How to optimize the whole: Do you know your customer journey?

Lean has been essential to many successful businesses for decades. It is a learning experience, and in this post, I will show you how I have come to discover more and more what the lean principle “optimize the whole” means:

 

 

2003:  Optimize the whole = Optimize project deliveries

I started out thinking it was much to gain by optimizing the project delivery process. We focused on how we could deliver software that was tested and that fulfilled the requirements from operations -doing it as effective and as fast as possible. 

Handover - Tableatny @ Flickr

2007: Optimize the whole = Optimize the sw life cycle

Around 2007 I realized that we had so much more to gain by optimizing the whole development life cycle: from idea via concept, implementation, testing, installation in production, upgrading and rollback. (yes, moving away from waterfall.)

It was popular to start using more agile development approaches, Scrum and Kanban. I got to work in agile teams; the concept phase, implementation, test and deployment happens within short sprints, even in some large organizations. This is a great improvement, and it is a delivery thing. Getting the software out there, in order to be used, not stored, being able to focus on the features that are actually used! and getting better and better at devilvering the right features. Fantastic!

What a great difference!!

2012: Optimize the whole = optimize the customer journey

What if you are great at producing the right features and great at deploying it easily to production, but the customer never get to hear about the product in the first place? Or the customer is not able to get started? Or it is almost impossible to buy the product?  

I learned that the whole customer journey was what really matter to the customer. To me, this is the next step if you are into advanced lean thinking: Optimizing the whole value chain, seen from a customer point of view.

So what can you do to get better at this? This is what we did:

1. Identify the customer (define the relevant personas)
2. Identify the steps in your customer journey
3. What works well?
4. What are your weak spots? where do you lose your customers?
5. Any low hanging fruits?

 

The customer journey

The best organizations consists of units that support the whole customer journey, they are able to handle, improve and truly optimize for the whole. (not only the whole software development process, but the whole customer journey)

Pitfall: I have worked in a team where too many people was looking into step number 4, and unfortunately, the areas of most interest was outside the responsibility of our business unit. This is not a good situation, it is damaging to the motivation of the individual and it prevent the team’s ability to deliver if the focus is on what you cannot change. In an ideal world, anything can be changed, and anything can be changed easily. 

Top performing organizations will change according to what makes sense, but the larger it is, and the more silos you have, the longer time it take. It also require sweat and lots of hard work, and some tears. Trust is a key word in agile software development, and the same goes for lean leadership; each employee must be able to trust that the top management is handling flaws between business units.

Trust

 

Where in the lean journey are you?

What is your next steps?

What is pitfalls have you experienced? 

How to get rid of forced ranking; story from the trenches

All companies have boundaries; things that you just have to live with. Values are essential in this context; you use them to know when to fight, what to accept and when to move on.

This is a true story of getting rid of Forced Ranking: A group of colleagues challenged our 70.000-employee-company-boundaries based on our values, the values of the team, and the values of the company:




Forced ranking
this is also known as vitality curve, forced ranking, forced distribution, rank and yank, and stack ranking.

The concept was made by Jack Welsh in the 80's, and the point is to divide and label employees into three groups: the 20 % top performers (that should be rewarded with bonuses and stocks), the 70% majority, the bottom 10% (that should leave the company).

I do not see anything positive about labelling all employees with grades like this. In a high performing team it does not make sense to label 70% as average!!! Who wants a team where 70% are dis-satisfied?

This labelling system break trust between leaders and employees, between peers, and create economic incentives to be in a weaker team. It prevents collaboration, learning and teamwork.

The system is also linked to goals and this create a system of goals that everyone make sure they meet ( = weak goals and not revealing the company's true potential). If the achievement of goals is linked to compensation, the intrinsic motivation is replaced with money motivation, the extraordinary work is replaced with average performance that is aligned 100% to the plan rather than aligning to adapting to constant change and stretching for the extraordinary.

Ok, so what to do with this?

1) research
I knew in my heart that forced ranking was wrong, but had to put my thoughts into more precise wording. I started to write down my thoughts and searched to find what others have said and done in the matter. I found some great material:

• Edward Demming's book Out of the Crisis
• Daniel Pink's book called Drive, here is a ted talk and a RSA animate of it

2) reality check
I also talked to my peers (other team leaders and project managers). This was disappointing, because half of the people I talked to did not see the problem at all. One person with 50 employees and several managers reporting to him said to me: "if this was a problem I would have known".

But (of course) I did not give up, and I focused on the ones that did see the problem and could help in finding a solution.

3) proposed solution 
I worked close with two peers, and together we made a three-slides-deck describing the problem, effects and possible solutions.

4) escalation
We presented this to our site manager, and he accepted it and scheduled a meeting with our General Manager and Senior Vice President.

5) case closed?
Our GM and Senior VP joined forces with their HR representative, and we were able to get rid of the whole rating system!

Hurray!!!

So, when you meet a boundary that you just think is important enough to fight; I encourage you to do something about it. It is in your company's best interest. Use your values as a guideline :)



Have a nice weekend!
Eira