In a blog post I recently read, the writer said that in America, when someone says “our policy is…”, the policy is stated and adhered to but in his country, “not so much”. He went on to say that the cultural signals are different between the two countries.

The writer goes on to suggest that in his homeland, they seem to operate on the premise that if most people are told, “We can’t do that…it’s against our policy”, they will not question the assertion and will just walk away. But, if you argue forcefully and with conviction, they will comply. In America, you don’t have to argue – they do what they say.

I’m happy he’s satisfied with the way things are here. I would argue, though, based on my many and varied experiences, that policy as written and policy as executed are two distinct branches on the same tree here, there, and everywhere else. And the wrong branch is dying.

I’ll give you an example: I once did business with a certain purveyor of wireless products and services before I became an employee. Once I became an employee, I naturally enjoyed a sizeable discount on everything wireless.  The service wasn’t that great but for the price, I felt I could bear some pain. A few years down the road, the company ”rightsized” and I became an ex-employee.

The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.
Socrates

At the end of my wireless contract, I looked at what the now ex-employer wanted to charge me for its goods and services (retail prices had gone up quite a bit).  I asked at a local office if my being a steady-paying customer for over eight years counted for something. What would they do to keep a good customer?

They said they were powerless to do anything – it was driven “by corporate”. I asked them to check with A/R and even offered to get my credit report to show I was a customer worth hanging onto. They wouldn’t deal, though.

I decided to take it to the corporate office. Sure enough, they were as indifferent to my “plight” as the local office. They said, ”If we do it for you, we have to do it for everybody.”

Their stated policy is to “give customers exceptional service” but what their actions say is “…as long as it doesn’t cost us up front.”  Their implicit policy is to treat customer service (or customer satisfaction) as a necessary evil.

The time-honored maxim — that it’s cheaper to keep customers than it is to replace them — seems to have lost its meaning. Perhaps, too, the concept of “cost control” has become the top priority…to the exclusion of everything else.

What do you think? More importantly, what do you tell your customers, and what do you do?

We have heard from several customers about the need for implementing ISO in their unique organizational settings.  Based on this feedback, we are currently developing an ISO QMS implementation guide with tools applicable in different business settings, including service organizations. It will augment our existing ISO 9001 QMS Procedures Manual, and will help answer questions like  ‘How do I get started?’ and ‘How do I roll out ISO in my company?’

As a publisher and professional services firm (not a manufacturer), we have seen benefits from implementing quality methods. We have clear metrics that we measure regularly and are always looking to improve our measurements or come up with better metrics. It is our belief that an implementation guide will provide practical implementation steps to organizations that want to work on their own with little or no help from consultants.

The initial release of the implementation guide, scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2010, will include the planning, design and implementation tools we have used for our clients–and for ourselves–to become ISO-certified. We are also adding some additional tools and explanatory materials prepared specially for the implementation kit. The tool sets incorporate knowledge amassed over almost ten years of research, use, deployment at client sites, and publication of quality policies and procedures. Check out our recent article & blog series on process maps and current series on project management for more insights into what will be included in the implementation kit.

More companies will benefit from continuous improvement

ISO has helped Bizmanualz cultivate the belief and practice of continuous improvement. By using the “Plan – Do – Check – Act” methods on which most quality systems are built, we have focused on improving underlying processes and avoiding problems in the future. Our process orientation reinforces teamwork: we’re all in this together to improve the process that will create ever-better, sustainable results not only for our customers. By releasing the tools that we ourselves use  internally and for clients, we aim to help other organizations implement quality systems with equal structural support.

The ISO implementation kit will be as easy-to-use and self-explanatory as possible. To support this goal, we are developing a test program in which we will work with selected companies to test and use our implementation kit. If your organization has immediate plans to implement or improve its ISO or related quality system, please contact us through the Bizmanualz website or by commenting below this post. We will provide the implementation product at no charge for test customers in exchange for regular phone reports and occasional access to your facility so that we can learn from your use of the product.

