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Customer Focus
This post is actually a response I gave to a blog from the ITtoolbox. The gentleman I was responding to takes the position that companies may believe themselves to be customer focused when in fact they fail to take into consideration what the customer wants. Seems fairly obvious but he is correct. It isn’t unusual for executives to not understand who their customers are and still believe they are customer focused.
But the author of the original post and I quickly diverged when it came to how we see the organization. It is his contention that the organization (especially in those companies that view its employees as their number one asset) should drive the design of the processes. Read on to see how his opinion may contradict his own view of being customer focused.
There is one more point I want to make before you begin reading this blog. I view publicly-held companies, privately-owned businesses, government agencies, non-profit organizations and even departments to be basically the same. Each one of those entities has customers they are serving and processes they are executing. As you read through my response don’t think it does not apply to you if you don’t work in a ‘business’ – these ideas do relate to you.
I agree with your initial premise that a value chain that does not consider the customer is in trouble. How can a company believe it is customer focused if it does not take the time to define and quantify the expectations of the customer and take into consideration what the competition is offering?
How a business is designed will determine whether it is customer focused and plays a huge part in its level of performance. I know this to be true since I am a business architect. I provide customized business design tailored to reach the goals of my customers. In order to do that I have to understand all the components of a business and how they relate to each other.
Business designs have 5 components:
Ø Capstone – all strategic information about the business
o Internal: Vision; Mission; Values; Principles; Goals; Business Strategies, etc.
o External: The competitive environment (trends, obstacles, risks, critical business issues, …). Designs that do not take into consideration the competitive environment are flawed. It is a big mistake to not understand the context in which your business exists. A once robust design can become quickly obsolete if the context (environment) changes. As Joel Barker once said: “When the paradigm shifts everyone starts back at zero.”
Ø Market Model
o Here is where your perspective comes into play. Business leaders need to understand what each market place is looking for from products and services being sold into that market. Leaders must take the time to define the expectations of customers and then quantify them. Vague and arbitrary requirements do not provide good input into product development.
o Here is where we appear to diverge. Business leaders have to understand if their existing Market Model can deliver on the growth goals of the company. The Capstone creates the performance requirements for the Market Model. The performance requirements for the Market Model are not arbitrary.
o If the Market Model is not designed to achieve the growth goals then either the goals need to be adjusted or the design needs to be updated. By having defined and quantified the expectations of the customers it is possible to analyze whether one’s offerings to the market place need to be redesigned. This is being customer focused – you are delivering what the market wants.
Ø Process Model
o Input – Process – Output. Every business has processes to fulfill the demand for its products and services. Those processes do affect how the customer is being served. All of the processes performed by a company are considered to be its Process Model.
o Here is where we definitely differ. The Process Model receives its performance requirements from the Market Model. For instance, if the market place establishes a two week lead time your business will not be competitive with a four week lead time. You will have to reengineer your processes to deliver on the promises made to your customers. This is in keeping with being customer focused.
o Your processes will determine what skills, talents, knowledge and experience you need in your organization. Therefore processes create performance requirements for organizations.
Ø Organizational Model
o Processes are executed by the organization. As mentioned previously the design the Organizational Model receives its performance requirements from the Process Model. If the business needs to outsource some of its work and has never done that before then new skills such as Vendor Management and Service Level Agreements will be need to be executed and either the existing staff will be trained or experienced personnel will be brought in.
o Process designs should factor in the skills of the organization but the company should not under deliver to the market place due to inabilities of the organization. If you under deliver to the market place your sales will suffer accordingly.
o The organization needs to be designed in order to execute the processes that deliver its products/services and achieves the strategic goals of the company. The models are all connected and when designed to support each other the business can actually achieve alignment. Alignment has to be designed into an organization.
Ø Systems Model
o The organization uses systems to execute the processes. Many executives start with systems and work backwards. This is the reason why there are so many dissatisfied business leaders. They are applying a new system to an outdated business design.
o Will changing the dashboard in your car have an effect on the design of your car? Investing in new IT systems before updating the overall business design can only bring marginal improvements.
