Was It Something I Said?
The Process Under Pressure
By Vijay Mehrotra
We had an unexpected visitor to our offices the other day, a woman that we had worked with years ago. She had been employed at a large company that had been our first big client, eventually working her way into a management role. Since then, she had moved across the country, earned a graduate degree and changed careers. An unexpected trip had brought her to our area, and she stopped by unannounced for a visit.
She had stayed in touch with many common acquaintances from our client company, and she gave us the update: who had stayed, who had left and what had become of them all.
As we were winding down, I asked about "Kirk," a young man I had worked with closely. Her eyes lit up.
"Kirk is still there — can you believe it?" she said, "You know, he's still pretty much following 'The Process' and people still really listen to him."
As she told the story, the memories came flooding over me. In our first significant project with this client, we had adapted some techniques from quality control and activity-based costing and combined them with some custom software, structured data collection rules, and a whole new data analysis and cross-departmental communication methodology. I had gotten very emotionally involved with this initiative, and often mused about "giving birth" to The Process.
Eventually, we were able to empirically demonstrate an annual savings of over $8 million from The Process. It was an unqualified home run, and our methodology was held up to other divisions as a model. I had long dreamed of such a story: combining analytic techniques, communication and facilitation skills, and creativity to have a major impact on the financial results of a great company while providing meaning to the lives of the people involved.
Unfortunately, the story does not end there — it somehow never does. The division re-organized, people changed jobs, and our executive sponsor left the company. Kirk inherited the central role in The Process from the analysts we had originally trained, while The Process never took root in the other divisions ("our business is different," they insisted). We eventually stopped consulting to this company, and by 1999, the only visible reminder of this experience was a large Word file on my hard drive, nearly 200 pages of text and graphics that documented the whole bloody thing.
So you can imagine how proud I felt when I heard that Kirk was still following The Process, and that it had been advantageous to him and to his company.
Then, just the other day, I got a call from a sales executive with a company that we work closely with. They were looking for a reference customer, someone who really understood the value of the sophisticated queuing and scheduling system that has been a big part of my working life for the past few years.
"You oughta call 'Fred' — he really gets it," I told her confidently. "In fact, let me call him first — it will give me a good excuse to touch base with him."
He told me a sad tale. About a year after we had worked with his group, his senior management team had brought in an efficiency consultant. By all accounts, this outside expert was hard working, thorough and professional, and Fred said that he had brought in a lot of good tracking and reporting processes.
However, the efficiency consultant had no understanding of the dynamics of call center resource planning. He successfully convinced senior management to throw out the methods that we had worked so hard to implement with Fred's team and to revert to scheduling via spreadsheets. Worse yet, in order to facilitate this simplification, the expert insisted that the company stop cross-training agents and instead dedicate each individual to handle only one type of call.
As Fred looked on helplessly, the "silo" model of routing calls and responding to customers led to a rapid increase in the callers' average waiting time. Meanwhile, utilization levels plummeted, as agents dedicated to a single group sat idle while calls that they were capable of handling queued up elsewhere.
Fred didn't give up, and he eventually convinced his management to go back to their old forecasting and scheduling method — but only after they had all experienced several months of painfully bad customer service. The efficiency consultant, just like the scheduling consultant (me) was long gone by then. Fred is just now starting to pick up the pieces.
These two stories hit me between the eyes, coming at me just a couple of days apart from one another. Why had one solution survived where another one had been torn down?
I am sorry to disappoint anyone who has read this far in search of a clear punchline. There is no bulleted list of things to remember at the bottom of this column, no clever tips to ensure happy endings.
The successful or unsuccessful deployment of innovative modeling solutions is a complex organizational challenge — so it is no surprise that the maintenance and enhancement of these solutions faces real challenges as well. I wish I could say that the strongest ideas will surely endure, that getting buy-in and investment up front is the key to the whole thing, or that having an on-going internal owner is absolutely critical. All of these things are certainly true, yet there are clearly more mysterious and subtle components to the survival model as well. I'm just not that sure what they all are.
Vijay Mehrotra (vijay@onward-net.com) is the CEO of Onward Inc. in Mountain View, Calif.
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