The Process Ninja

Outside-in Part 3 - The Method

So I've talked about what outside-in has achieved and about successful customer outcomes - by how do we practically implement outside-in?

Outside-in is fundamentally about aligning processes with successful customer outcomes. Through workshops with little more than than sticky-notes, brown paper and the front line staff in the room we can start to radically change our thinking of organisational processes.

When we look at the customer experience we are looking for three key items within the process:

Moments of Truth – any interaction with the customer – this could be a customer to person interaction, for example or a customer to system interaction. These moments represent an opportunity in time to delight the customer or to fail!

Break points – any hand-off in the process – these represent potential points where the process can break down.

Business Rules – any decision point in the process. These can add complexity, increase effort and be a potential failure point.

When we map out the process we start to identify where these three factors occur for each step in the process. We then use these to calculate the point of failure factor for our process. This point of failure factor gives us an idea of how optimised (or not optimised!) our processes are from a customer point of view. The point of failure factor has been proven to directly correlate to customer satisfaction – so a high level of potential failure will equal a propensity for customers to be dissatisfied (I wonder why?!)

Thinking about our process with all its moments of truth, break points and business rules for a moment it is easy to see how customer dissatisfaction can occur. You may think that having lots of moments of truth (i.e customer interaction) might be a good thing, but think of it this way: if you had to call up a company to get some information but each time you received the information it was inaccurate and had to call again, how long would it take to irk your dissatisfaction? And what if instead the company had not only given you the information, but had given you extra information that had helped you further?

So once the point of failure factor has been identified we seek to improve our processes. But how to we do this? We need to:

1. Eliminate
2. Improve

Each moment of truth, break point or business rule represents an opportunity, but the more of them we have the greater our chance of failure occurring. So to reduce our point of failure factor we seek to eliminate as many as we can. Obviously we can’t practically get rid of all of them, but we need to ensure that the ones that we leave in place are improved as much as possible and that they are aligned to successful customer outcomes.

This is a very high level overview of how outside-in works. If you’d like to find out more or to become trained in the technique I’d recommend you visit the following links:

BP Group - http://www.bpgroup.org/

BP Group on Linkedin - http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1062077&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

Steve Tower's Blog (World Outside-in Guru) - http://successfuloutcomes.blogspot.com/

Remember, The Process Revolution Starts Here...

- TPN

Outside-in Part 2: Successful Customer Outcomes

So we've talked about what Outside-in has done and is currently doing for some of the best organisations in the world. But how does it actually work?

Outside in, fundamentally, is about aligning the way business is done with successful customer outcomes. That may sound like a no-brainer but careful thought is required to specify what the real customer outcome is. Outside-in takes an approach that focusses on the customer experience. The part that most organisations get wrong is that their definition of the customer experience is blinkered - the way that they have run their business and approached what they think their customers want has become immobile and inflexible.

Take two contrasting examples. British Airways struggles ahead selling seats on planes. Their approach to making money is just that - bums on seats. They are stuck in the mentality that the process is simply from check-in to baggage collection. It's thinking from decades ago. They are going slowly bust because they are a dinosaur unable to be flexible enough to adapt, to learn and to align with what today's airline passengers actually want. They can cost cut 'till the cows come home - it won't save them.

Meanwhile Ryanair are steaming ahead. They've looked at the customer experience and removed the blinkers. They've used outside-in to think outside the box - to give customers what they want - to fulfill the successful customer outcomes. They don't see the process as simply check-in to baggage collection - they have seen the opportunities: e.g.  online gambling, e-cigarettes and their latest innovation - removing check-in desks altogether.

So whilst traditional companies try to solve their problems by looking at their internal processes and improving them (with the misguided aim of improving their service to the customer) outside-in starts with the customer experience and builds the internal business processes to support the customer alignment.

But how do we do this I hear you scream?

Stay tuned for Outside-in Part 3: Moments of Truth.

- TPN

Outside-in Part 1 - The Process Revolution Starts Here

Six Sigma and Lean's bodies lie smouldering and decomposing in the ashes of the 20th century. A revolution is upon us. Some are wise enough to have seen it coming, some have only recently found it and the others, well, they'll soon adapt or die.