Designing a business is a cascading process and if you are changing your processes or organization before defining and quantifying the goals of the company and the design of the Market Model then you can not consider your company to be ‘customer focused’ and you can not know if your goals are even achievable.
Silver Bullet
Every business leader is looking for a “silver bullet” to help them solve all of their critical issues. Many executives mistakenly thought a new information system was the answer they were seeking, hence the well documented dissatisfaction with IT investments. We have found that the closest thing to a silver bullet is Business Blueprints™.
Here is a list of business problems that a set of Business Blueprints™ can resolve. Don’t keep treating the symptoms but instead get rid of the problem. Business Blueprints™ allow you to go right to the root cause of many business ills.
Read through this list and see how many sound familiar. It is not uncommon to recognize three or four as being challenges your company is facing.
1. Performance Not Meeting Expectations
– 80% of performance issues are the result of the design of your business.
– How can you solve design problems if you can not see the design?
The business design needs to be visible to know whether your strategic sales and profit goals are reasonable. Changing strategies has absolutely no effect on the design of a company. The key to performance is Design, not strategy.
2. Disagreement on Direction and Strategies
– Are you certain everyone is going down the same road?
– How did you decide to go in a particular direction?
The Pareto Principle is intended to focus businesses on what is critical. Even with that tool most businesses are uncertain about what to do next. Business Blueprints™ provide clarity in determining what is important in order to achieve strategic goals.
3. Technology Selection
– Are you interested in minimizing the risk of selecting the wrong technology?
– Do you want to spend millions to automate the same ineffective processes?
A well-selected piece of software will support the updated design of a business. Selecting a piece of software before knowing the design of your business is very risky. Most companies do not know their design and most ITsolutions are considered to be a business failure for that reason.
4. Problem Prioritizing Projects
– How difficult is it for your management team to prioritize projects?
– What method do you use when prioritizing your work?
Companies look for quick wins when selecting projects. But the greatest ROI is not necessarily the best project to pursue. Most of the work after updating a design is centered on implementing the new design so that the desired strategies can be executed. Prioritize initiatives and sequence projects.
5. Unproductive Strategic Planning
– If strategy execution is dependent upon the capabilities of a design (and it is), how can you create strategies if you can’t see your design?
– How much more productive would strategy meetings be if everyone was looking at the same blueprints?
Strategies must be embedded into the business design to enable the strategies to be executed. It is harmful to create strategies that can not be executed with your current design.
6. Alignment of the Organization
– Are all the departments within your company going in the same direction?
– How can you empower your people if they do not share a common understanding which is only possible with a set of Business Blueprints?
Alignment must be designed into a business; it can not be managed in. Therefore the design of each business must be documented and made visible and the parts designed to ensure Total Business Performance through alignment.
7. Value Provided by Departments
– How can you measure the value provided by the organizations within your business?
– Has each department defined and quantified the expectations of its customers for its products and services?
By having the design of a department documented you can see its critical customers, services and processes. You can also tell how well the department is performing against its customers’ expectations. Raise the value of critical departments.
8. New Management
– How long does it take a new executive to understand all the parts of the business and their relationship with one another?
– Would it be helpful if an executive could see pictures of all the parts of the business and how they fit together?
By having a documented set of Business Blueprints™ an executive can understand in two months what it will take 12 months without them. This means better decisions can be made more quickly.
9. Mergers and Acquisitions
– Do you think that merging two cultures, product lines, customer segments, processes, organizations,…. is more difficult than adding a room onto a house?
– Would you like to significantly increase the likelihood of successfully merging two companies while reducing the time and cost?
Having the blueprints of two companies make mergers possible. You can actually see how the parts of one company compares to the other and how to best combine them. The costs and time necessary to create blueprints will pale in comparison to the risks and the efforts necessary to try and merge two undocumented businesses.
