Process Design – Page 12 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 1, 2021

Bank Holiday thinking

One of the things I love about Bank Holidays is that I get to spend a whole day reading. I’m halfway through this book and there’s already interesting stuff in it.

One of the ideas I particularly like is that of ‘pure procedural justice’, where a process inevitably leads to the desired result (in this case, a ‘fair’ one), and where the desired result can be projected beforehand according to criteria that are independent of the process applied.

Pure procedural justice is rare, unless you are dealing with a simple outcome, such as dividing a cake up equally, but it does seem to be a useful way of approaching process design:

What outcome do I want?
How could I define it before I run any process designed to achieve it?
How can I design a process so that I will inevitably achieve the outcome I want?
How could I measure the outcome independently of the process?

For processes that involve human beings, part of the answer is to abstract the desired outcome. Rather than trying to list out every possible acceptable outcome, instead you define the characteristics of a set of possible outcomes each of which would be acceptable, even though you have no way of knowing what they are, or which you will actually get as a result of any particular run-through of the process.

That’s what your Promise of Value is for, to help you define those characteristics.

May 26, 2021

Rearranging deckchairs

Before you cut costs in your central department of government or business by removing a job it currently does, here’s a good question to ask:

Can we remove the need for this job completely?

If the answer to that is ‘No’, then ask these:

Who is best placed to do this job effectively and efficiently?
What resources do we need to shift along with the responsibility?
What resources will they need to set themselves up to do this job?

I’m all for devolution. The closer to the front line the better, but too often ‘devolution’ merely means shifting where the work is accounted for without shifting the resources needed to get it done.

When you’re looking for real efficiency gains, shuffling deckchairs is rarely the best answer.

May 18, 2021

Good tools

A good process is like a favourite tool.

You know the kind of thing I mean – that ladle you reach for first because it feels right, holds plenty, pours without dripping and washes up easily. Or that favourite saw, that is somehow just easier to work with, even though it’s old and a bit battered.

Often, what makes a good tool work brilliantly is exactly what makes it beautiful. It’s obvious what it’s for, and how it should be used. It’s comfortable to work with, easy to maintain.

Good tool designs are timeless, yet it’s often clear that an individual has crafted them and/or worked with them. They allow for a little personal finessing.

A good tool, like a good process, is one you’re happy to use every day.

It’s one you’re willing to keep in good order, so you can have it to hand always. It’s a tool you’re proud to share, and proud to pass on when your work is done.

Good processes, like good tools, don’t make work, they enhance it.

May 17, 2021

Managing what matters

When you pay a traffic warden by the ticket, you’ve incentivised them to find the easy targets, not to prevent illegal parking, and certainly not to keep the roads safe for other users. Worse, you’ve incentivised them to pursue minor infractions over major ones.

That’s why my street is full of traffic wardens just before school opens and just after it closes. It’s why parents arrive 30 minutes before they need to in order to grab a legal parking space, wasting an hour a day just sitting in their cars. It’s also why everywhere else in my town centre remains plagued by illegal, inconsiderate and dangerous parking.

This kind of simplistic proxy for performance has become endemic, because its easy to measure. If you can say ‘I’ve hit target’, you’re off the hook as a person, a school, a company or a government department. Never mind that you’ve actually made life worse for everyone, and really dreadful for some.

What gets measured gets managed, they say. True.

So start with what you really want, then explore different, creative and possibly multiple ways to measure whether you’re achieving it.

The answer’s unlikely to be a simple tally. And you may just come up with a completely new approach to the problem.

May 5, 2021

Superficiality

I had my blood test yesterday. Ahead of me in the queue was an angry (not rude) man. He’d waited 2 weeks for his appointment and taken time off work to attend, only to be told “You’re not on our list”.

Testing was a pretty efficient set-up, with 3 people taking samples for 3 people every 5 minutes, so they were able to fit him in.

During my turn I asked what had gone wrong.

“It’s the call centre”, I was told. ‘They send us about 30 people a day, who aren’t on our list of appointments. Sometimes for appointment times that are already taken. Sometimes for children who shouldn’t even be sent here – we can’t handle children here. We do our best to fit people in, but we can’t always do that. It wastes everybody’s time and makes our job miserable. We’ve tried to tell the call centre, but we don’t have the authority.”

On the face of it, centralised booking for several different units at different hospitals should be more efficient. A small team can handle more volume more efficiently, saving costs across all units.

But this only works if the central team are a) incentivised to produce a satisfactory outcome of the entire process; b) have all the information they need, when they need it, to do that job properly, and c) use feedback from people further down the line to improve how it works.

Otherwise all you’ve added to the process is a silo that increases real costs for everyone involved.

There’s a more fundamental error that’s been made here. The people delivering a service should be in control of the customer experience of that service. Either by managing the end-to-end process themselves, or being a key player in its design and continuous improvement.

But I’m guessing that customer experience was probably the last thing on the mind of whoever came up with this, along with a genuine interest in efficiency. Superficial gains were enough for them.

It shows.

April 29, 2021

Footpaths

Processes for people should be more like a footpath than a railway track.

