An Executive’s Tale (cont'd)

Dave's eyes lit up. "That's a story I love to tell, ” he said. “ Of course we had to reorganize; we had inherited a mess of incompatible call centers and support policies. Any subscriber call could end up at any center, so the customer experience was different, the effectiveness varied widely, and we were spending way too much money in not solving problems quickly enough. So, I hired some key executives and directors from some other companies and told them to pick one way of doing business and get everybody to get on board with it. They brought in some bright consultants to help model the business processes and assist with training, and in a very short period of time we completely turned the groups around. They actually started winning industry awards less than a year from when we turned them loose."

He paused and looked thoughtful for a moment. "You know, one other interesting thing happened I almost forgot about. Most of our customer service calls get handled on the first call, but some of them are too technical for customer service. We need to hand those problems over to the network group to diagnose them and fix something technical. One of the most successful parts of the reorganization was when the customer service group worked with network to fix the procedures for handing problem calls from customer service to network. It was so successful that people are still talking about how well it works. Turns out that the same troublesome VP I mentioned earlier was in charge of the network end of that team as well."

"Well, so far, that all fits" I nodded. "So, I suppose that those procedures are still in place and pretty well enforced by the customer service group?"

"You bet!" Dave exclaimed. "It is a critical part of our service operations."

"Alright," I continued, "the next question is what happened to all that paperwork that VP issued for the enterprise goals you set last year. Did those get implemented?"

Dave looked thoughtful again. "I don't think so. I seem to recall that there was a lot of resistance to them, and the rest of the network organization seemed to think they were too hard or unnecessary or slowed things down. I never really understood what the problem was, but I don't think they are being used much. Can you really have standardized procedures for whatever they do over there? After all, running all of that technical gear is not like answering calls at a call center. They must have a lot of unique and unforeseen problems over there that really cannot be reduced to a procedure."

"Dave, a lot of non-technical executives think exactly the same way, but it is simply not true. There are a lot of technical jobs you ' re not thinking of that require a high level of skill and experience to perform, yet are governed by rigid procedures. Airline pilots, as an example, live by their checklists and lots of standard ways of doing things when flying. Doctors have very specific routines they follow even when they are diagnosing very unusual and difficult illnesses. Lots of technical jobs are ruled by strict procedures that help people to be more efficient by doing things the same way every time."

"But," Dave asked, "doesn't that remove the creativity and ability to innovate?"

"No," I replied, "it actually provides a framework that fosters more creativity and innovation. Instead of doing things in a haphazard fashion which requires a lot of thought, procedures allow you to deal with the 99% of the job that is routine in a routine fashion. That leaves the brain power available for the 1% of situations where something is going wrong or something out of the ordinary is happening.

"Standards and procedures are also the best way to propagate what works best throughout the organization. The new industry buzz-word for this is 'best practices' but in English it just means that you find out who is doing the best job, and get everybody else to do things the same way. Pretty simple when you think about it."

"I have to admit that it seems too simple to be true, but what you say makes sense." Dave was nodding his head by this time.

"One more question and I'll bet this will come together for you. When you had the IT consultants reorganize network, did they implement the troublesome VP's procedures, or some they had thought up themselves, or did they not talk about procedures at all?"

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