I'm Hear to Help. Volume III
Sometimes they know you’re coming, know you’re there to help and are excited to participate in process improvement work. This is the situation our team walked into with a large healthcare group in California. It was a refreshing change of pace, given that the first two stories in this series (see Volume I and Volume II) had happened just before all this. And our assembled team was great.
The Project Manager (PM) was a jovial guy that stayed on top of things. There was a fellow Black Belt that was going to work one set of events, while I worked another. And we even had an admin support person to help with documentation; a real blessing considering the size and scope of the gig.
On the company’s side, our main Point of Contact (POC) was an energetic up-and-comer in the company. And his boss, a Division Director was completely supportive of him and us. It was a solid set-up for success.
The Healthcare group we were to help started off as a small practice of a few doctors. They were good doctors providing good care to their patients, and so their practice grew. As it grew they hired more people; mainly friends and relatives. These were good workers too and the practice had more success and grew…and grew…and grew.
It had the settings of a great American success story. But, as many of these stories have, there were some underlying issues. As the practice grew into a large regional healthcare group, the friends and family who were hired at the beginning of the journey stayed on and grew with the company; rising to greater positions of responsibility. But several of these did not have the knowledge or experience in running larger operations, and they struggled with the scale as everything grew.
A perfect example of this was the Director of their call center. A wonderful woman who was the cousin of one of the founding doctors. She was an early hire to answer the phone and handle scheduling. This was back when it was three doctors and one landline. This had been her second job; her first being as a cashier at McDonald’s where she credits learning about providing great customer service in a fast-paced environment. As the practice grew, they added more phone lines and more people to work them. So she became a supervisor. Then more lines, more people, and the advent of technology, computerized scheduling software, and advanced telephony systems. So she became a manager, and then Director of Customer Services.
She was a great boss. She knew her people and took care of them. But didn’t know about large-scale call center operations, and they had not hired anyone who did. Also, she was lacking IT support. Folks working IT were mainly focused on finance operations such as billing. The scheduling software was constantly on the back burner, and telephone systems were not even on the IT radar. Consequently, there was a myriad of phone features and functions not being utilized.?
As some of the work we were doing involved her call center, we discovered she did not have any metrics or key performance indicators set up, other than total call volume. A quick review showed she was woefully understaffed to meet the goals the company had for customer service:
She did not have the experience, nor given the support, to learn call center basics.
This issue was repeated throughout the company. Departments maturing organically and built with home-grown talent. Leadership not supporting looking to others for lessons learned or benchmarking. Hence the struggles they were having.
On the bright side, they were realizing the need for change now (due largely to the burning platform of decreasing revenue and increasing costs). But it would have really been helpful to the company if they’d realized this need about 5 years earlier.
They were trying to make up for lost ground by hiring external experienced experts (like a new IT VP), investing in admin support and infrastructure (soon to be a key factor in this story), and bringing in consultants (like the team I was on).
It started as a wonderful contract: engaged employees, supportive leaders, and easy access to any function we needed to review…scheduling, benefits, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and all the fun stuff.
Two weeks in, as we had team building process maps we find out something…
The IT department had been patchworked together over the years…various programs were bought and stitched together until it now looked like a digital Rube Goldberg machine. The new VP of IT determined it was no longer sustainable. She was planning on tearing it all out and putting in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) program. This was both positive and negative.
On the plus side, it was long overdue and would greatly help the company: to have everything updated and integrated: from scheduling to billing…all in a common platform.
On the downside, it meant that pretty much everything we were working on was going to be worthless in about three months when the ERP was implemented.
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While there was some value in us staying on to capture the current processes, all the work we were doing on improvements and future state would be wasted. The environment for the future state would no longer be the same.
We went to our Client Director and our Consulting Director, explaining the situation. We proposed our team stay on another week to finish capturing current state processes, then come back in about two and half months to then work with the teams to build the future states. We could not do it now, as there was still a lot of uncertainty with the ERP. Final specs and functions had not been decided. But things would be solid in just over two months. Not much of a delay, and it would end in practical actionable results.
To our surprise, both Directors said “NO!” The Director of the Client company was worried about the optics of hiring us, then not getting anything for several months. As mentioned, there was a burning platform, and she needs something, anything, to show that things were being done.
Our Consulting Director saw an opportunity to complete this contract, then sell them on another with the IT overhaul. Her exact words were that this was a perfect example of being “sticky.” This aberrant word was her favorite when discussing client relationships. Everything was done with the intent to improve our “stickiness” so the client kept us around. We cautioned her that our work would be crap…our action plans would be immediately obsolete. But the dollar signs were clouding our Director’s vision of the right thing to do.
And so the team was to stay in place. We were to finish the current state, then build a worthless future state. We were to become ultra-sticky, and so we did, and we hated it.
The client teams we were working with quickly realized what was going on. As we looked at the future, they knew the ERP was coming. Many were working with IT on generating user requirements. They knew as we tried to lay out future processes that it wasn’t sure what would, or would not, work. But their bosses wanted something. So we pressed on.
A bit more than a month passed and our engagement came to an end and not soon enough. Tensions were rising between my fellow black belt and the PM. One heated discussion turned into a full-blown yelling argument as we worked on the final documents.
The Corporate COO was coming in to hear our out brief. He was smart and sharp. As the teams presented their finding, the discussion turned to action plans for future improvements. He knew all about the ERP project (ironically having met with IT before our brief). When he saw the proposed list of actions the questions started…
We hemmed, the team hawed, and the client leadership team did not have solid answers. It was not a very comfortable briefing. It could not be over quick enough.
The other black belt, the admin, and I all?packed up and left. We were not local. The PM was. He was to sweet talk the Client into another contract and promised to call us when he nailed it down.
The call never came. The COO, and other corporate leaders, were not happy with the work being done at the company (not just us, but the whole group). The ERP implementation got delayed…twice. Which meant future states could not be nailed down.
Unhappy leaders, an ineffective action plan, and delays with all the ERP resulted in a decision not to bring us back. Ultimately all the client got was some current state maps. Future state maps were useless as were the action plans that were to take them there. All we did was contribute to the company’s expense column.
We were there to help, and everything was in place…but failure to adjust to changes in the big picture trashed everything.
#quality #lean #leansixsigma #operationalexcellence #processimprovement #totalqualitymanagement #storytelling
Quality, Reliability, Risk Management, Operational Excellence, and Continuous Improvement Leader, Coach, and Mentor
1 年A few things come out of your I'm Here to Help, Volume III... Sometimes it is known that there is a problem to fix, but you also need to fix it at the right time, so this situation should have stuck to, "Yes, this needs to be fixed, but not now with so much uncertainty ahead." The right tool at the wrong time is actually the wrong tool. Never let the quick buck cloud your judgement about the right thing to do. You will never earn customer loyalty, repeat business, and referrals if a customer feels that they have been taken advantage of.