Are you able to clearly identify and communicate what's needed and what needs to change?
Are you dealing with something simple, complicated, complex, or chaotic?
Do you understand the situation and underlying conditions well enough to take effective action?
Are there risks — strategic, financial, reputational, operational, compliance, etc. — you need to examine and mitigate?
You can answer the following questions from a 30,000-foot perspective and, for even deeper, actionable insights, you can use some very economical and fast methods to get answers and input from diverse perspectives across your entire organization.
Do you have the right number of people, organized the right way to get the job done? Do managers and staff understand how they contribute to the organization's goals and success?
Do first-line supervisors know how to set priorities, make clear work assignments, assess progress and performance, provide timely and actionable feedback, reward good performance, and take any needed corrective action?
Do you have in place the performance measurement, compensation, benefits, and rewards and recognition to incentivize performance and behavior consistent with your goals?
Are your core business processes complete, well defined and documented, efficient, repeatable, and well understood by the people responsible for performing them?
Do your processes produce consistent, predictable outcomes and outputs or are the results all over the map in terms of quality, timeliness, customer satisfaction, and staff productivity?
Are there meaningful performance measures in place for all critical processes? Are performance measures highly visible and do out-of-bounds conditions lead to immediate corrective action?
When a process fails to deliver the expected results, are the people performing the process trained and empowered to take effective corrective action?
Does the business technology support all critical processes end-to-end with little or no manual processing?
Do your business systems make it easy to capture, access, analyze, and report information about process performance, product and service quality, and customer satisfaction?
Is the technology easy to use or are users relying on out-of-date job aids, peer support, or cryptic instructions scribbled on sticky notes to accomplish their day-to-day assignments?
Is your business agility and flexibility constrained or impeded by the inability to update, upgrade, or otherwise enhance your business technology in step with changing business conditions or needs?
What You Experience
You and your team are dealing with too many fire drills -- events that escalate quickly, demand immediate attention, disrupt plans and schedules, and frustrate even the most capable and engaged managers and staff members.
While fighting fires can seem to energize those involved once the fire is extinguished, doing so day-in-and-day-out leads to burn-out and disengagement.
And the time spent fighting fires robs you of time to improve customer and staff experience, develop leaders and staff, develop new and enhance existing products and services, and deliver on priority strategic initiatives.
Actions You Can Take
Fire drills result from — among other things — a lack of repeatable processes, inadequate staff skills and knowledge, lack of accountability, software glitches, and unclear roles and responsibilities.
Take actions to achieve a sustainable operating cadence: clarify roles and responsibilities, examine and improve critical-to-customer and critical-to-staff processes, invest in meaningful training and development, and maximize appropriate delegations.
What You Experience
You're using widely viewed best practices and methodologies to address the issue, yet you are not getting the results you expect or need.
After a couple of false starts, you're beginning to wonder if the product, service, project, or initiative is ever going to get delivered or is worth the effort and cost.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to resist "shooting the messenger" or playing the blame game.
Actions You Can Take
Stop to consider that what you are facing is something complex and NOT suitable for out-of-the-box or cookie-cutter approaches or methodologies.
Rather than force fitting an inappropriate approach or methodology, consider adapting a more interative, empirical, low risk approach to the challenge at hand.
Become a learning organization — examine and understand the complexities and related risks underlying the endeavor, identify and prioritize the sources of greatest business value, and run small, meaningful "experiments" to prove out your approach and gain greater insights into the way forward.
Related Reading
What You Experience
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Actions You Can Take
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When the real problem isn’t the obvious one(Opens in a new tab)What Your Customers Experience
You've made the online sale, but what about the rest of the customer journey? You offer customers a website and a call center as options for post-sales interactions.
For public sector organizations, think about your captive customers who have nowhere else to go to access services.
Your voice greeting delivers a long, repetitive, yet tantalizing explanation that using your website offers better responsiveness and quicker service.
Once there, customers find the website confusing to use, difficult to navigate, and it often fails to function or perform, especially on mobile devices.
Frustrated users have no recourse other than to call and again endure the now not-so-tantalizing explanation about using your website. After being presented an extensive and confusing array of choices, the caller is placed in a call queue for who-knows-how-long before speaking with a service agent.
At this point, there can be a couple of variations on this service debacle: the caller is asked to call back to reach the right person or transferred to a line that's never answered.
What Your Contact Center Agents Experience
To make matters worse, once connected to an agent, the agent is bombarded with complaints about the poor service resulting from something beyond her or his control.
The long call queues result from insufficient call center staffing and surging call volume resulting from inadequate website functionality and performance.
What do you think is the impact on call agent engagement and motivation? You've managed to create a toxic mix of frustrated, angry callers and disengaged, harried contact center agents.
Actions You Can Take
Break down the silos that exist among your customer channels.
Adopt process and technology design practices and techniques that transcend the entire customer journey, such as journey mapping, value stream mapping, creating flow, and value stream management.
Reorganize around and continuously examine and improve customer value streams rather than focusing on optimizing individual delivery platforms.