For now I can recommend our ISO 9001 QMS Manual. While it is written from a manufacturing perspective, the principles, as well as many of the specific policies, procedures and forms, can be generalized for a service business. And it has been recently updated to conform with the ISO 9001:2008 standard.

Are you implementing a quality program at your organization? What will be your first step? How will you get started? What do you think should be in our implementation guide? Would you like to try the guide and let us know how to make it better? Leave a comment below or contact me directly at  dan@bizmanualz.com .

Recently, the Bizmanualz sales team used a “swim lane” map to agree on the use and timing of its new sales tools.  Before that, though, we collected all of our sales presentations, product descriptions, proposals, and contracts and used them to update our sales implementation binder.  We not only created this physical “home” for the information but we duplicated it on our network.  This binder was designed to help us standardize how we talk about our services.

Even with the sales tools collected and standardized in this way, we were getting more variance than we were willing to accept in terms of the length of the sales process, final configuration of the service, and the customer’s expectations.

Looking for root causes, we determined that the sales tools we had created were being deployed at different stages in the sales process by different people.  Though we had information on when was the best time to use each tool — for example, we knew it was counterproductive to send a written proposal before confirming a shared understanding with the prospective customer, and we’d developed one-page illustrations and short slide decks to help with that – the issue of correct timing had not been adequately communicated to everyone.

Bizmanualz’ sales team worked together on this swim lane map to arrive at a consensus on when to deploy proposals and other sales tools (click graphic to enlarge).

Timing is Everything

We had not clarified when to use each tool, so in practice our sales process had not been fully implemented.  Getting the sales team in on creation of a swim lane map helped us hash out the best timing and implementation of each tool. We agreed that implementation would be based on customer behaviors that we could observe and document.

Our swim lane map shows us establishing a shared understanding with the customer using a visual presentation, and also gaining acceptance to configuration and price. Only then do we propose terms and conditions.  Has a shared understanding been established? What have we observed that confirms our perception? Have we received a written correspondence? Yes: issue proposal.

By mapping it out, we could visualize the implications of using the wrong tool at the wrong time. We could see that offering a formal proposal too early could throw us into a loop of confusion, delays, and revisions. By confirming expectations one step at a time, we could literally see on the map that we would be driving up customer satisfaction, one of the key metrics we use to run the company.

I got a piece of spam today from “The Warrior Sales Academy”.  Two things immediately popped into my head.  One, they’re trivializing the unpleasant but sometimes necessary things soldiers do.  (You want to be a “warrior”?  Really?)

Two, we’re not in the Dark Ages.  Conciliation is preferable to confrontation.  Collaboration trumps the “pillage and plunder” mindset.  Selling is first and foremost about establishing – then building – healthy relationships.   What value do you give them in return for the money they give you?  Are you offering greater value than your competitors?  Are you always looking to improve?

Look at the quality management system process model, as depicted in ISO 9001:2008 (figure 1).  See where the customer is?

Here, the customer is the alpha and omega of the quality management system.  Organizations that implement quality management systems ensure customer satisfaction — they meet the customer’s requirements, and then some.

Contrast the ISO process model with the warrior process model (Figure 2):

Do you really expect to get – and keep – customers when you go after them like barbarians on Rome?  Look at what clause 1.1(b) of ISO 9001 says:

“This (standard) specifies requirements for a quality management system where an organization…aims to enhance customer satisfaction through the effective application of the system, including processes for continual improvement of the system and the assurance of conformity to customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.”

Seems pretty simple but as the saying goes, “If it was that simple, everyone would be doing it.”

So, what are you?  A warrior, or a builder?  If you’re not having any luck as a warrior, it’s probably time to take the ISO 9001 approach.

Getting a job done requires more than just the work.  Often times, there are inputs provided and paperwork handed over, not only before the project, but also between tasks within the project. Now, paperwork may take the form of electronic documents, or records in a database. But either way, handing off or accepting documents is often how we set the boundaries between tasks and transfer control from one party (or project step) to another.

