Posts in Process Improvement

Facebook and Instagram Password Snafu

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Looks like it’s time to change your Facebook and Instagram passwords … again!

It’s all over the news this morning!!! Facebook confirmed yesterday, that it stored “hundreds of millions” of account passwords in plaintext FOR YEARS!!!

The discovery was made in January as part of a routine security review. Facebook said, “None of the passwords were visible to anyone outside Facebook.” Facebook admitted the security lapse, after they discovered passwords were accessible to approximately 2,000 engineers and developers.

“This caught our attention because our login systems are designed to mask passwords using techniques that make them unreadable,” said Canahuati, in the recent announcement. “We have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them.”

Facebook said it will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook and Instagram of the exposure.

Recommendation: Change your passwords now!

Facebook Marketing White Paper

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Three years ago, my wife and I opened up an equestrian business in Bulverde, Texas, where we board horses and train riders. We quickly discovered the importance of Facebook Marketing in this very social business.

Like many small business owners, we struggled to engage our audience on social media. However, as a business consultant, I’ve worked to fully understand the ins-and-outs of the maze of digital advertising — especially advertising without spending money!

I put together a short, helpful white paper called, The Five Deadly Sins of Facebook Marketing.

If you are interested in the FREE white paper, request it via this link: https://mailchi.mp/549ddf9c3390/fds.

Share Your Success

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“Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.” – Woody Allen

As we step into the last week of February, what is the one thing you most want to accomplish this week?

For me, this week, I start teaching tomorrow my first business class with Hallmark University — Business Intelligence and Analytics. It’s both an in-person and online course. I want to make this an effective and impactful experience for the students.

So, my one this is: To Deliver Value This Week!

Share with me and everyone else your one thing this week! Let’s make it happen!!!

Who Am I — Success Incubator

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Your success is my success…I’m a success incubator!

In the early 90s (Air Force cop), I got involved in quality. In 1998, I retrained as a fulltime internal coach and consultant. I was always the problem solver, so I moved from job-to-job every couple of years.

When I retired from the Air Force, I really wanted to help people–the business person. I created my own consulting business, Crosscutter Enterprises. Crosscutting is a jeweler’s way to bring out the brilliance of a diamond–I crosscut your business.

A month later, Booz Allen Hamilton (top 10 consulting firm) called me about a job they hadn’t posted and I hadn’t applied for. My interview was more of when can you start. Over three years, Booz changed and I left to work again with business people who need my help.

A month later, USAA called offering a contract. A month later, the exec I worked with told me he was going to hire me at the end of my contract–he did. For seven years I led four strategic engagements.

Today, I’m back…looking to work with you–businesses that need an expert to help them grow and solve problems.

Let me be your success incubator!

Take A Leap Hump Day

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Happy Hump Day!

Voltaire said, “Great is the enemy of good.” While Cardone said, “‘Thinking big’ simply isn’t enough.” Which statement do you believe?

What is your passion? Are you living it? Are you aiming low and hoping to hit the mark? Are you accepting the status quo…the, “We’ve always done it that way,” or “That’ll never work?”

Taking a leap doesn’t mean completely throwing out the old for something totally new and scary! You can take the leap, just by doing one thing a week that scares you. It might be enrolling in a new college class, taking a different route to work, parking in a different location, or even eating at a new restaurant.

Taking a leap is a way to hijack your sedentary brain and shock it into awareness. Wednesdays are perfect days for taking little leaps. Simply start doing one thing different that improves your work or life.

What’s your one thing this week?

Experience-based Operational Excellence

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customerexperiencepuzzle

The Customer Experience

Experience means many things.  An experience is a direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge.  In other words, the customer experiences something through observation or participation.  Experience also relates to a customer as the fact or state of having been affected by or gained knowledge through direct observation or participation.  In other words, the customer has experienced things with the company that they base opinion on.  Also, experience is related to an individual based on their practical knowledge, skill, or practice derived from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity.  Customers all have different experiences that make up their background.  Individual experience is often related in the terms of degrees, certifications, and/or years of involvement in a particular thing.

