Key Issue: How can a business be more effective?
Several recent surveys have highlighted two strong predictors of a business’ effectiveness. The first is having a continuous, interactive planning process between key business customers, business stakeholders and the business community. One of the most effective ways of doing this is through data and surveys.
Most measurement initiatives are either done as a single event or as an ongoing monitor of a single business process (e.g., a transaction-based survey or an annual employee satisfaction survey) and they are not incorporated into an enterprise wide, bottom-line impact quality program. Also, most initiatives are implemented once a problem has occurred (e.g., a decrease in customer retention rates) and not as an ongoing quality program to improve customer satisfaction, increase retention and bottom-line profits. The fatal flaws of these types of programs are that they are one-offs, only focused on a specific process and the feedback is never sent back to the respondents. In the long term, these initiatives will ultimately cause an increase in dissatisfaction, which is counterproductive to the organization.
The second predictor of a business’ effectiveness is for the key stakeholders and the business to make extensive use of external resources (e.g., best practice groups, consultants, research and benchmarking organizations) at all levels of business process maturity, including requirements, design and implementation phases. At each step in the sequence, the appropriate external resources should be leveraged to improve the effectiveness of the process and organization.
The high correlation found between the use of external resources and effectiveness is a function of several factors, including:
- External resources enable the enterprise to learn more quickly and leverage the experience of others, reducing the number of potential mistakes.
- The use of outside references and materials encourages the enterprise to break stagnant or harmful patterns of behavior and “think outside the box.”
- External sources “triangulate” decision making between organizational structures, allowing leadership to consider the problem collaboratively with its constituents, rather than adopting antagonistic positions that reflect entrenched organizational biases.
Conclusion
Effectiveness measurement efforts need to evolve beyond metrics and demographics to the evaluation of perception. Why? Businesses can boast superior efficiency, meet posted service-level agreement (SLA) objectives and exceed all advertised functional requirements yet still suffer from the customer and stakeholder perceptions of missed alignment and lack of effectiveness. It is not enough to solicit the list of issues. You need the ultimate outcome to include an ordering of customer perceptions so you can successfully improve their experience and perception of your business.