A cornerstone of the customer experience revolution, organizations around the world are increasing their investment in soliciting customer feedback. Yet there’s one dirty little secret no one wants to talk about: response rate. Most customers ignore or refuse to respond to all the requests for feedback they get. To best understand this dirty little issue,…
I was a two-year varsity football letterman playing a defense linebacker at Cornell University. I relate my experiences on the field to experiences on the job. The professional and college football championships will conclude with the number one team at the end of the season. That team will have demonstrated determination, perseverance, and grit to win. It is not much different with organizations striving to improve their performance. They have no “could’ve” or “should’ve” in their vocabulary; instead, they focus on “must have.”
Let’s do a quick psychic demonstration:
Draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper. On the left side of the line name your three best decisions in life and on the right side name a couple of your worst decisions …Go ahead, I’ll wait!
And now be amazed with my uncannily accurate first prediction: The decisions on the left side all turned out great while those on the right side turned out lousy. Underwhelmed? How about my second prediction: You’re probably wrong.
“We live in a world of speed and cheapness,” says Roger W. Smith, who makes every component of a watch from scratch and by his own hand. It is the ultimate opposite of that other Smith (Adam)’s division and specialization of labor. I believe there is room for both in our world. It takes one watchmaker about 6 months to produce one watch. The result is a masterpiece…
What is the one consistent element of every successful significant project or initiative?
Making time to review earlier proposals and decisions is hard… very hard. But it’s still one of the best time investments a leader can make.
When operating budgets are squeezed, we usually cut the training budget first. It’s an easy target because there is little visible, immediate impact. When time is squeezed, we usually cut follow-up reviews. Follow-up is an easy target because we tell ourselves we’ll get back to those reviews… when there’s time. So, when will that be? And how much might delay cost?
The Blue Ocean Strategy is highly related to process innovation. The idea of this strategy is to build new businesses where none existed before. So-called Blue Ocean industries are more profitable than traditional business fields with head-to-head competitors. In the Blue Ocean strategy, you must offer your customers a value innovation (i.e. tangible product or service advancements) accompanied by demonstrable savings. To be able to do that, you have to look at your process innovation from a new perspective. Let’s revisit the six steps of the Blue Ocean strategy from a process point-of-view.
Why Implement an Organizational Culture of BPM?
I’m holding a focus group with some call center associates from the general customer service queue of a major financial services institution.
I’m thinking that I’m going to have to sell them on why we’re here, work hard to get their support, and tenuously pull information from them. After all, they probably don’t want to be here…this is a part-time job for some, a stepping-stone job for others, and a placeholder job for the rest…and I need their honest, and probably negative, feedback to do my job.
My job is essentially to improve their jobs. I could not have been further from the truth.
According to recent AIIM Report – ‘Winning the Paper Wars’, 74% of companies have business improvement campaigns that would benefit from paperless initiatives, but only 24% of those have a specific policy to ‘drive paper out of business’. In the era of BPM, BPMS, iBPMS, ERP, ECM (and dozens of other acronyms), I’m asking: how…