Monthly Archives: June 2011

Systems Thinking Concepts

Tripp Babbitt’s Blog Down for 5 Days – Why Remains a Mystery

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Much to my chagrin, my blog has been down for five days.  That is five, count’em frustrating days.  I wasn’t notified by my hosting company (ProVim).  There were no phone calls and no emails, yet, they claim to have attempted to contact me.  I worked furiously through the weekend to find answers and only found more frustration.

I did find that my website was being hosted by theplanet.com when I searched whois.  They are now called Softlayer.com and ProVim the third party.  In a chat session to Softlayer (a contradiction in customer service terms) refused to help me based on legal grounds.  They wouldn’t even contact the third party (ProVim) to help resolve the issue. I abhor service companies that can’t provide service or won’t do everything possible to help solve an issue.  This thinking is selfish, I would never do business with Softlayer.com – they look inside out from their perspective and not outside-in from the customer’s perspective.

As for ProVim, they are a small company and growing by acquisition by what I read.  They are acting like a big company meaning it is hard for customer’s to get answers.  More bureaucracy, they had to open a ticket number to resolve my issue – my issue was labeled “medium.”  Sounds like how someone might order chicken wings then representative of my problem from my perspective – and that perspective would be a customer’s perspective.

Ultimately, I had to rely on the good ol’ boy network to apply pressure . . . are we really in the new millenium?  After a bogus attempt to resolve my issue by an executive, someone with knowledge actually understood the problem and resolved it.  So, five days of frustration ends with someone with knowledge to solve the problem.

A lesson to all of us that value is created on the front-line in the eyes of the customer.  We don’t care about balance sheets and income statements and especially we don’t like our problems labeled “low” or “medium.”  We care about our lives not yours and we hate IVRs, ticket systems and unanswered phone calls.  Try designing a system that serves us and not you.  Revenue and business improvement result and you won’t have to buy businesses to grow.  The management paradox is that customers are dying to do business with organizations that sollve their problems and not those that worry about their own.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

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Systems Thinking Concepts

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

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Over the years I have heard this phrase more often then I care to mention.  I hated it when I was 23 and I hate it at my current vintage age.  This term makes as little sense as the grammar it contains – and you know how bad I am at grammar.

The truth is our service systems have long been broken . . . and to some extent always will be broken.  There is no end to improvement and accepting the current state as stable is, well, both ignorant and obstinate.  Take the cover off your eyes, man.  Your service systems lack anything close to what a customer would call perfect.  And be thankful they are as such because otherwise life would be b-o-r-i-n-g.

New breakthroughs and new thinking will have infinite life for those that don’t accept the status quo.  That feeling inside that lets you know the blood is pumping through your veins is excitement and our dissatisfaction propels the world forward.

The current state of business that succumbs to targets, incentives, and assumptions leads us to the “ain’t broke don’t fix it” crowd.  A pathetic lot that reminds me of the McCarthy and witch hunt eras of yesteryear.  “Did I hear you say no targets?”  Burn them at the stake or accuse them of heresy or even communism that should keep them cowering.  Copernicus hid his revelation that the earth was not the center of the universe until his death in fear of being mocked or killed.

Do we still live in that era?

Universal “truths” that aren’t are hard to swallow and so we wallow in the stagnation of old theories.  Like a pig to mud.  Claiming brilliance, instead of admitting we wreak the odor of decay.  New thinking is only hazardous to careers, not profit.  Those that venture outside to experiment with method most often are labeled failures until they start their own companies and defeat last generation’s thinkers.

Toyota in manufacturing, Apple in technology while the rest fight to protect their dying markets, thinking and profits.  An isolationist attitude in a global market.

God bless the dissatisfied.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

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Systems Thinking and Management, Systems Thinking and Technology, Uncategorized

Counter-Intuitive ROI

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ROI is often asked for by management to justify investments in technology or other investments.  Dead trees and time to present such mandatory reviews waste more resources then the alleged returns that organizations actually get . . . this means more hot air and manure than actual benefit.

