success!

Unfortunately, some quick data collection about the purpose of each call revealed that about half of all the calls were not new orders but were calls to follow up on something that hadn't been thoroughly completed - checking for order status, looking for supporting paperwork, providing information missed on an earlier call, reporting an incorrect shipment, trying to find a person, or asking for copies of invoices. All of these demands on the call center were counted the same, a call is a call and they were handling more calls than ever before.

With the focus on increasing capacity, the customer service reps felt pressure and incentive to handle calls more quickly, and so they were. Not dramatically, but shaving a little time here and there on each call to try to speed things up. Unfortunately, this often resulted in less complete communication, a few details missed, and slightly incomplete understanding of customer needs - resulting in more calls that subsequently needed to be handled to fix things up. A similar focus on increasing and rewarding activity in specific departments existed throughout the company, and many of the calls were due to minor problems occuring throughout the organization. Since all outside communication flowed through the call center, it felt the impact of little glitches all over the company.

By tracking the type and frequency of calls, and working to improve the concrete little details in the call center and throughout the company that were contributing to all this failure demand, management was able to methodically reduce the churn, the customer service busy-work. Over a period of six months, the number of calls handled actually decreased, but this was because true customer service was improving significantly; customers were calling mostly to place new orders, rather than to follow up on previous calls. This kind of work never stops, and there is always further room for improvement.

All calls are not equal so don't bother just counting them. Look at which are new, valued calls and which are based on some previous little (or big) failure. Then work systematically to reduce the sources of the failures, throughout the company. That's the key to improving your customer service department.

Adam and the Auntie - Drama in the Bedroom Department

Adam works as a straight-commission salesperson in the electronics section of a home furnishing store. One day, he's visited by his Auntie who had just moved back to town. She's a looking to buy a new TV.

Now Adam he's a pretty good sales guy, and Auntie she's a trust him pretty good, so Auntie she ends up buying two TV's, a surround-sound audio system, and two full bedroom suites of furniture for her new place. Auntie's happy, Adam's happy.

But the manager, he's a not so happy.

It seems that Adam is only supposed to sell electronics, and as soon as beds and furniture are involved, somebody else should have made the sale. So the manager, he takes back the commission on the furniture to give to the salesman who works the bedroom department. Adam protests and argues and eventually they end up with a 60%/40% split, since he did all the work, the sale was largely because he was a relative, and the other sales person didn't do anything.

How counterproductive all this conflict and competition is. And how damaging to the team relationships. There are better ways to manage your sales staff.

Whose Point of View is more Important

A manager at a mobile phone provider was very proud of the service they offered, bragging about the improved call handling capacity of their help desk and sales people. He mentioned how effective their new approaches had been at improving the quality of their service, reducing average call length, increasing the number of calls handled per person per shift, improving call resolution.

Coincidentally, talked to a long-time customer of this company whose Blackberry had recently failed. She was trying to get a replacement device for the least amount possible. She faced a $500 plus expense for an immediate replacement, yet she would quality for a free replacement five more months into her contract. When I talked to her, she had logged eight calls and two visits to the store to try to find a palatable solution. Without success!

The store thought they were doing a great job; they were cheerfully, efficiently handling calls and providing accurate information. Yet the customer was on the verge of finding another supplier.

Ask yourself this - whose point-of-view is more relevant to the continuing success of your company? Yours? Or your customer's?

Another Night At The Theatre

A recent movie night started poorly, with frustration buying tickets online. The website was very slow, redirected us several times, and our first transaction failed half-way through the credit card processing, before we could print our tickets. We tried again, and after waiting through more slow screens, we were finally able to print our tickets. We were surprised to find we had purchased both tickets AND concession vouchers, which wasn't our intent.

In total, the purchase took about a half hour. Our hope was to avoid waiting in line at the theatre, instead we waited online, were frustrated online, ended up being double billed, ended up buying tickets AND vouchers, ended up having to cancel one of the transactions through our credit card company, and started our romantic night out in conflict with a faceless, frustrating technology.

Poor service!

Small Landlords Do More, Stress Less

A group of small landlords laments the difficulty in collecting past-due rent, or unpaid rent from tenants who abandon their suites. Questions arise - "How do I make a claim with provincial Rentalsman?", "Should I use collection agencies?", "Should I just write off the bad debt?", or "What can I do to collect it myself?"

Instead of focusing on collections, we shift to look at the bigger picture, at the system - "Why am I having to do collections?" "What is it about my renting methods that produces this problem of collections?"

Turns out that none of these small landlords do formal credit checks on rental applicants prior to signing leases. Turns out that a few retroactive credit checks on the delinquent tenants show they have very poor credit histories. Several landlords change their methods, and end up using formal credit checks of all applicants. The problem of collections dissappears for them. Changing the system, changing the method, allows them to handle a few more suites, make a little more profit, and do it with less effort and stress.

Overwhelmed by Failure Demand

A medical lab was having trouble keeping up with demand. Phone call check sheets showed that 60% of staff effort was dealing with “did you get my sample”, “when will it be ready” and “what’s the status of my sample?” questions. After reorganizing call handling and some work methods, this failure demand was eliminated and capacity naturally increased (and stress decreased!)

Standard Service Levels

We set up a standard service level for our software support team; all help calls were to be resolved within three days. It seemed to work as average times dropped dramatically. But, customers were still unhappy. It ended up that technicians were just closing the tickets after three days whether the problem was fixed or not. They’d open another ticket, or provide help off-the-record in order to meet the standard. We’d ignored the capacity of the system and set an arbitrary, unreachable target. The people did what they needed to do to survive in the impossible system we created. Now that we understand variation, failure demand, and system capacity, we’ve been able to to truly improve service, instead of just the numbers.