The map used to show the flow of paperwork is one of the seven most-used process maps that we are describing in our process map series.  The document map displays visually what information you should expect to receive, and from whom. It also shows you what information you are expected to produce for someone else. For an example, let’s go back to my family vacation story. One of my usual stops before any family vacation is AAA for a TripTik. You get a custom-printed series of roadmaps showing the territory that you plan to traverse. Tall skinny pages are comb-bound into a book. The route is highlighted, usually with an orange highlighter that is easy to see in daylight and darkness.

Handing off a simple document like a highlighted road map leaves little doubt about what is intended and that control is being handed off from the navigator to the driver.

In our vacation travel example, a TripTik map page could serve as an output document from the navigator to the driver at the “provide directions” step.  Sure, after several hours on the road my wife might just tell me where to go. But she might better show me where to go. With experience, we have agreed that a highlighted TripTik removes all ambiguity between right turns and left and otherwise clarifies the navigator’s intentions.

In this small area of the swim lane map, the navigator "provide(s) directions" to the driver. The navigator is actually handing off a highlighted roadmap, or TripTik, to the driver. This hand-off shows up on the document map shown here. See the previous blog post for the full swim lane map where this example comes from.

Document Maps Help You Recognize Hand-Offs

A simple document map like this one makes it clear what documents are inputs and outputs at each process step. You can see what documents you get, and which ones you need to hand off to others.

Look at the first row labeled “Navigator.” She obtains a TripTik map and tourist brochures (received from outside the process).  The navigator executes the ‘plan route’ process step and produces a ‘highlighted route’ and ‘turn-by-turn instructions’ for the Driver. All four documents are, literally, physical documents, and thus are shown on the map.

Next, the driver uses the documents obtained from the navigator in his ‘driving’ step and produces a status report showing the current location. Notice that a parallelogram is shown instead of a document symbol, indicating that the status report is not a written document, but a spoken one in this case.

The passengers, who don’t really own any process steps, produce a break stop request as part of a pre-defined process called “break process.” That is, the break process comes from somewhere outside of the Driving process. Here, passengers produce a spoken request for a break. Again, a parallelogram is shown, indicating that no actual written document is produced.

Document maps should show all the important written documents so that you could audit your inventory of reports for compliance purposes. The document map is not a recreation of the swim lane map. Decisions and process detail can be left out. You are showing the main steps in rough order.

Document maps come in handy in quality systems like ISO 9001, which require that certain records (like product requirements) be created and maintained. Since they show the records your process creates, documents maps remind and remind process owners to generate output documents without having to name someone as the “document police.” And if you’re in the middle of the process, document maps can tell you if you have the inputs you need to do your job.

Last week I took you along on a family vacation to the Eastern Shore of Lake Michigan near Muskegon. Yes, we got there. But it was a longer journey than it needed to be. We could have spent less time travelling, and more time vacationing in the cool climes of Lake Michigan. Responsibilities between driver and navigator could have been more clearly delineated. The hand-offs could have been better communicated to cut down on some of the indecision and waiting that occurred.  Sounds good but, So how do you do that?

This swim lane process map shows the passenger (customer) in the first lane. Their role is mostly to ask questions. In the second lane, the driver accepts requests for breaks from passengers, and route adjustments from the navigator, who is shown in the third row.

Asking, ‘how are we going to get from where we are to where we want to be,” is a question of implementation.  What are the concrete steps we have to take to get there?  Who is going to do what, and when are they going to do it?

Using Swim Lane process maps is one way to answer some of these questions.  We like to organize Swim Lane process maps by putting the ‘START’ on the left and the ‘END’ on the right.  It’s easier to read the chart from left to right.  Organizing the Swim Lane map and other process maps in predictable ways, and not over-stuffing your maps with information eases communications, which is mainly why you create process maps: to communicate to others a process that you already know.

What’s In A Swim Lane?