In a nutshell, customer experience (CX) is something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through by a customer with a certain company.  It is the product of an interaction between a company and a customer over the duration of their relationship.  This interaction includes their attraction, awareness, discovery, cultivation, advocacy, and purchase and use of a service.

CX is simply the result of everything that makes up the company’s product or service delivery, visible or not.

Problems with Customer Experience Today

Many companies today only focus on the ‘touchpoints’–the critical moments when customers interact with the company and its offerings to establish the customer experience.  This is often depicted in marketing as an experience map.  Often, this is a narrow focus on what is important to the customer’s satisfaction at specific moments and often creates a distorted picture of the overall experience.  This can lead a company to believe customers are happier with the company’s products and services than they actually are.  This approach also diverts attention from the bigger and more important picture–the customer’s end-to-end journey.[i]

An emphasis on Operational Excellence within an company as the driver of the CX is important to carefully consider.

Experience-based Operational Excellence

Operational Excellence (OpX), as an official business concept, has not been around very long and is often misconstrued.  The best way to look at OpX is to think of it as an end-to-end enterprise-wide management practice that aligns everything in the organization toward driving excellence.[ii]  From a perspective of the CX, OpX essentially represents an organization’s focus on all things that affect the customer’s experience (see Figure 1).

 X-Based OpX

Figure 1: Experience-based Operational Excellence

     Normally, companies view CX as a result of the product itself.  Some broaden the view into the processes that impact the product delivery and many companies see OpX as nothing more than the application of process management and Lean Six Sigma improvement processes.[iii]  In reality, true OpX represents the end-to-end enterprise-wise business management.  The ‘experience’ is at the very center of where the product, process, and employee intersect–this is what the customer sees and feels.  The entire experience is influenced by high-level company strategies, internal and external communication, and employee development.  Everything within the company is supported by an innovative layer that includes technology and information.

Thus, everything in the organization is important in the CX equation and focusing simply on touchpoints will represent a lack of true focus on the CX.  From a company’s perspective, there are several representative performance metrics that are important to the overall CX.  A company cannot simply look at metrics like sales and net promoter score, but must consider all company performance as critical to the CX.  There are many things that measure the experience, but can generally be referred to as satisfaction, sentiment, and relationship.

Summary

In summary, the traditional view of CX as a stand-alone activity represents a shortsighted view of what is important to the customer.  Although much of what makes up OpX is out of the customer’s view, it all leads to the CX and must be considered and aligned.

[i] Rawson, A., Duncan, E., & Jones, C. (2013). The Truth About Customer Experience. Harvard Business Review.

[ii] Boothe, W., & Lindborg, S. (2014). Handbook to achieve operational excellence: A realistic guide including all tools needed. Ft Myers FL: Reliabilityweb.com.

[iii] Crabtree, R. (2010). Driving operational excellence: Successful lean six sigma secrets to improve the bottom line. Livonia MI: MetaOps Publishing.

Four Types of Companies

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When dealing with any organization, it is important to understand the things that are important to it and the employees. For instance, they may be focused on improving compliance or increasing revenue, but each company focuses on things that are important to it.

Knowing this when dealing with the company or their employees helps understand how they behave.

One way to examine any organization is through the lens of purpose versus process. When looking at organizations from this lens, there are four possibilities. The organization can be purposed-based, process-based, blended, or neither. How they are says a lot about how they operate.

Let me define what I mean by each of these types of organizations:

1. Purpose-based. A Purpose-based organization relies on a strong organizational purpose and reason for being. At the heart of what they do everyday is a greater reason everyone works there. Sometimes the organization defines this in their mission and vision statements and sometimes it is just known. Making money is NOT a greater purpose. A good example of a Purpose-based organization would be a philanthropic nonprofit or military organization. Their reasons for existence, even if not written down, are usually quite clear.

2. Process-based. Organizations that focus on perfecting processes to run an effective and efficient organization, are process-based. Strictly process-based organizations are focused on exceptional product or service delivery and not their reason for being. Money is normally very important to them.  Many commercial companies fall into this categor, more so in manufacturing.