Footpaths allow for more sensitivity to a change in conditions, or a productive diversion, for heavier or lighter traffic.

As long as you all end up in the right place, with the right feeling, it’s good.

Well-worn means you’ve probably got it right, but there’s no need to set that in stone.

April 28, 2021

Security

A child, confident that her parent will be there when she needs them, is willing to leave their side, to explore and try new things. This is how she learns to be independent. Having an anchor you can rely on is important.

Children put into a big space and simply asked to play stay close together more or less where they’re put. If, however they are told there are boundaries to their space, and where those boundaries are, they range more widely in their play – often right up to the boundaries. Some of them may even test how firm those boundaries are. This is how children learn to be creative. Boundaries are important.

I’m not sure I’d want my business to behave literally like a family, but it is possible to give it some of the same structure to create a community. Your Promise of Value and the processes that are driven by it are both anchor and boundaries. Everyone can fall back on the anchor in times of stress, and push the boundaries of the system when they’re feeling adventurous.

In the space between, let them play.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

April 20, 2021

Appropriate Technologies

The internet is a wonderful technology. For instance, I’ve just bought an antique dining table with a few clicks and couple of phone calls. Not so long ago, it would have been impossible to find it, never mind buy it so easily.

The telephone is still great technology. In combination with the internet, it can be wonderful. Yesterday I booked an X-ray with just one phone call. A human being answered and booked me in. I updated my online diary as we spoke. Job done for both of us.

Yesterday, I also tried to book a blood test. Same NHS trust, different department. This time I got an automated answer offering the option of a long wait in a queue or to be sent an online form. I chose the online form. A link was sent to my phone. I followed it and completed the form. So far so good, if a little clunky.

But as soon as I’d submitted it, the form was gone. No email, no text, not even an acknowledgement of receipt. It’s gone into a black hole. I don’t know when it might be reasonable to try again. I have no record that I filled it in at all.

In other words, as far as I’m concerned, it didn’t work.

Adding the internet doesn’t automatically make for wonderful. What’s really needed is appropriate technology. Whatever makes the job easier for everyone.

Choosing it takes empathy.

April 8, 2021

Not like. The same

Sometimes, a process that looks like it could be a pattern isn’t.

If the same thing happens in the same way every time, and it’s performed by the same Role using the same Props, then what you have isn’t processes that are alike. You have the same process, repeated exactly as part of several larger processes.

As an example, take dealing with a visitor to your office. Often this is the responsibility of a particular Role. They greet the visitor, take their coat, show them to a waiting area and offer them a drink. It makes no difference why the visitor is here, what happens afterwards or who deals with them next, the process is exactly the same whether the visitor is a client, a prospective employee or a tax inspector.

In this case, it’s better to define the process once, and include it in the Customer Experience Score wherever it occurs. You could call it ‘Receive Guest’, define it the first time you identify it (for example as part of your ‘Enroll Prospect’ process) then refer to it elsewhere (for example, in Handle Tax Inspection, Recruit Team Member, Hold Social Event).

Identical twins, triplets, even quintuplets are a wonderful thing in humans. We don’t mind that they make more work because they’ll each grow to be unique human beings.

You don’t want them in your Customer Experience Score though. The extra work they create there is pointless.

April 7, 2021

Pattern vs Catch-all

When designing your Customer Experience Score, you often uncover processes that follow a specific pattern.

For example, you want a client to have a similar experience every time you request information from them – perhaps you send an email, then immediately follow up with a phone call or a text, or both. Perhaps you call, then follow up with an email. After a while, you might remind the client if they haven’t responded. There might be a limit to the number of times you do that.

However you want the experience to be, you want that experience to be consistent across all the information requests you might make, so it’s tempting to lump all these different processes intoa single catch-all process.

That’s a mistake. Although the pattern is the same, each individual process turns out to be slightly different. The information being requested is different, the purpose is different, the priority, urgency and timescales may be different. The Roles involved may be different. The Props will definitely be different.

These differences will out, and somewhere in the depths of what looks like a simple process, you’ll end up having to include some way of spelling out what actually happens in each case. It usually involves a complicated list of “If you’re dealing with A, do B; if you’re dealing with C, do D;…”

And so on.

The key is to remember why you’re writing your Customers Experience Score, which is to enable someone else in your team to perform the process as well as or better than you. That is best achieved by making each process self-containedly easy to follow, without cluttering it up with decisions about alternative possibilities.

When Google gives you directions for getting from your house to that beauty spot you love, it gives you full directions for each and every route, even though most will start with the same turn out of your street, and end with the same turn into your destination. Imagine trying to find your way with directions that say “If you’re following route A, turn right at the next roundabout. If you’re following Route B proceed straight across. If you’re following Route C, turn right.”

You’d take longer, annoy fellow drivers along the way, and probably get lost a few times. You might even give up and go home. That’s the last thing you want your team to do when they’re delivering your Promise to clients.

A pattern is a pattern, nothing more. Use it to design in consistency that reinforces your Promise of Value.

A catch-all, on the other hand, makes everyone work harder, for no extra benefit.