Tag Archives: shared services strategy

The Perfect Medicine for Outsourced and Shared Service Success?

December 9, 2012 Tripp Babbitt 2 Comments

I ran across the “Sourcing Sage” and his creative cartoons about outsourcing. I found the cartoons to be entertaining but not-so-much the sage advice. His wisdom is that in order to outsource/share services an organization needs to do the following:

Process Documentation
Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)
Training Curriculum
Knowledge Base
Product Documentation
Organizational Optimization
Workstation Standardization
Systems Inventory
Metrics
Costs

Nothing new or creative but does “re-emphasize” what most big IT firms will tell you. Unfortunately, most of this stuff guarantees nothing when sharing services and/or outsourcing. In fact, most of it is waste. However, in the industry this is best practice. A fool and his money are soon parted.

And it happens all too often . . .

Standardization leads to failure demand as these manufacturing factories can not absorb variety found in service. The result is a colossal waste of organizational dollars. All the documentation in the world is not going to fix an already broken work design, it just adds to the costs.

For more on outsourcing and shared services click the one that interests you.

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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Technology – A History of Increasing Costs

October 27, 2011 Tripp Babbitt Leave a comment

The problem isn’t technology alone when it comes to costs, but more the thinking behind it that increases costs. The transaction costs are very visible and for the gullible represent quick savings for companies. And companies laden with rewards and pressure to reduce costs “quick” is an embraceable proposition – it becomes a way to achieve instant gratification and survival in organizations.

I recently had a phone call with a technology company that assured me that IVR systems – that I loathe – were saving companies millions. No evidence but the reduction in visible transaction costs – this means each transaction cost is lower. Systemic or total costs are completely ignored.

No one asks about how many transactions that come in the form of customer demands are actually value or failure they just look at the transaction alone . . . not whether the transaction should have occurred in the first place or not.

Reducing failure demand (demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer) becomes a huge area to make improvement and does not involve any IT. As part of reducing failure demand, we are improving the flow . . . as economies come from flow and not scale.

Looking at the history of reducing transaction costs with a flawed mindset, we see that in the good old days we would get service face-to-face. Telephony advances in technology allowed for a cost reduction in centralizing customer demands through contact centers. Now, we have websites to reduce transaction costs and avoid the contact center.

The result has been worse service and more costs. A natural extension of when the focus is on reducing costs . . . costs increase.

Outsourcing and shared services have been enabled by technology – couldn’t have either without technology. However, both perpetuate the reduction of transaction costs as a form of improvement and ignore the systemic customer demand and flow that really are behind reducing costs. The management paradox is that the transactional mindset is increasing costs in the form of lost customers and acceptance of a poor service design.

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 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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Systems Thinking and Management

Seeing is Believing

September 7, 2011 Tripp Babbitt Leave a comment

Evidence . . . the one act that can counteract a thousand assumptions.

Faith seems to have been lost over the years and replaced by the pursuit of profit. Can you really trust anyone these days? Politicians, plumbers, sales people, attorneys, mobile phone companies, investment bankers, car repair are all professions and industries that we don’t trust – and I certainly don’t mean to say these are the only ones. They seem to be in it for themselves or what ever profit they can get no matter what the consequences.

However, if I can see evidence that can convince me, but only if I understand what I am seeing. Knowledge plays a huge role in my understanding. Most executives lack knowledge these days. This gives them limited perspective on how to solve today’s business problems.

Indeed this is due – in part – to having come up through a functionally separated organization. Sales, marketing, finance, operations, information technology, human resources, etc. an executive has a limited view. Also, the focus on finances clouds the ability to actually see. Executives are flying their businesses in a fog, blind to the reality of what is.

The biases from years of functional, industrialized thinking and outdated education leads us to a place where we follow what we know, even if it ain’t so. Outsourcing, a shared services strategy, cutting costs from a budget, standardizing processes are examples of things that business executives embrace . . . until they can see evidence of the damage these things almost always do. These are profit reducing activities where the evidence demands a verdict.

If there is a skill I have been honing it is to be able to view an organization and spot the problems of an organization. Finding them is simple, finding one that will get an executive to go look and experience the agony and waste that comes with poorly designed systems constructed from the wrong perspective and assumptions is much harder and personal.

Evidence . . . where seeing truly is believing.