What I am talking about is an approach that is so radically different from the ways that we have traditionally approached process improvement that it forces you to totally alter your current mindset. It is an approach that is the secret weapon of some of the world's greatest companies such as Google, Apple and Virgin.

It's called Outside-in.

On paper outside-in sounds like a "no brainer" - it's about looking at process from the customer's experience. I'm sure you think you already do that, but if you aren't using outside-in already I can categorically tell you that you aren't. Outside-in uses a method to systematically look at the customer's experience from end to end, rather than looking at improving the customer's experience by altering internal processses - this is inside-out thinking. Whereas inside-out thinking puts a bandage on the effect, it doesn't eliminate the cause - the wound still bleeds.

As organisations we have become crippled by our internal processes. We've become so entwined in what we do day to day we've forgotten why we exist - to serve our customer - to give them what they need, to give them what they want and sometimes to give them what they don't know they need yet! The customer is our reason for being, without them we cease to exist, yet through our bureaucracy and our bulk we become a bloated beast of burden - unable to move rapidly to meet the needs of the lightning fast pace of life around us. In the end, we sink and die whilst the nimble climb higher and higher.

When we use Outside-in to optimise process we achieve three things simultaneously - We reduce costs, improve the customer experience and as a result improve revenue. This we call "the triple crown".

Sounds to good to be true? Well, it's not. And here's why:

• Whilst Marks and Spencer flounder in the UK, Zara are achieving world domination
• Whilst Delta and United airlines are dying in the states, Southwestern airlines is flourishing
• Whilst Best Buy expand, their major competitors have gone bust
• Whilst Nokia try to sell outdated phones Apple kill the market with the iPhone
• Tesco has surged to be the no1 supermarket in the UK, now bidding to buy the former no 1
• Ryanair become the most profitable airline in Europe whilst BA implode
• Whilst british banks go bust, bank Santander is posting huge profits

What do these victors have in common? They all use Outside-in to achieve the "triple crown".

So, do you think Lean and Six Sigma will help you to achieve all that? Thought not.

Welcome to the revolution.

- TPN

Will Twitter Embrace Process or will it become "The New Spam"?

Twitter - love it or hate it, it's the big thing at the moment. I use it myself, but only as much as I can stand to and only for business purposes.

But recently I've noticed that all I'm getting through these days is what I call "twitter spam" - "followers" whose only updates are the same as those crappy spam e-mails we're all now so used to. Twitter is in danger of becoming the new spam. And what about cybersitting? At the moment I can (and as a test I have) registered twitter names of major corporations that don't quite get it yet (shame on them!) - how long before someone invents a little piece of software that starts registering thousands of twitter names and then puts them up for sale?

I see twitter as being like one of those kids who grew up in a commune like River Phoenix or something - a brilliant genius, but not quite living in the real world - full of innovation and creative spleandor, but not able to live with normal society. Twitter's free and easy lifestyle is about to end, I fear. With innovation comes responsibility- twitter has triumphed, but now some rules have to be put in place to protect it's users and to protect it's end goal.

Dare I say it, it's time for process.

- TPN

EVERYTHING is Process

My favourite band of all time, Oasis once sang "You're all part of the Masterplan..." and that's how I think about process.

What a lot of people seem to forget is that everything we do is a process. When you get up in the morning you follow a process, when you brush your teeth you follow a process. A lot of what we do has become routine and habit, but once upon a time they were new to you - you probably just don't remember when the switch from being a new process to being "just something you do" occurred.

How is this relevant? - well we have to stop thinking of process as being a thing that we fix or we tweak or we control. It is all of those things, but it is so much more - process IS everything that we do, and the sooner we can make decision makers understand this way of thinking, the sooner we'll change the world.

Process is rock n' roll. They just don't know it yet.

TPN

Can innovation and process co-exist and are you scared of creative people?

I saw an interesting article today on whether Innovation & Process can co-exist

I totally agree - there is space for innovation & process - in fact, to make continual improvement work we need to be able to break processes and re-build them - that requires creative thinking!

(In this particular instance the chap might also want to consider a collaboration tool, such as a wiki to streamline their RFP process).

However, it also requires the right people - people who can challenge the norm; creative people. I have to say I don't see many creative people working in "big business". I like those kind of people. So why is it that big corporates are so scared of creative people? Are they too difficult to handle, are they too scary?? Are you a creative person? What do you think?