Successful Customer Outcomes – are you delivering (or are you part of the problem?)

Simply put everything an organization does, from the tasks and activities through to strategy should be explicitly linked with a Successful Customer Outcome.

Say you are in the Accident and Emergency at your local hospital? How much of what is actually happening is contributing to the well being of the patients? At a recent family crisis as a visitor I managed my stress by doing a time and motion study (sad I know). Over 48 hours I sampled activity and tasks, and albeit not scientific (it was hardly a controlled environment) it produced an interesting profile:

Sample size 256.

I would suggest an interesting stat in there is the time with the patient (7%).

If we assumed the objective of going through the process (the Successful Customer Outcome) is to make people better how much time is really spent doing that? How much time is spent on tasks and activities which may not directly contribute to that?

All our jobs involve us in tasks and activities which may not directly contribute to the SCO – how many of those could be released to spend more time achieving the desired outcome? It might not be 93% but it is one helluva a lot.In this example we would reduce costs, improve morale of overworked nurses and enhance the customer experience. Who wouldn’t want that?

How can you do that?

There is no excuse for complexity.

There is no excuse for complexity. It is a consequence of muddled thinking and a lack of understanding of the true goal of the organization, which is creating Successful Customer Outcomes.

Complexity has developed as organizations have added new routes to market, new ways of delivering service, new enterprise IT systems and a myriad of improvement approaches. Each internal functional specialism has developed a mindset to optimize their part of the organization, sometimes at the expense of others. The unwieldy complexity that results has caused a reaction primarily aimed at the need to create order out of this chaos, as if accepting that complexity itself as a right to be. This is not so. Let us unravel the muddle of complexity once and for all.

All work in an organization is fundamentally created by the need to provide product or service to the customer. Everything else is a consequence of that need, which creates value for the shareholders and creates a livelihood for the work force. All else follows.

Furthermore all interactions in meeting the needs for customers are the cause of all work within an organization. These interactions, or Moments of Truth[i], create work in so far as we need to attend to a request internally.

In doing so we interact with our colleagues, systems and other internal processes, and create internal Moments of Truth, which can be referred to as Breakpoints[ii]. The way we deal with Moments of Truth and Breakpoints is underpinned by Business Rules[iii] which may be thought of as ‘decision points within processes’.

These three entities determine the shape of our organization, the internal landscape of how we do work. The resulting activities from Moments of Truth, Breakpoints and Business Rules create the very processes themselves. In fact process is simply an effect caused by the way we choose to interact and guide the customer to obtain our products or service.

Think about that – process is an effect. If that is the reality then the vast range of tools and techniques created in the last century, and sometimes before, are fixing an effect. It is like taking painkillers for discomfort and nothing more. If we are not getting to grips with the causes of the pain it will surely get worse and as we discover, stronger pain killers are then required.

That’s the rub. We have been systematically fixing the wrong things and is it any wonder that change doesn’t stick? Have you ever had that feeling that this is the same project challenge as before, just dusted off and here we go again? It is because we are not fixing the causes of work, and while we continue to ignore the causes the complexity worsens, costs increase and service suffers.

Einstein put it well when he said
“We can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”

CPP Masters Advance release of 2014 program (book now at EARLY BIRD prices)

INFOGRAPHIC: Process Excellence State of the Industry 2013-2014 (from PEX)

  • Where are the hot new areas for process excellence?
  • What tools and approaches are companies using?
  • How can you maximize the results from your process excellence program?
We may be in San Francisco this week at the BPM Summit however our minds are turning to the Annual PEX Florida event in January in Orlando. As ever the PEX network are keeping their finger on the pulse and have produced this enormously useful Infographic.

Every two years, PEX Network undertakes
a State of the Industry research project to better understand general trends in how companies are approaching operational excellence.  This infographic summarizes the results of our 2013-2014 benchmarking survey.
Download this infographic to find out key trends in approaches, projects, budgets, and investment plans in process excellence for the year ahead.
And don’t forget to stay tuned for the release of our State of the Industry report in the coming weeks!
For more information about PEX Week 2014 or to book your place please get in touch in one of of the following ways:
Call: +1 646 378 6026/ +44 (0) 207 036 1300
Email: enquire@pexnetwork.com

BPM Celebrities in San Francisco next week

PEX BPM Summit USA San Francisco

Global Top BPM Speakers

   Michael Brown
Michael Brown
Director, Process Improvement and Service Quality
TD CanadaTrust
   Clay Richardson
Clay Richardson
Principal Analyst
Forrester Research
   Atul Bhatt
Atul Bhatt
Vice President, Business Architecture
Wells Fargo
   Carol Guedez
Carol Guedez
Global Head, Quality & Efficiency
Orange Business Services
   Mallikarjun Angalakudati
Mallikarjun Angalakudati
Director, Meter-to-Cash Process
National Grid
   Matthew Morgan
Matthew Morgan
Head of Business Systems & Improvement
Bridgewater Associates
   Vinod Jain
Vinod Jain
Vice President, Transformation Strategist
BNY Mellon
   Paul Harmon
Paul Harmon
Executive Editor, Business Process Trends
Chief Methodologist, BPTrends Associates
   Elizabeth Johnson
Elizabeth Johnson
Director, Process
Capital One Bank
   John B. Bertolet
John B. Bertolet
Director, Global Process Management
Schneider Electric
   Richard Whitehead
Richard Whitehead
Chief Operating Officer
CSL Software Solutions Inc
   Ian Clayton
Ian Clayton
Author USMBOK™ , Senior Vice President, Operations
G2G3 Americas
   Adam Golden
Adam Golden
Principal and Founder
Major Oak Consulting
   Steve Towers
Steve Towers
SVP and Founder
BPGroup.org
   Lawrence D. (Larry) Duckworth
Lawrence D. (Larry) Duckworth
Principal
BusinessExcel, LLC Author of Primordial Leadership©
   Dan Roberts
Dan Roberts
Director of Product Marketing
Software AG
   Neil Nobie

Neil Nobie
BPM Practice Leader
KEDARit

Download the Agenda

 

The Science of the Customer Experience

The new site featuring Customer Experience has gone live: http://www.cxrating.com

You can access and download the resources that will provide an overview of the value of becoming scientific about the Customer Experience. Meanwhile Customer Experience Mapping gets a kick in the pants as we integrate ABACUS (the BPGroup toolkit) to demonstrate a generic process across several channels.