As noted before the majority of service organizations we’ve measured have mildly positive to negative Service Value, meaning they spend more time on their mistakes than they spend on their customers.
The best route to growing the value of your service organization is to pin down your Mission and to relentlessly grow the time and effort you devote to delivering your Mission-specified services to your customers.
You cannot do this as an abstraction—you have to engage the people who actually prepare and deliver your services to understand what works, what doesn’t, and your full panoply of improvement opportunities.
Meridian deploys a four step process for growing Service Value, comprising Mission, Work, Commitment, and Implementation.
Our process is differentiated by our commitment and ability to make people a more effective part of your Re-engineering process.
Mission
Mission describes the specific services you provide to your customers. Step one is to delineate your Mission—to make clear the services you exist to deliver to customers, whether internal or external to your organization. Mission is a moving target, evolving over time in response to changing taste and competitive pressures, but should be specific, clear, and executable at any point in time. This is not an involved exercise—most organizations have some sense of mission, though all find value in succinctly re-visiting their mandate before remaking their service operations.
Work
It’s amazing how difficult it is to really understand what everyone does each day. Sure there are job descriptions, but do these artifacts actually describe day-to-day reality? In most cases hardly!
The key to holding productive discussion about work is to focus on tangibles—on the inputs, work products, and deliverables people receive, process, and forward as part of their jobs. We discovered people can pretty completely inventory the tangibles they handle in their jobs.
The information collected during this step boils down into an explicit measure of your organization’s current Service Value; recommendations about work that can be improved, automated, or eliminated; a roster of process and work improvements that can be implemented immediately; and a view as to what your organizations Service Value might look like given recommended work changes.
Commitment
This is the point where I think most traditional Re-engineering programs fell apart. Elite teams birthed brilliant designs that withered because there was no commitment to really changing work.
At this point in Meridian’s process we will have a robust roster of work changes and improvement opportunities. We will also know what types and levels of investments will be required.
But to succeed we need to build a broad commitment to implement.
The first task is to build support amongst Directors or Managers—the people with immediate responsibility for managing your service delivery personnel. These are the people who really shape how work is accomplished. Change is not achievable without their whole-hearted support.
We believe the best way to gain support is to ask your Managers or Directors to decide what will be implemented and to establish implementation priorities. Allow them to build their re-engineering agenda. Then ask them to sell their agenda up and down the hierarchy, engaging both the people that work for them and the people for whom they work. There is no better way to put your re-engineering initiative on a solid footing.
Action
Implementation is the last mile of the marathon—it’s where even the best trained can grievously fall apart.
The simple problem with implementation is people already have full-time jobs. It’s hard to change how you work when the work is piled high and growing deeper by the minute.
All previous aspects of our re-engineering program require broad participation to succeed, yet implementation is the opposite. Focus and accountability are critical, which mean tasking a few people, for a finite time, is the best route to implementation success.
Other keys to successfully implementing the work changes that will grow your Service Value include:
- Developing a clear view of what it will mean to succeed with your re-engineering program.
- Making clear what you’ll need to succeed (and securing it).
- Aligning people with their new roles.
- Training people in their new roles.
I stress that our process for growing your Service Value is a very “human” process. Unlike traditional re-engineering approaches we ensure that the people who will be required to adapt and change drive your re-engineering process.
Our process for growing Service Value is also a very “humane” process, reallocating resources toward customer service, rather than just cutting heads.
My next step is to provide a detailed description of a successful implementation of Meridian’s unique approach to growing Service Value.
