How long have you been providing service in the field? Have you grown through mergers and acquisitions? Do you have different processes in different regions or lines of business? These are some of the typical questions I ask when I engage with a customer. The answers are often shocking to the customer since nobody has ever asked them these things before.
Let’s face it, we all have a job and it usually isn’t contemplating the vast universe or how we ended up here. And when I say here I mean at this point in our companies evolution. The truth is that most businesses grow organically. They start small and grow as the business needs change. This is the most common way that a business grows but much like a plant growing in your garden, if you don’t have a plan you may end up with something far different than what you intended.
When a business starts out small there are people that know everything there is to know about the business and all of its facets and nuances. It’s easy since the number of moving parts is relatively small and can be easily comprehended by the folks who started the ball rolling.
The challenge is that as the business needs grow the standard solution is to throw more bodies on the fire and keep piling them on to stay up with demand.
This is a recipe for disaster since the intimate knowledge of the business that was held by the few doesn’t scale. This problem is compounded if there are any mergers or acquisitions considering the other company probably did the same thing as they grew.
It’s not uncommon for me to engage with a customer that has many different business units that they inherited as part of a buyout or merger and they run them as separate operations. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as it meets the true business needs of the company overall. But has anybody actually analyzed both the new business unit and the old business unit with a critical eye? Have they asked the hard questions? Are we currently doing it right? Will this process scale to the next level? What best practices can we glean from the new entity? Is it time to do a redesign?
The fact of the matter is that in the majority of cases this type of introspective review is usually only done at the highest level in the company and it stops there until something fails and when it does all hell usually breaks loose. There is never time to do it right but there’s plenty of time to do it over and over and over. So how do you prevent this from happening? Simple. Plan a little.
Now it is said that the best battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy and that’s as true today as it was with Napoleon but it never hurts to put the framework for success in place early. I’m always surprised when I start asking questions and a customer replies, “That’s the first time anybody’s ever asked that…” The simple truth is that most of us are too busy doing our job to take a step back and do any analysis of the current situation with an eye on a redesign. The fact that this redesign is critical to future success usually slips by unnoticed.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you need a complete redesign of your processes but maybe a nip here and a tuck there would help. If that’s not going to fix it then we are probably looking at major surgery which usually saves the patient and allows them to go on and live a long and fruitful life.
Only you can decide how far you push the change but you need to consider a few things as part of that decision. How much change can my organization tolerate? Can I put a plan together and execute it in phases? Will my existing systems, processes and people be able to support these proposed changes? And possibly the most important question of all: What don’t I know that I’m assuming I do?
I have been told that one statement I have made to customers in the past is very blunt: If we automate your current bad process you will simply have a faster bad process. I’m not trying to be blunt (or some folks use other words to describe me), I’m making an important point.
If I automate your current process but that process won’t support your business growth or current and future challenges you are wasting your time, money and people. Let’s use this opportunity to put a game plan together about where we are and how we got here (often the overlooked part of the equation) and where we need to be based on the business needs.
Can we quantify any of this required change in business terms? Will it improve billing cycles? Can I reduce stock on hand with real time data to and from the field? Can I improve my first time closure rate on service calls? Will my employees be happier? How can this change positively impact my customers? Can I use this as a competitive advantage? Could I possibly take that vacation to Disney World with the family?
Here’s my suggestion: Get the key stakeholders in a room (managers and a representative sample of staff and field folks) and start asking what works and what needs to be improved. You will be shocked at what you hear but keep dialogue in this session as open as possible.
Your managers have one perspective on what is going on but your staff and field folks are where reality meets the road. The things your people are doing to get the job done are a testament to their tenacity and the level of brokenness of your processes. When the process doesn’t support a successful outcome your staff will work around it because nobody has ever asked them to help fix it.
Once you engage your team to help with the plan you create change agents within the organization. In a past life I used to hate hearing the words “we’re from corporate and we’re here to help…” because I knew that what corporate thought was going on was usually far from reality.
By drafting your internal folks to help fix the system they become champions of that change and can do a great job steering the rest of your employees in the right direction. They will have pride of ownership in the new processes since they helped to put them in place and will always have the best interest of your customers at heart. And let’s face it, having happy customers is why we are here in the first place isn’t it?
Tags: Brian Philbin, Business Process, Field Service, Mobile Futures Today, Process Redesign