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 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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Asking the Wrong Questions to Improve Service

June 13, 2011 Tripp Babbitt Leave a comment

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

How to Do Shared Services

June 5, 2011 Tripp Babbitt Leave a comment

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

Michael Barone – Frederick Taylor Drives Management Thinking Too

March 9, 2011 Tripp Babbitt 2 Comments

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Michael Barone, a Fox News Channel contributor, recently wrote an article called Who’s to Blame for Union Woes? This article is somewhat accurate as he points out that unions still operate as if Frederick Taylor thinking still dominates businesses and government. The problem Michael Barone misses is that Tayloristic thinking still dominates management thinking too!

Manufacturing and service still follow the premise of Frederick Taylor that the functional separation of work is a good thing. You don’t have to look far for the evidence . . . functionally separated sales, operations, front, offices, middle offices, back offices, etc. sewn together by entrapping technology that seals in the waste.

Management is responsible for the design of the work. And with management focused on costs by outsourcing, sharing services and reducing unit costs we have lost our competitive position in the US. The management paradox is that a focus on costs always increases them making us less competitive as other countries create value. Unions may have embraced yesteryear thinking of Tayloristic thinking, but it is management that continues the outdated design.

Unions were created by management taking advantage of workers. First for working conditions and later for reducing salaries while executive salaries have sky-rocketed. This management thinking has created a gap where in order to get more profit in the private sector we have to milk the worker . . . the ones that actually do the work and create value for customers.

Undercover Boss (TV show) provides evidence that executives and management don’t know much about the work and make decisions, plans and projects without knowledge. Management making decisions without knowledge creates much waste and poor decisions like the banking crisis. Management with incentives and no knowledge are destined to create poor work designs and decisions.

I do agree with Michael Barone that unions have “clung to an adversarial model,” but that model is perpetuated by management. If workers mindsets are to change to create a better tomorrow than so does managements. The bottom-line is that management must change too. We need to embrace the worker to help to solve tomorrow’s problems, not persist to call them “the problem.”

If union membership is down to 6% as Mr. Barone says, then when they are all gone . . . what will management’s excuse be?

Join me for the International Deming Conference in New York City on March 21 – 22.

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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Industrialized and Mass-Production Thinking is Still the Enemy

January 7, 2011 Tripp Babbitt Leave a comment

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To take a look at business we have to go back in time to a Post WW II world. Manufacturing was decimated by the war, except in one country . . . the United States. The world turned to the US for products.

Because of world demand, the US focused its manufacturing on mass production and the thinking from Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford. How many can we produce and how fast? . . . Were the questions that US manufacturing was trying to solve. No competition and no focus on quality.

This worked well until a meeting in Japan on July 13^th, 1950. Where W. Edwards Deming met with 21 presidents of industry that represented about 80% of the capital of Japan. Dr. Deming promised that if they followed better thinking that the US would be screaming for protection from Japanese goods in 5 years, they did it in 3.

In the greatest upset in economic history, US manufacturing faltered . . . culminating in the 1970’s with the bankruptcy of auto industry giants – Chrysler and Ford. This lead to some self-reflection in the US about how a small country like Japan with few natural resources could put the US on its heels.

In 2011, the design of American manufacturing and service still has that mass-production flavor. Some have managed to change to just survive (always good motivation to do so), but service still lags in thinking. Many technology organizations think of their software development process as a production line. A wholly wrong approach if you hope to make good software.

I have talked about economies of flow before, but it is scale thinking that still wins the day. Reducing costs through outsourcing, shared services leads to service designs that have the opposite outcome of what is desired . . . or unintended consequences. In this case, the unintended consequences are increased costs, worse service and reduced morale.

Economies of flow thinking helps lead us to better design as what is good for the customer always is good for the bottom-line. To many, this is counter-intuitive. The prevailing thinking is that better service costs money and it is with the industrialized thinking of yesteryear.

And so as we enter 2011, we still have the fundamental thinking problems about the design and management of work. Will this be the year that you do something about it?

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion! Click on comments below.

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 Technology

Rivlin-Domenici Plan – The Problem is the Approach

November 18, 2010 Tripp Babbitt 1 Comment

Here we go with another “plan” to reduce spending in government. I plan to post a more in-depth piece to the Rivlin-Domenici Plan. Not bad people, but the same old worn out approach where politics takes precedence over method.

One of the first things you read about from the Debt Reduction Task Force is the word compromise. The minute we read this word we should realize that we are in trouble. Compromise means that we aren’t going to get something that works, it means that we get something that can be agreed to.

The second glaring problem is the word plan. The traditional approach to improvement is putting a plan together. The Task Force may understand the size of debt, but to put a plan together without knowledge is misguided. This doesn’t mean they didn’t spend some time studying, but the report indicates high-level learning that leads to assumptions.