Beautiful presentation . . . but most of these “dog and pony” shows have so little knowledge contained within them.  The only ROI really gained is to the vendor and not the customer of such efforts.

ROI comes from doing things that customers value.  This requires experimentation with method to deliver service, some of this requires technology – no doubt.  However, there is opportunity just in the design of the work and too many times technology gets in the way.

Instead massive plans and PowerPoints are put together to PROVE that ROI can be achieved.  Proof without evidence is the result.  Rarely, is a knowledge present or an experiment done that actually shows the change of method leads to ROI.

Baffle them with BS, rather than dazzle them with brilliance.

Embracing work and those that do the work that customers value just isn’t cool . . . but it is profitable.  In fact, it is extremely profitable.  The problem is that this thinking represents a management paradox to our current mindset about business improvement.  In the end it is a much better to ROI.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

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Outsourcing, Shared Services, Systems Thinking and Contact Centers, Systems Thinking and Financial Industry, Systems Thinking and Government, Systems Thinking and Management, Systems Thinking and Technology

Asking the Wrong Questions to Improve Service

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A client recently forwarded me an invitation from a company promoting a seminar titled “How to make off-shoring work?”  He rightly pointed out that if your asking the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer.  After all, it isn’t about getting off-shoring (or outsourcing, shared services, etc.) to work, it is about getting the work to work better.

The problem is (as with most fads) they are based in assumptions.  Here is the one that caught my attention in the promotion:

“Most major corporations have embraced offshore delivery of IT and are moving to the next stage of a global delivery model, in which the location of both supplier and internal resources are decided from a business perspective, with very few duplicate roles across the world. With major economic benefits, this transition has been accelerated by the economic developments of 2009. What are the challenges? What are the opportunities? And how can you make it work for you?”

Obviously someone with a vested interest in convincing an audience that off-shoring is the right thing to do and you would be ignorant or stupid to have not embraced it as this point.  No evidence, just a lot of hype from a major consulting firm that is trying to sell the mirage.

Too many companies will fall into the cost trap of such claims.  They will do this because they see a reduction in activity costs . . . a very short-term thinking proposition.  But with executives salivating over bonus potential in the next quarter, reducing activity costs sounds appealing.  They miss huge improvement opportunities with this thinking by not addressing the design of the work BEFORE considering off-shoring, outsourcing or shared services.  This is the fundamental thinking problem that management must overcome to improve service.

Off-shoring, outsourcing and even a shared services strategy have gone from a snowball to an avalanche without proof of total cost reduction.  If companies would see that they are off-shoring the waste that is in the design of the work, I believe a different approach would be in order to achieve business improvement.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.


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Systems Thinking and Contact Centers, Systems Thinking and Government, Systems Thinking and Management

Service Targets, Technology and other Non-sense

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It was W. Edwards Deming that first spoke of “arbitrary numerical goals” and the damage they can do to organizations.  His famous question was, “By what method?”

Anyone that understands Walter Shewhart’s control charts understands that a system operating predictably between the upper and lower control limits cannot be improved without a statistically significant change of method.

They can, however, be changed by manipulation of the system or the numbers.   This is the bad news of targets, especially when rewards or penalties are tied to achieving them.  Managers and workers are caught attempting to reach targets in bad systems . . . manipulation is often the only alternative.  It is sometimes referred to as a “defacto purpose.”

Over and over organizations that set targets get a false sense of security.  SLAs (Service Level Agreements), KPIs, budgets are set with targets and seemingly achieved, but customers don’t feel the 95% target in the service provisioned to them.  There is good reason for this, the truth is hidden in the details.  Projects and cases are closed and reopened, customers get hung up on, operational definitions are changed, money shifted and the list goes on in the creativeness to hit the numbers.

None of this is real improvement.

The design of our service systems gets to the heart of Dr. Deming’s method question.  When the design of the work is consistently poor (and it is), the result is predictable . . . bad service hidden by faux measures.