3. Blended. A blended organization has a strong purpose or reason for being and operates with strong processes. Organizations with both are difficult to find, but can come from anywhere.

4. Neither. Many companies and organizations have neither a strong defined purpose nor effective and efficient processes. These organizations are quite easy to find because they are everywhere.

Being Agile

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Agile…

This is quickly becoming the management buzzword of 2015. Just another magic pill for industry to improve what they do with what they believe is little work.

Agile, as a process (yes folks, it is normally a process), usually starts in an organization with IT in software development. Soon after companies get the “agile bug” and they want everything to be agile. Lean quickly becomes the Agile way to be.

Agile, by itself, is just a word describing a state of being. I’m sure there are many definitions, but in its basic sense, Agile is being able to adjust, change, or respond quickly. It’s being resilient and flexible. Agile approaches are based on quick incrimental iterations. Agile, at its core, is organic and a state of being, not a program.

How do you become Agile?

Look at how you are organized and how you make decisions in your company. Is your company fairly flat and accepting of risk or do decisions need to be collaborated up through many levels and do they take a long time to obtain approvals?

Does your system, to get things done, have to go through annual processes with multiple approvals and significant roadblocks, or are employees empowered at the lowest levels to embark on projects when needed to make things happen?

Do you focus on managing change (I e., reactive) or are your employees ready and actively looking for change opportunities and making them happen?

Agile cannot become the way you are without significantly addressing your culture and operating models. If you are slow to make decisions and change as a company and if you are reactive to changes after they occur, then you are not Agile.

Employing Agile methodologies like Agile Software Development or Lean are only programs…they do not make you Agile as a company.

Being Agile means fundamentally changing everything about your company…

Will that work for your company’s culture?

Internal Service Providers vs External Service Providers

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Here is a situation that keeps repeating itself everywhere I turn: internal vs external services.

When I am talking about service providers, I mean the activities that help the company run, but add no value to the product the customer buys. Things like HR, IT, Facilities Management, Finance, etc. There is a specific situation that plays itself out over-and-over again with these internal organizations.

A service–let’s use the example of payroll–is needed to pay employees of the company. When the company is starting out, employees are simply paid by the president or another random person working in the company. As the company grows, the workload increases and an office manager is hired to take care of these things. Over time an HR department is stood up with several related functions, payroll just being one of them.

Then, the company really starts to focus on their margin. Competition has stood up and offering the same cool ideas and the company needs to figure out how to cut costs to keep their prices down. The days of being the fat, dumb, and happy big kid on the block are gone. Normally cuts come from the services that support the company–places like HR. After all, they are non-value added in a lean environment, right and these people have been with the company for several years and now make pretty good salaries. Basically, they are a drain, and we need to keep them to a minimum.

Oh, the plight of the service organization…can’t live without em, but don’t want to pay them.

Because they are lean and mean (and maybe mad), the services that they always provided to the company start to get harder to accomplish. The company is growing, but their office is not. The results of their work suffer and it takes longer for them to do stuff. The company (internal customers) starts to get frustrated with the poor service. In some cases the company has become so big that no one even knows how this service is even done or who does it.

In order to keep up, the payroll service starts creating self-service capabilities to ease their workload. Essentially they start outsourcing what they do to the customer. They sell this as a positive thing, but it adds time and complexity to the employee and removes the level of expertise that the service was hired for. Imagine the frustration that is setting in.

Next, the internal customer, frustrated with long waits, lack of and poor service, and having to do many things themselves, decides to take matters in its own hands. The thing is, now the company is so big, that everyone has their own budget and can do what they want. So, factions of the company hire their own payroll person or even department. Of course this person doesn’t do everything but they start taking on the roles that the official department should be doing, but isn’t being very effective at. At first, the original payroll department doesn’t have a problem with this…good for them. But then people start questioning what they do, versus what this new person is doing and why are they even needed?