Swim Lane Diagrams, as described in part I of our series on process maps, organize tasks by role.  A role gets a swim lane. You are responsible for every task, document or decision shown in your Swim Lane.  The chart above shows three swim lanes: Passenger, Driver, and Navigator.  In our swim lane maps, we always show the customer on top.  Arguably, my daughters in the back seat are the customers of the ‘drive home from camp’ process.  If it wasn’t for the customer, my wife and I might be in Cape Cod, or Colorado, or France.  But we wouldn’t be in the minivan in Michigan.  To determine who goes in the top lane of your Swim Lane map, use the “but for” test.  ‘But for my daughters, I would not be driving five hundred miles north to a very small town in Michigan.  The process would not be taking place.

How Swim Lane Maps Help

What really stands out in this Swim Lane map is that Driving and Navigation are in fact different roles.  Had we consulted a Swim Lane map before our trip, we would have clearly seen that the driver should not be attempting to navigate,  no more than the navigator should be grabbing the wheel and driving.  The roles are clearly distinct.  Swim Lane Maps visually communicate how the roles relate to and communicate with one another.

Swim Lane Maps keep you within the bounds of your role while defining hand-offs of control and information.

Customer Involvement Shows Up In A Swim Lane Map

Swim Lane Maps visually communicate the involvement of each role, the Customer role for example.  As in the example above from my family road trip, my daughters asks of the process, ‘are we there yet?’ and interrupts the process when it is, ‘time for a break.’ But my daughters are passengers, and not responsible for any process steps (rectangular boxes).  In simple processes, customers may provide information at the beginning of a process in the form of requirements, and at the end when they buy the product.  In more complex products, customer requirements may be injected more frequently. In the case of co-development or co-creation of products, customers may have responsibility for processes and therefore process steps would appear in their swim lanes.

ISO-certified organizations must gather requirements from customers. That could be shown as a requirements document, depicted in a process map as a process step box with a wavy bottom. Customer requirements could also stand alone in a separate requirements definition process.

In a Swim Lane Map, handoffs of control and information appear as vertical lines or arrows originating from an activity in one role and connecting to an activity in another. When my daughter asks, “Are we there yet?”, it shows up as a vertical line leading from a decision point. The answer produces different actions, which is another indicator that this role is a customer.

One way to set strategy is to use your clout.  As the company’s chief executive and majority shareholder, convince everyone else that the direction you want to take is essential to achieving the company’s objective goals – increasing sales, improving customer satisfaction, and complying with government regulations.  Maybe not the best way, but it’s one way.

Realistically, there are better ways to determine company strategy, and no one way is the best way.  Any time you can take more than one route to arrive at a desirable goal, you need to balance the relative value of projects, using financial measures like ROI, or prioritization schemes like Pareto charts.  This post considers the interactions between decisions, projects, and systems – in real life, few good decisions occur in isolation. Decisions must take into account that everyone in your company depends on everyone else for information and work-in-process.

That’s where process maps come in

Implementing strategy without a process map is like navigating a family road trip without a road map. It usually doesn’t work out. Ask my wife about my driving and navigating from St. Louis, Missouri, to Michigan. Fortunately, we had plenty of food and water in the minivan, and the kids were already in Michigan at summer camp.

Today in the article section, we continue our series on process maps by introducing three types of process maps: High-level, Low-Level, and Swim Lane Process Maps.

Consider that before packing the minivan, I might have consulted a map of the United States. Were I to look at the big picture, I would have seen right away that the eastern shore of Lake Michigan is north and somewhat east of Saint Louis and that it’s faster to drive through Illinois and Indiana to get there than say, through Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, and the Milwaukee Ferry. In that sense, the national map is a High-Level Process Map. It shows the major systems (states) and how communication (highways) pass through them.

My wife asks the question, "why do they call this a minivan?"

If you were updating your company’s automation supporting order-to-cash software, you might want to review a high-level picture showing how Purchasing moves a quote to Production, and Production sends finished goods to Shipping. A High-Level Process Map would show you right away that Shipping has to receive materials before shipping Finished Goods to customers. Knowledge of sequence and dependencies depicted in a High-Level Process Map helps you determine what happens first.

