There are lots of tools out there

I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. I mean process improvement tools: 5S, control charts, swim lanes… those sort of tools.

There are also lots of people who know how to use those tools. It is easy to recruit staff who can bring a toolbox stuffed with approaches and techniques to your organisation.

Tool transfer

There are plenty of headhunters and recruitment agents who are skilled at poaching people from one industry and dropping them down in another.

For a while I worked for a bank that was keen on reducing operational expense. It got very excited about applying lean thinking to cut costs. This bank had lots of money, so they did the obvious thing and bought in the appropriate tools, investing in skilled staff.

They recruited a tranche of manufacturing engineers who were well versed in lean. These guys then set about installing a lean system across the organisation.

The tools didn’t work

One of the main ideas was to use shadow boards to help people find the equipment they needed. You will see shadow boards in well run factories and warehouses across the world. The guys applied the logic to a large service centre and started to mark the desks with white tape.

Instruction manual goes here

Telephone goes here

Keyboard sits here…

Creating a clear, uncluttered desk for everyone.

Once everything was marked out they enforced a clear desk policy. There were weekly and monthly audits to make sure that everybody complied. A place for everything and everything in its place.

This made no difference to productivity. They just spent a lot of money on white sticky tape. To quote one of my colleagues:

Nobody has ever lost a phone in a call centre ~ Bob Spencer

Blindly transferring the tools that worked in one industry to another didn’t help. It just frustrated everybody as they realised that they were wasting their time.

The principles work

A call centre in the North East was more successful. Instead of forcing the tools onto the organisation they took time to understand the problem.

Their customer contact teams had a difficult job trying to resolve a myriad of customer issues. A mixture of payment plans, tariffs, mobile devices, software upgrades, networks and locations meant that they had thousands of different solutions to customer issues. It was really hard to find the correct solution to a customer’s problem quickly.

The solution they introduced was guided help files. An “electronic shadow board” that helped the agent find the information that they needed quickly. A place for everything and everything in its place.

Don’t hire tools, hire principles

The tools don’t transfer from one industry to another. Just because it works in a garage doesn’t mean it will work in a bank. But the concepts and ideas invariably do. So don’t hire people who know how to use tools, hire people who understand why.

If you enjoyed this post click here to receive the next

Read another opinion

Image Admanchester