Monthly Archives: October 2012

The 95 Method and Government, The 95 Method and Management

Plan, Budget and Performance Measures

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David Walker of the Comeback America Initiative that he founded is often on CNBC explaining what it will take to get America on track.  It is the same story . . . build a plan, budget the plan and institute performance measures.  To paraphrase Mr. Walker, the former US Comptroller, “this is what big, successful companies do.”

This thinking is what led us to the US decline in the first place.

Mass-production and industrialized thinking that didn’t succeed after WWII has led to retrenchment.  In this case a better word would be – retreat. Down-sizing our budget and workforce requires a plan.  Winners and losers baked in and the losers are Americans.

This does not mean that we should continue down the course of large deficits or that budgets don’t matter, it just means you are managing a retreat.  Large scale ideology leads to massive expenditures as more expense is derived from managing the downsizing.  This is not the way forward for the public or private sectors.

Finance has overwhelmed logic as the numbers are misleading.  Context is needed and so is the evidence.  However, big thinkers don’t have time for the detail and this leads to deficits.  Managing scale, flow is missed and naturally so are the causes of cost.

Political candidates are touting their road maps, plans and other non-sense without knowledge.  Voters starved for detail can get only sound bites, sappy commercials and personal attacks.  It is pathetic.

With budgets, the mantra is to cut costs.  Performance measures help keep the budget numbers on track.  In a system full of waste, just cutting costs misses addressing the waste.  A bad system with no money still leaves a bad system.  Performance measures derived from budgets and plans (without knowledge) almost always lock in the waste.

So, this political season be skeptical and demand more than just pplans, budgets and performance measures – how do we grow?

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.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

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The 95 Method and Contact Centers, The 95 Method and Government, The 95 Method and Management

Divided Responsibility – Still Haunting Service Organizations

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You would see it more often in manufacturing, but divided responsibility plaques service organizations too.  Typically, in manufacturing it would be seen in quality control efforts where management would declare high-quality products.  The management paradox is that more inspection predictably led to higher error rates.  When two or more individuals inspect the same product to “inspect quality in” it means no one is responsible.

When action items are delved out amongst participants of a meeting, often you will find two (or more) individuals being given the same task to “share” the workload.  Nothing fundamentally wrong with that except someone has to take ownership with the other(s) supporting.  Clarity in ownership is important to avoid finger-pointing or sub-standard action.

President Harry Truman with

President Harry Truman with "The Buck Stops Here" sign on his desk (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To me, this divided responsibility is reflected in work designs where tasks are broken into so many pieces that no one can have a chance to know if they are doing a good job.  This is because the actual outcome is buried multiple levels beyond the first step.  Customers get frustrated as they have to figure out who does bear responsibility.  This often ends in escalations to management that unfortunately take a lot of time to “get up to speed” to resolve a customer issue.  “The buck stops here” is the famous phrase from Harry Truman that I hear from management in service organizations.  Finding the right answer for a customer is the problem.

Clear lines of communication in the design of the work and responsibility of tasks.  Keep the work together if at all possible, but make one person the owner.

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.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

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