The plan is devoid of evidence that any of the measures will work. Big plans based on compromise rather than knowledge and method is sure to make the deficit bigger. This plan will kick off legislation and other plans that will cost billions before we ever see any action. And when action comes, we have no idea whether the Deficit Reduction Plan will work.

Other troubling keywords are modernization and shared services. The word modernization tells us that we can expect people to want to get rid of paper and automate things. Too often in government we make the assumption that information technology will make things better, when in reality it increases costs as poorly designed work is the problem, not automation. We wind up with entrapping technology that locks in the poor design.

Shared services typically only looks at functions and not the demands that are placed on government. An agency might have the different demands going into each function, just combining them won’t reduce costs. In fact, once shared we are seeing shared services departments spring up that cost us more money and adds more to the deficit.

To win this battle against the deficit, we need all hands and brains and to keep the political players from compromising, modernizing and planning us to bigger deficits.

We need to engage those that are going to improve the system and must include those that have knowledge of the work . . . as for the rest they need to get knowledge by performing “check” with those in the work.

By understanding customer purpose and the demands constituents place on the system we can develop an understanding of the causes of costs. Taking direct action on the system we can experiment with method and redesign the work to eliminate failure demand (demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer) and improve flow.

Having worked in government management, I have seen the massive amounts of waste and sub-optimization that exist from poor design and outdated thinking. Politics and compromise have no place in improvement, we must have method.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion! Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here. Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at [email protected]. Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columnist (Quality Digest, PSNews and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.

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Shared Services, Systems Thinking and Government

Shared Services in Government – Increased Costs Hidden from View

October 27, 2010 Tripp Babbitt 1 Comment

I am not against reducing government costs . . . but I am not for increasing them mindlessly either. I have written about this before (Shared Services in Government: 4 Reasons Not to Share and Dos and Don’ts of a Shared Services Strategy), but election time brings craziness and promises to balance budgets. Many like to provide financial evidence that this works, rarely have I found this to be true.

Where is the evidence?

Supporters will show you that they had two or more “like” functions and combined them. The financial savings are obvious.

But are they?

Not really. Here is what we have found in the United Kingdom on some IT-led shared services projects:
• The shared services programme for the UK Research Councils – sharing IT, HR and finance – which was bought at £40m and is now forecast to cost £120m (and it ain’t over till the shared services work, which they don’t and probably won’t).
• Much the same has been reported with the shared services initiative at the Department for Transport. Sharing HR and finance was supposed to save the taxpayer £57m, but it is now on track to cost £81m.

Economies come from flow, not scale and too many political wags have got it wrong. They want to reduce costs, but pull all the wrong strings because they appear to make sense. It is the ultimate waste of tax dollars.

Further, the financial and/or technology companies leading the charge to shared services are locking in waste. The curious will read the articles above to understand why . . . as for the rest quit wasting taxpayer dollars.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion! Click on comments below.

Tripp Babbitt is a columnist (Quality Digest, PSNews and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.

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Mergers and Acquisitions – Scale Thinking that Leads to Higher Costs

July 26, 2010 Tripp Babbitt Leave a comment

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There are been fewer mergers and acquisitions in recent months . . . and that is a good thing. Too many organizations and government entities have swallowed whole the economies of scale thinking that in a management paradox has led to higher costs.

The culprit behind is a shared services strategy that is fundamentally rooted in economies of scale thinking. Government entities and for-profit companies desperate for cost savings look to combine services to achieve them. The problem is not the scale, it is the flow.

Blindly combining IT, HR or contact centers seems to be where organizations have been duped in to thinking that this is a good idea. The problem with this approach is rooted in the design.

Most organizations destroy flow by their design through the functional separation of work. Phone calls have been centralized into contact centers to achieve such scale economies and back offices built to do processing. Technology entraps the worker through such poor design thinking and locks in the waste.

For any organization (public or private) a better way is to study demand before taking on scale thinking. This can’t be done at the 50,000 foot level, but by studying demand where transactions occur between the worker and customer. Too many assumptions are made based on “you have a contact center and so do I, let’s save money by combining the two” thinking.

If the demands are the same (rarely the case) their may be opportunity, but contact centers, IT, back offices and HR are typically fraught with waste. This waste comes in the form of failure demand. As much failure demand as organizations have in it, we miss the opportunity to redesign the system to design out the failure demand. Do we even need that back office?

The functional design is an inhibitor to flow. Poor flow leads to higher costs as hand-offs and queues lead to poor service. The insightful study of demand can aid in a better design as we can design failure demand out and design in services that accommodate “what matters” to customers and constituents.

Better design for increased economies of flow will decrease costs, not economies of scale thinking.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion! Click on comments below.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.

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