Back on the road

Once we were in Wisconsin, the big US map showed that Milwaukee was to the right (er, east) of Dodgeville. Easy enough. Once we got to Milwaukee we searched for the ferry. There, the big USA map was not much help, so I pulled out the more detailed (or low-level) Wisconsin state map.  On it, I looked for the Milwaukee area insert.  Furthermore, had I stopped to ask directions, someone might have advised staying in the southbound lanes of Carferry Drive rather than end up back on Lake Parkway heading toward Chicago.

That is the kind of insight you can glean about your business from a Low-Level Process Map. Credit checks and accounts-receivables reviews happen before granting credit to customers, so you might want to work on the estimating and accounting software packages before redoing the invoicing systems.

Now my family and I are all safely home.  I’m contemplating our next road trip, and I have become a big fan of Swim Lane Maps. Like a Low-Level Process Map, Swim Lane Maps show the functions that must occur for a successful journey, like “Drive” and “Navigate” (and maybe “Keep your hands off your sister’s iPod”).  Swim Lane Maps show responsibility for each activity and when various parties need to accept information from (or hand off to) one another.

All this, and they're still happy campers, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.

Had I consulted a Swim Lane Map before repacking the family in the minivan, it would have been visually apparent that I was responsible for driving, not navigating, and I was supposed to accept information somewhere north of Chicago.

One can come to appreciate that maps get all the information out in the open. And should things go in the wrong direction, you can point to the map. Interested parties can discuss the map calmly, with no need to comment on anyone’s innate abilities such as hearing or sense of direction.

At this point, you might see how Swim Lane Maps could come in handy in your company, when you consider how systems will support people who provide information and work-in-process to each other, and vice versa.  For example, the sales department is supposed to hand off orders to the credit department which, in turn, performs the credit check based on management criteria.  The IT department should want to know about responsibilities, dependencies, and hand-offs — which a Swim Lane Map can convey easily and concisely – before they begin to plan, develop, debug, and roll out software.

So, check out this week’s installment about High-Level, Low-Level and Swim Lane process maps.  An introduction to the series appeared last week in a blog post of ours and in the article site where we posed the question, ‘What is a Process Map?’

I trust that next week, you will find your way back here for more types of maps.

At Bizmanualz, process improvement — internal and external — is one of our main objectives.

Many of us in the USA and elsewhere are aware of the need for significant improvement in many aspects of the health care process — providing and insuring, for example.  In a recent blog post about the US Healthcare Problem, we presented a case for using the ISO 9001 standard to drive health care process improvement.  Now, we’ll look at ”lean” and how it pertains health care.

The concept of “lean” was developed for production environments (see the Toyota Production System) but with a few modifications, it applies to services as well.  In either case, Lean considers the use of resources for goals other than “creating value for the customer” to be waste and such wastes should be eliminated.

From the customer’s perspective, value describes an item or a service they’re willing to pay for.  Lean is sometimes said to be about “creating more value with less work”; in reality, it’s about “maximizing value while minimizing waste”.  And though people can’t seem to agree on much of anything in the health care “debate”, one thing we should all be able to agree on is that there’s plenty of inefficiency throughout the health care system.

Bicheno and Holweg (in their book, “Lean Toolbox”), describe seven service wastes:

1. Delay – customers waiting for a service;
2. Duplication — having to reenter data, repeat details on forms, copy information across, or answer queries from several sources within the same organization;
3. Unnecessary Movement — having to get in line several times, lack of a “one-stop” service encounter, etc.;
4. Unclear Communication – wastes of seeking clarification, confusion over product or service use, wasting time finding a location that may result in misuse or duplication;
5. Incorrect inventory — being out-of-stock, unable to get exactly what was required, substitute products or services, or not having the right provider available;
6. Opportunity lost to retain or win customers – failure to establish rapport, ignoring customers, unfriendliness, and rudeness; and
7. Errors in the service transaction — product defects in the product-service bundle, lost or damaged goods (famously, the airman who was supposed to have his gallbladder removed but had his lower limbs amputated).

