Excited about process? You should be...
The Situation
The client enjoys a market leading and deserved reputation for customer focus.
It had recently created a Customer Service & Operations division to provide all back office fulfilment activity across its key product range through +/- 5000 FTE and multiple sites.
Through its forming stage, it became clear that cost and processing efficiencies were needed with a culture of continuous improvement helping to enhance business performance and customer satisfaction.
The Task
From the divisional director and across the divisional leadership team, there was an appetite to become a process led organisation, leading the business deployment of lean service thinking while delivering in year financial benefits.
The new process excellence function, that I was tasked to create, had three key objectives. First to create a sustainable, professional corporate capability. Second, to demonstrate the value of process thinking and avoid the marginal cost of buying in expertise. Third, to develop ‘one best way’ that removed the hidden costs of multiple approaches and methods of process management. In essence, the task was to design, develop and deploy a Process Excellence team including its people, practices and budgets while engaging business leaders, turning them from stakeholders into advocates for the new approach.
The Action / Approach
Based on the purpose of the new team, I first set out what we needed to be great at. This enabled a quick focus on what really mattered. It included capability development & education, change inception & assessment, process management, process insight & root cause analysis and finally, solution design.
Then a number of key tasks / activities were identified and mobilised to simply bring the team to life. This included launching Process Owner Teams, establishing a Process Change & Design Authority, creating a dashboard of key process metrics, formalising root cause analysis, creating a pipeline of continuous improvement ideas while communicating across the division and executive relationship building.
In particular, like many other businesses, I identified the client had so much data, it was suffering from ‘wood for trees’ myopia. An exercise of simplification in partnership with the divisional heads resulted in key measures relating to flow, timings and experience being adopted while understanding the impacts of failures, defects, overheads and controls. A deep appreciation of what ‘normal’ looked like enabled rapid attention to emerging problems.
All of these actions relied on capable, energised people. Strong, engaging leadership and effective communication was a given, but specifically reviewing process and lean training was identified as an early area of opportunity. I also established organisation wide process collaboration through a “Process Hub’ and to help the development of colleagues at all levels, I introduced an easy to use Continuous Improvement Toolkit.
The Result
Within the limitations of client confidentiality, it is the case that multi million pound benefits were identified and delivered in year.
Divisional thinking about change & improvement was radically refreshed. Impact analysis was formally implemented and effective prioritisation took place, enabling the deployment of Agile practices in the IT division
Divisional understanding about in flight and pipeline change was massively enhanced. Duplication of initiatives and activities was effectively reduced to zero.
Colleagues were engaged, enthused and empowered, evidenced through top quartile engagement survey outcomes.
The dashboard approach, which was described as game changing by the Chief Executive was deployed organisation wide.