10. Growing Faster than an Organization can Accommodate
– How can you tell if each executive shares the same understanding about the destination of the company and how it will get there?
– How are you changing the company to accommodate your growth?
Growing too fast can introduce serious challenges to any organization. Communication become exponentially more complex as businesses grow. You need to ensure that the design of your business can support the increased growth and it won’t collapse upon itself. A set of Business Blueprints™ allows you to see your existing design and to make adjustments to accommodate that growth.
It is interesting that so many diverse issues within a business can have the same root cause. And it is even more interesting to understand that having a set of Business Blueprints in your hand will position you to go after any of these issues within your business. What problems are giving you pain?
Eight Steps to Business Excellence
Success will be defined differently for each area of our lives. For some personal success is measured by the size of their bank account while others look to their marriage and children. Professional success may be looked at from how high in the organization you have climbed or it can be the degree of delight received from a job well done.
The eight steps I am going to discuss does not address either directly but if you look closely and think about each one you will find many applications for these steps. This “process” was developed to assist businesses in achieving sustained Business Excellence but its application goes beyond strictly business.
Too many businesses are on the down-side of their growth curve and are facing very difficult times and decisions. Executives at these companies are not in enviable positions. They have an entity that has existed for many years, was successful and is now struggling. Some have been at the helm during the good times and bad while others have been brought in to ‘right the ship’. Regardless the challenge is the same.
As they work with their management team and try to address the situation they will repeatedly ask themselves these four questions:
· “How did we get here?”
· “How could things have gotten this bad?”
· “What could we have done differently”
· “What can we do to get out of this mess?”.
An answer to the first two questions can be found in Tom Peter’s book Re-Imagine. Mr. Peter’s identifies some very interesting facts. In 1917 Forbes magazine first identified the top 100 companies in America. These were the best and the brightest. One could make the argument that these companies had everything they needed to ensure their survival. Fast forward 70 years and 61 of those 100 companies were not to be found.
Next Mr. Peters investigated the performance of companies listed in the S&P 500. Again these are top companies with money and people to drive their businesses forward. The span of time is now from 1957 to 1997, so the window of change has been reduced by 30 years. Here we are shown that 426 of the 500 S&P companies ceased to exist.
From 1917 to 1987 – 60% of top companies did not make it. From 1957 – 1997 81% of the largest companies no longer existed. The percentage and speed of becoming obsolete is increasing. But what causes companies to become obsolete?
It would be interesting to establish a correlation between the rate of change in the world around us and the rate of obsolescence in business. Who doesn’t say things are happening faster and faster – that the merry-go-round of life isn’t speeding up? While a part of us yearns for the good old days at the same time we want our HD TV and Blue ray technology. As the world turns faster and the globe becomes smaller, customer expectations change more rapidly and businesses are challenged to keep up.
The relevance of any business and the products/services it offers to the market place is determined by the world external to it. I refer to the external world as the competitive environment. Businesses don’t get to decide how relevant they are, instead it is the competitive environment that determines the relevancy of a business. Each business, its suppliers, business partners, competitors, customers, distributors, sales, …are all within a competitive environment. The environment provides the context in which to evaluate the relevance of the design of every business and its products/services.
So in response to the questions:
· “How did we get here?”
· “How could things have gotten this bad?”
Answer is:
· Your business became obsolete due to a changing environment.
And that leads to the next two questions: “What could we have done differently?” and “What can we do to get out of this mess?”.
Just as the first two questions had a single answer so do the second set of questions. Allow me to develop this idea by returning to the ideas of environment and Context.
Businesses are created in the environment in which they are going to compete. As a business takes off its products/services are designed to meet the needs of the customer – otherwise the customer would not buy them and the business would fail to exist. Along the way the business grows and adds new functions and internal services to support the increasing demand for its products/services and the operations to fulfill that demand. All this is happening in the original environment.
Over time that environment will change. Customers will expect new levels of quality, service and options; competitors will offer new and improved products; new materials will become available; new suppliers will arrive on the scene; trade barriers will be erected or torn down,…. and your business, which was designed to compete in the old environment becomes less and less relevant.