As providers and as customers, we’ve seen these wastes…far too many times.  We need to remove as many of these wastes as possible and improve the process.  That’s where Lean can help, and many health care providers are already implementing Lean and other process improvement tools and techniques.

We need to take Lean, ISO 9001, and other tools deeper into the entire process of providing health care — more providers and insurers — if we’re going to make things better and make the improvements last.  The answer is certainly not going to be found in new legislation (see #4, above).

Now, shall we – at long last — begin?

What are you doing?  That’s what Twitter’s slogan used to be. Until Tuesday, that is, when the mega microblogging site unveiled a new home page that is quite different from the one we’ve all come to expect.

Over the past few weeks and months, there has been a lot of chatter going on about how Twitter might challenge Google for the usefulness of its search function. Unlike the bot- or spider-generated search indexes for the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft), Twitter’s search result is based on human reporting. And, the logic goes, the human touch makes Twitter’s search results more relevant.

Fair logic, but somewhat difficult to embrace. The human brain is (I would hope) far more powerful than a desk calculator. Yet, when it comes to adding or multiplying six-digit numbers, we still use the calculator. Besides, the search engine spiders have become very smart over the years, capable of understanding the nuances of context, relevance and appropriateness.

Which brings us back to the home page change at twitter. Instead of the regular login boxes, you now see a search box. Instead of an explanation of what Twitter is, you now see a short tag line that asks you to “share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” And on the bottom of the cleanly designed page, you see trending topics by the hour, day, and week.

The fact that twitter doesn’t describe what it is, is perhaps testimony to the abundance of press exposure it has received in recent months. The brand identity firmly established, it can now afford to focus on the call to action. Once you sign in, however, it’s no different than what it was before.

It will be interesting to see how Twitter emerges as an alternative search engine. There are certain topics, especially current events, for which it might indeed be a better search platform. With a plethora of new users joining Twitter every day, the information bank will only become bigger. However, I am not willing to abandon Google any time soon. I’ll still tweet, but I may not be ready to Twitter yet.

As for what I am doing, I am going back to Googling this garden tool that I’ve been meaning to buy for some time now.

There are few people in the U.S. — and not a lot more around the world — who are unaware of the health care insurance crisis in this country.  The answer, for whatever reason, is as it always has been: let’s make a law!

But what kind of law?  ”Too many people are without health care insurance!”, cries one side.  ”We can’t have ‘socialized medicine’!”, cries the other side.

“We must seek compromise!”, cries a voice from the middle.  Politics is the art of compromise, right?  If compromise is “the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes that he or she has the biggest piece” (bonus points if you can guess who said that)…yes, I suppose politics could be an answer.

In reality, we know it is not.  We know that whoever writes the laws stands to gain the most if those laws are passed.  This is true not just of the USA, but of every country on the planet.

There is an effective solution out there that we seem to be conveniently overlooking.  That solution is ISO 9001, “Quality Management Systems-Requirements”.  According to the standard, key to an effective quality management system is meeting — or exceeding — customer requirements.  The product — in this case, health care insurance — must satisfy customer requirements above all.  The customer is so important that three clauses are devoted exclusively to the customer: clauses 5.2 (Customer Focus), 7.2 (Customer-Related Processes), and 8.2.1 (Customer Satisfaction).

And just who is the customer of health care insurance?  Well, who’s supposed to be reaping the benefits of the product?  There are two customers, actually…

• The people being insured, and
• The health care providers.

Who aren’t customers?  Pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturers, lawmakers, lobbyists, ad nauseam.  My advice to President Obama — and to any other world leader, for that matter — is to develop a health care system that complies with the requirements of ISO 9001, and ignore anyone and everyone who calls for legislation.  Don’t forget — the ones insisting that legislation is the answer are often the ones who stand to profit the most from it.

Whether you agree or not, let me know what you think.