It doesn’t end there.

Unfortunately, service organizations turn to information technology to automate the poor design.  Here, we enter the realm of scripts, IVRs, best practices, analytics and standardization – a short list.  Management has a love for technology that is assumptive in nature and puzzling to customers.  Management and technology are like moths to light.  Why have paper when we can have technology?  For that matter, why have people?

A fool’s gold.

Service organizations have spent billions on technology and the outcome has been project delays, cost overruns, and entrapped workers have contributed to the great money pit called information technology.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.  Our greatest opportunity for improvement lies in the design and management of work.  This involves not just redesign, but also how our thinking got us to the poor design in the first place.

Much of this thinking problem is rooted in costs and budgets with the corresponding targets associated with these.  Others are rooted in the problem of the functional separation of work, how we think about workers (see the Quality Digest article The Droids We Build), assumptions about motivation.

Coming to grips with the thinking that prevents good service is an important part of developing good service.  Addressing the system conditions (targets, technology, standardization, etc.) that constrain our service systems can only be done with knowledge.  And knowledge is gained by studying our service systems outside-in from a customer’s perspective.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

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Shared Services, Systems Thinking and Government, Systems Thinking and Management

How to Do Shared Services

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I was recently reminded that shared services isn’t always bad, but shared services done with industrialized thinking is always bad.  The industrialized piece is rooted in the functional separation of work where the unwary see cost reduction opportunity by combining like functions.   Voila – instant savings to your service or government.

If it were only that easy.

I wrote about shared services in a couple of posts one called The Case Against Shared Services and another post called Shared Services in Government: 4 Reasons Not to Share.  Both articles hit on problems, but didn’t completely describe the huge missed opportunity to redesign services.  You might get some savings sharing services, but while looking for the penny on the floor we miss the golden 6-foot statue the coin is under.

The rush to savings leaves out the counter-intuitive – if not obvious improvement.  When we study our organizations as systems, outside-in from a customer perspective and end-to-end we begin to question the original design.  When we question design, we can begin to question our thinking that created that design.  Rooted in what matters to customers, we get efficiency and effectiveness in delivering services.

Studying our systems and redesigning services before sharing them helps us locate the golden statue of cost savings without ever looking at costs.  It just happens.  But you have to know how to look, but more importantly you have to know to look rather than assume.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

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Systems Thinking and Management

Service Sales – Design the System Better and Finish the Job

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The functional separation of work shows up in many places in many ugly ways.  The one design that is maddening to customers is where you have the salesperson sell you a product and tell you about all the great features and benefits, only to disappear after the sale is made.  This requires a hand-off to some back office person that either laughs at what the salesperson said the product or service would d0 or has no clue about anything the salesperson said.

I laugh when I hear salespeople say, “My job is to sell, not service.”  Are you kidding?  You have zero chance of a referral with this thinking, especially when customers have to track down someone that can actually help them.  As consumers we should not be tolerating this behavior.

Interestingly, if you provided me good service there would be less reason to have marketing or sales . . .  or at least greatly reduce their need.

I don’t buy that sales is a stand alone profession.  Functionally, sales has been split out and it has become highly rewarded.  But aren’t we just trying to find people to do sales that have a silver tongue because our service stinks?  Trying to convince customers that we “really are good” or hope that if we spin it the right way customers won’t find out about poor encounters.

My recent article at Quality Digest talked about how there are fewer places to hide for service organizations that provision services poorly.  Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets give customers and potential customers a forum to share their experiences.  And you can read for yourself that the mouthpieces aren’t always happy with your performance.

My insurance company salesperson couldn’t be bothered with operational issues that I was having trouble with when my basement flooded.  That of course is a different department.  My perspective as a customer is that there are no departments . . . there IS ONE COMPANY.

Customer wish:  Please don’t bore me with your over-stimulated sales people.  Just give me what I want when I want it.  I promise to reward you with more business and from me and others.

Now that is service and sales.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

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