Operation Improvement Inc.

Management Seminars

A skills development strategy that you may wish to consider is the “One Day Module”.  This approach to training is especially suited to high performance teams with demanding schedules.

• One “day at a time” training gives participants opportunity to assimilate and apply material.
• Managers and key professionals can more easily be included in one day programs.
• Your “star” technical people are not away from their area for more than a day.
• One day modules are easier to coordinate with everyone’s schedule.
• It is easy to add specialty topics to your existing  training curriculum.
• One day modules are easier on the month-to-month budget.
• You get better attendance compliance and fewer logistical conflicts with one-day modules.
• One-day training modules can be supplemented with consulting at a lower daily rate.
• There is time for participants to complete any between-module homework assignments.

¨Accurately Visualize The Current State Of Your Operation.¨

Decision Support is that business function specifically charged with the question, ´What do we know about our operation, and how do we know it?” The deliverable is Metrics and Measures. In this view, financial data is a specific instance in this broader category.

In a business of any size, a ´complete and clear picture´ of the current state of the business is a collection of summaries. This is true from operations and accounting to marketing. For example, you might see reports that contrast: east versus west coast sales, plant versus plant profitability, shift versus shift utilization, and manufacturing lot versus lot quality.

Now, ´east versus west coast´ may not be the crucial distinction, and that is the point.   We want our data, reports and statistics to become  actionable ideas that positively impact decisions and behavior. Identifying which distinctions are critical is one of the secrets of successful business metrics.

If such distinctions were intrinsic, any honest person could simply ¨look¨ and determine how to organize data into information.But, proper organization of data into information is work that requires knowledge and skill. If improperly done, honest and accurate data (badly summarized) will send the organization marching off in exactly the wrong direction. (I have multiple ´actually happened´examples that I have shared with clients in classes and consultation.)

Decision Support is not “in” your technology, quality or accounting departments, and should not be confused with software packages (Decision Support Systems) that you might buy. It is a crucial and on-going  capability that must be developed by management, and it requires an integration with  accounting, information technology and quality.

Decision Support is Information Architecture at its highest level, where information truly is about the business ideas within the data, and not the numbers, calculations and graphs. It is key to simplification, to maximizing your ´ease of doing business´, and to rapidity and accuracy in decision-making.

A ´complete and clear picture´ is the cause of confident action, and our  Management Philosophy´s #1 principle demands it.

Most people have called a support, or ´Help Desk´ and they know that the better ones make a record of each customer contact in a ticketing system.

Tickets are more than automated  ´called while you were out´ systems. On top of reliable ticketing software is the ticketing ´design´. Service work by nature has many intangible qualities. A good ticketing design is what makes the efforts of a service operation visible, measurable and measurable.

An IT organization can purchase ticketing software on the basis of reliability, scalability, robustness, support and price. The ticket design, however needs to be created in coordination with the operational design for the service business, and modified when the business changes.

The heart of the ticket design is often called ´CTI´ - category, type and item classification. Tickets are classified for many reasons, including: accountability, service assignment and ticket routing, and metrics.

Well designed CTI systems allow a service tech to classify a ticket into one of a thousand categories by picking one of ten categories, then one of ten types and one of ten items. Of course, this makes so much more sense than searching through a master list of dozens, hundreds (or more) of request types, but this is not the most important aspect of a well´designed CTI!

Poor ´CTI´ coding can undermine metrics. When you look at tickets from badly designed classification systems, you will typically see a conceptually unusable hodge´podge of symptoms, diagnosis, prescribed solutions, prognosis and follow´up.

Good ´CTI´ ticket design is difficult. Perspectives on ticket classification change throughout its life cycle. What starts as a call for, say, email assistance actually becomes an anti´virus issue. Agents all too often will second guess themselves, or make too much use of the ´Other/Miscellaneous´ or ´User Error´ buckets.

The answer to effective use of  ´CTI´, and confidence ticket classification by agents is not simply ´training´. Organizations fighting a bad ticket design can find themselves putting agents through -months´ of so´called training before they have confidence that the individual can answer the phone and screen a call.

The answer is not another layer of automation. Another layer of macros or templates doesn´t solve them problem, it simply moves it. Also, correct selection of ´CTI´ should drive a service organization to templates and standardized processes, and not the other way around. (Templates or macros should be reserved for the ´Top 5´, or at most: a ´Top 10´.)

A properly organized ´CTI´ classification system should reflect the business design. It should recognize that, at first contact, there may not be enough information for a -complete´ ticket classification. It should drive the request for service into standardized processes and template solutions, and not vice versa. And finally, it should support conceptually useful metrics.