Are you still driving 'Right First Time'?

As long as I can remember, 'Right First Time', or RFT for short, has shown up as a measure of quality/efficiency/effectiveness in operational departments. Most of the time it's an easy to understand percentage and the concept is pretty straight forward to get your head around. I've seen it in pretty much every sector I've been in and it was already there when I got there, most of the time.

Now I don’t think it’s a bad measure, far from it, it can drive some positive behaviours and outcomes, but I do think it requires a bit of additional thought beyond the obvious. So here’s some thinking around RFT.

A national measure says…..

I actually saw a RFT measure that was pointing at the UK as a whole. I can’t remember the source (I need to get better at writing that down), but I did capture the number…

"79.9% RFT across UK companies"

I am not sure how that is measured, and if you've read previous drops of this, you will know I am a bit weary of dodgy measurement systems, but let's just have a think about this for the moment.

Why did they measure it?

Who knows? Perhaps because they could and it may create a conversation?

Just measuring something that points to the idea of opportunity to get better can’t be a bad idea can it? Well, as long as the improvement part is done in the right way.

If that measure is to be believed then that’s a 20% opportunity to be better. If you scale that up across the UK that’s 1/5th of the 'work' done that is therefore not good. The cost of this must be huge both financially and in terms of extra effort for employees and customers.

It's probably bigger than that

The opportunity I mean.

RFT relies on a couple of assumptions that can often fail when put under scrutiny. These are often missed when setting a focus on this particular measure and so I'll drop them here for you to have a think about…..

Assumption 1 - we know what right is and therefore anything outside of this is wrong.

Assumption 2 - the work we are measuring is value demand i.e. it's what we are there to do based on our purpose.

Let’s have a dig into each of those.

We know what right is and therefore anything outside of this is wrong

The number of times I have seen a measure and when asking for the specific definition I am either greeted with a puzzled look or I get a sentence.

Neither of these are sufficient enough to describe the categorisation of good and bad work. This gets compounded when there are people involved in the measuring of RFT.

If you give 10 people a sentence to work from and then ask them to categorise whether it was good or bad, what do you think will happen?

If you incentivise people on the idea of RFT and they have the opportunity to make it look better (without it actually been better), what do you think might happen?

I'm not saying that the measure won’t add value, if used in the right way, but there could be some real blind spots and you could find yourself acting from a point of really low understanding of what is actually happening.

How well defined is your definition of what RFT actually means in context of the work?

How are you incentivising improvement?

What behaviours are happening that are linked to the use of RFT?

The work we are measuring is value demand

You may have heard the term 'polishing a turd' before. This is a bit like that.

Would you be interested in our good we are at doing the work on something that we don’t really want to be working on in the first place?

In some instances you may be and that may make sense. Complaints are a good example of this. You don’t want them but you need a way of dealing with them effectively.

Often though, we are doing work on dodgy demand and instead of trying to understand that we stick a RFT measure on it and see how well we can do this but right (using our description from assumption 1 obviously).

There are examples of this everywhere….

Doing a repair on something that was only repaired the other month for the same reason, but we measure it as a separate piece of work and whether we did that part RFT.

Dealing with a call at first call resolution for a customer that needed a copy of their bill as the last one was incorrect.

Completing work that will show up as a problem somewhere else but you did your bit within the assumptions made in point 1 and so it's all good.

Doing activities that when held up against what we believe to be the reason why we are here, does not make sense as what we should actually be doing.

You get the idea.

What is the purpose of your organisation/function/team?

When you look at the work you are doing day to day how much of that fits with the reason you exist?

RFT alone may not be enough…

The emergence of RFT as a measure has definitely created a lot of improvement across almost all companies I've ever seen, but given the 2 assumptions/opportunities laid out here, there is probably more we can do to leverage the idea of doing good work.

If there is a 20% opportunity in the UK based around this idea of RFT, then I'd argue it's greater than that and there is probably a 40% opportunity if we think wider about what good work might actually equate to.

So, if you are invested in RFT and are serious about driving improvement in this way, have a think about those 2 assumptions you may be making and see if you can up your game on how you identify and deliver 'good work'.

Enjoy the rest of your summer

Jason

Keeping with the theme of measures. Here's a podcast episode from a while back that talks to the idea of aligning measures to purpose.

Here's the link...

Click for the 3 things about measures....

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