Here I introduce the idea that businesses have a design just like products or services. That may be hard to conceive since you have never seen a set of Business Blueprints™. It is hard to visualize something that you have not seen but that does not mean it does not exist.
Sadly, Dr. Michael Hammer passed away recently. For those of you who are not familiar with his writings, he made popular the idea of reengineering processes to improve business performance. When his first book came out in the early 1990’s I had already been doing process design work for years but did not have a name for what I was doing. I just thought of it as solving problems at the root cause level.
Dr. Hammer came along and was able to have people understand that a set of activities used to accomplish a purpose could be defined as a process and that the design of any process has the largest impact on how well work is performed. By documenting every activity and placing those activities side-by-side the process design becomes visible, enabling you to analyze and subsequently intelligently reengineer that design to meet performance goals.
Understanding process design remains important in business today. BPR, Lean Six Sigma, Kaizan, Total Quality,… are all extensions of this concept. Many consultants are referring to business processes when they speak about business models (processes are only one perspective of a business design). Executives are looking for ways to improve the performance of their businesses and actively seek it through process reengineering.
All designs become obsolete.
Earlier I spoke about businesses becoming obsolete – the same thing happens at the process level for all the same reasons. Thanks to people like Dr. Michael Hammer and Mr. Derril Watts with Mountain Home Training and Consulting, http://www.mhc-net.com/, people have come to understand that just because you can’t see processes does not mean they don’t exist and that they don’t have a design. It took years for this concept to work its way into most businesses and I would argue that any business that does not have Process Management as one of its disciplines is lacking as a professional organization.
As process designs are invisible until they are documented so are business designs. The impact that designs have on process performance is even more powerful at the business/organization level.
Design Dictates Performance.
So in response to the questions:
· “What could we have done differently?”
· “What can we do to get out of this mess?”
Answer is:
· Design your business to compete in today’s environment.
If you are part of a business or organization and wondering what you should have done or what you can do to get out of your current dilemma it comes down to executing these Eight Steps to Business Excellence.
- Document the existing business design
· When a business is not meeting performance expectations you can not know whether it is a design or execution problem if the design can not be seen.
· More than 80% of the time an obsolete design is the root cause of performance issues.
- Establish the performance goals you wish to achieve
· Every company has growth and profit goals.
· Business designs must support business goals.
· Setting goals that are not attainable with the existing design is harmful.
· Unrealistic goals are a waste of money and represent lost opportunities.
- Establish the strategies you want to execute
· How will the strategic goals be reached given the environment and company’s organization?
· How you will accomplish something is deciding what strategies you wish to execute.
- Analyze the design of your business model in light of your goals and strategies
· Just because a goal is set does not mean it can be reached.
· Can you execute your strategies given the constraints of your design?
· If a design can not be seen it how can it be analyzed?
- Update the design to achieve goals and execute strategies
· The words design and strategy are not interchangeable.
· Changing a strategy has absolutely no impact on the design of a business.
· Designs determine what strategies can be executed.
- Create Strategic Plan and Master Project Plan
· A Business Strategic Plan:
o Strategic goals
o Analysis of the changing environment and the impact to business
o Clearly identified strategies and a description of each one
o All strategic initiatives and the rationale behind each one.
· A Master Project Plan is the ‘road map’ all executives want to see:
o Initiatives, dependencies and the sequence of projects
o Project prioritization no longer exists
o All initiatives from the Strategic Plan are in the Master Project
Plan.
- Implement the new design
· A Master Project Plan is the ‘road map’ all executives
· The design has to be in place in order for strategies to be executed.
· The Master Project Plan shows how to implement the new business design.
· To receive the full benefit of a new design it must be completely implemented.
- Execute the strategies
· The entire design does not have to be in place before management starts to see positive results.
· Some strategies can be executed with the existing design while others can be executed after particular initiatives are completed.
Stan Kirkwood - Business Designer 