Next step, the payroll department figures out that payroll is their job and demand that the people doing the work in the company all work under the same department. There is a big effort to consolidate all these new positions paid for by the internal customers and the payroll department becomes big enough to handle the workload again. The problem is, these employees are now part of the payroll department and service everyone under the same flawed systems that was causing the problem in the first place. Internal customers quickly get upset because they lost their personalized service and the company decides, in its annual planning activity, that the payroll department is a good place to cut staff because it has become “too big.”

Again, the frustration sets in, and the next thing you know ABC Payroll Services, an outsourced payroll service, finds its way into the company. It might be a small engagement at first. In some cases, the payroll department itself might outsource non-core, busy-work functions to them. The thing is, they specialize in payroll, do it for many companies, and have cheaper labor that less benefits. Suddenly everyone is questioning the value (i.e., cost and ROI) the payroll department brings when this new and very efficient and effective service provider is doing such a good job for very little money.

To save money, the payroll executive decides to quietly outsource their whole department, saving a job for themselves to “oversee” the activity.

Are you an internal service provider to a company? What value do you bring to your company? Have you outsourced yourselves through customer self service? Are you already challenged by someone else doing part of your work?

This story is played out over-and-over again with every type of service in companies. There are ways to combat this, but many do not see them. Consider the situation above and what the service provider could do to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Process Improvement and Agile

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Agile is quickly becoming the accepted method for project management these days. Once organizations start moving toward agile projects, quickly they want everything delivered in an agile manner. This has led many to ask how process improvement and agile work together.

One of the first misconceptions is that agile is not a process. Of course it is…there is a process flow in agile, just like any other project management approach. Agile has a set of repetitive steps to gather epics and stories and perform iterations. Without a process (series of steps), how would you effectively train agile to others and ensure everyone is doing it right and the same? Yes, agile is a process.

So process improvement can take a long time and often does not feel very agile. If your organization is moving to an agile environment, how does process improvement move there too?  Well, in process improvement, there are three ways to become more agile: proper project scoping and transfer, rapid improvement events (known by many names), and true lean/continuous improvement. The following briefly discusses all three.

Process Improvement Projects.  Running an improvement project using a formal methodology normally follows a waterfall approach, whether it be DMAIC, DMADV, PDCA, or whatever alphabet soup approach you use. Waterfall, as anyone agile will tell you, is not agile! The problem with these projects is they can take a long time to get to root cause and implemented solutions that the lead is confident will solve the business problem. Want it bad, get it bad…right? However, if you take that huge ‘boil the ocean’ problem from your sponsor/client and scope it down into a single area, you can get to an initial solution fairly quickly. Rik Taylor and Associates teaches a very specific project scoping tree that is very effective at getting to a manageable chunk of work. Then, Rik teaches students how to transfer that solution to quicker iterations in other areas, focused on the same problem. This turns the waterfall approach into a very agile-like iteration process. It is still not agile, but it is much quicker at getting to improvements and builds over time.

Rapid Improvement. This is know by many names, like Kaizen Blitz, Work Out, Action Work Out, Rapid, Rapid Improvement, etc. Although still a waterfall approach to process improvement, the actual improvement activity is compressed into a week or less of hands-on dedicated activity. The lead still needs to define and measure in preparation for the workshop event, but what most participants see is a week or less of activity. Also, the solutions, though generally lean-based, are identified and implemented very quickly. This can be a much more agile process.

Lean Shop. Lastly, working in a continuous improvement organization focused on business process management creates an environment and culture of agile improvement. See a problem, fix it, at the lowest level.  That is the nature of true continuous improvement. When you get to a true world of lean daily management backed by solid business process management, agile improvement iterations become the norm. True process improvement projects (waterfall) are only used for large end-to-end improvements.

Even though improvement is happening faster or constantly, it still does not mean it happens without a process. All problem solving must follow a process of understanding the problem, getting to a root cause, and improving. Failing to follow a repeatable approach will result in things like tampering, improper solutions, and improvements reverting back to the old way of doing business.

These are the ways that process improvement and agile are related. Remember, that a process, at its core, is nothing but a series of steps that allow for training, measurement, and consistency. Thus, agile follows a process just like everything else. Although all effective process improvement also follows a process, it can be performed in a very agile manner, getting to iterations of improvement quicker.