Outcome Based Approach

Disclaimer: I have been writing the blogs in the style of story telling based on real incidents but with some fiction added to emphasize the message. Hence please do not conclude anything based on the blogs. 

I received an email from Bhahmaji and I knew this will never be simple. Bharhaji recently went and visited a Customer. This means, the email from Bhahmaji will very likely contain all descriptions on how dissatisfied the customer is, and how the Customer is going to terminate the contract, and how Customer may sue us for a penalty of a few millions. Brahmaji loves to have escalations and reminds the customer on what all the areas when Customer can be unhappy. And than we will see Brahmaji floating emails and action plans on how is he going to address all Customer Concerns. Unfortunately even many organizations have a culture of appreciating leaders who address the escalations. But the leaders who do everything proactively and ensure no escalations are ignored and they may even be asked to leave to accommodate another blue eyed boy (or girl) to manage that "smoothly" running Portfolio.

I was used to it but still I needed to give some attention because at times Brahmaji could be right as well. ​When I opened the email, it was all the same. Customer has lots and lots of complaints and all were opened up when Balaji met them. Not even one was discussed in the weekly customer calls and even som daily calls.

Customer has serious concerns on our ability to do Continuous improvements. He was also worried about the Automation Opportunities which we never worked. He is highly disappointed about us not contributing towards any productivity gains. Support was going, all tickets were being fixed but with no interest on Customer's Business Problems.

Brahmaji completed the email with a statement that the Customer who has been with us for the last 5 years may leave us any day in next week including tomorrow.

He scheduled a crisis meeting.

I fortunately had time to accommodate myself to the discussion.

By the time I joined the call, I was hearing Brahmaji shouting on all the team for not doing anything. I heard the conversation without disturbing the flow of communication. Finally I announced my presence and asked Bhrahmaji on what is the action plan now.

Bhrahmaji said that we made action plan already and here are the major items.

​Action item	​Owner	​Target Date	​Status	​Remarks
​Daily Internal review meeting to be scheduled	​Bhahmaji	​Tomorrow	​Completed	​A Daily meeting calendar generated
​Weekly Project review meeting	​​Brahmaji	​Tomorrow	​In Progress	​Checking with Leaders availability
Steering Committe Review Meetinq ​	​Bhahmaji	​Next week	​In progress	​Checking with Steer Co member availability
​Speak to COE for Support on XXX Technologu	​Keshwa	​Next week	​Open	​XXX technology is required to do the task and the Project Manager needs to get the inputs from COE
​Initiate VISA requet for Apparao	​Chris	​Next week	​Open	​Apparao has to travel to execute Quater Closure issues
​....	​....	​....	​....	​...
​	​	​	​	​

I went through the entire list. For some time I didn't understand what is the plan. I was asking Bhrahmaji "What are the issues? and how are we going to address them?"

"Sir, I already shared the action plan. This plan is to address all concerns and issues raised by the Customer"

"OK. Please explain how are we going to address"

"I scheduled a Daily review call to discuss issues every day"

"OK. than?"

"We will fix the issues. We also scheduled a Project review on weekly basis. We talk to Steering committee on weekly basis and ....."

I opened the action items sheet and said. "Bhrahma.. all the action items that you mentioned will be completed once we schedule the meeting calendar and after a couple of discussions like initiating VISA request, discussing with COE etc. But at the end of closing all these action items are we sure the Issues are addressed?"

Bhahmaji was a bit silent.

"No sir. These are for solving the issues"

"Where is the plan to solve the issues and where is the rationale to decide whether the concerns of the Customer are addressed?

"...."

Can you Please explain what do you want to do and what do you expect to hear that the customer is happy?

"Hmm. If we do these reviews regularly ..."

"Bhahma! do you want the customer to explain what needs to be done to make him happy through these review meetings?"

"This is how I have been making him happy ..."

"Probably you could do that but you always wanted to hear from Customer through several discussions and than do the needful. Why cant we do this before Customer puts this much effort?"

"I cant say anything but it worked"

"OK, how are we going to ensure there is continuous improvement? What are the Automation Opportunities? What is the meaning of Fixing issues without interest and how can you convince customer that we are fixing issues with interest? ...."

"As of today I am not sure sir. But through these reviews ...."

They are all interlinked. You need to analyze and review the support tickets and summarize.

The issues can be repetitive. That is when you need to work on educating and ensuring elimination of the issues through root cause analysis. And by nature if they are bound to repeat, prepare a good Solution document and share instead of fixing them every time.

The issues can be knowledge gaps. In such case propose additional training. Once again the training's can be self paced through View Lets, recorded training's or Idiot guides so the audience don't depend on physical training's. Update the training manuals if required.

The issues can be due to Data. The Data issues can be either because poor migration and conversion scripts for data from other systems and cause Data Corruption regularly. It can also be because of the poor development without restricting the wrong entries without validations. You may have to investigate and clean the scripts apart from fixing the specific data issues.

The issues can also be because of wrong set ups of transactions and parameters. Explain on why certain transaction behave because of the setup and educate the customers to arrive at the right setup. You may also visit the documentation and any need for special training's on them.

Finally the tickets can be for technical Bugs. These are fully because your coding was not doing what was intended. Fix them completely and test thoroughly.

For every issue, tailor your ticketing system to take the inputs on how the addressing or not addressing the issue impacts the Business. This helps you understand how the system is being impacted. Identify the kind of tickets which take longer to fix either because of the external dependencies or by the process. And identify those kind of tickets which impact the Business to Maximum. Pick the top ten and try to optimize them to fix them fast and reduce SLA.

Bhrahmaji seems to have understood but his face shows there are still some open questions.

I picked on ticket that too 4 days to fix the issue.

The ticket is for creating a User to one data warehouse. Why is this taking 7 days ? I looked at the SLA for such type of ticket. The SLA itself was 7 days.

I got in to the details. The User enters the Ticket in the system with the details of his system, and many technical parameters such as Proxy address etc. Many users are not familiar to enter these details. I have seen the support engineer taking the appointment to guide the user to enter these details. User enters the details and than resubmits the details. Support engineer gets some details on her own. Finally the synchronization of the Windows user with this Data-warehousing system takes 30 minutes.!!!!

I said this is an automation opportunity. Brahmaji quickly said that this takes 60 person days to make the Single Sign on.

What is the ticket volume for this User creation? 1200 tickets per quarter. (AUTOMATION)

Hence it is worth doing. All tickets of this category will be eliminated to free at-least 2,3 days of effort per ticket of the users who are supposed to work for business. This means about 2400 Person days of productive time gained by the Customer. These hours can be utilized any where-else for the productivity (PRODUCTIVITY GAINS). In addition, the Users start working in the Data-warehouse within no time. This is again Productivity gain !!!

Now, we continue this kind of analysis and present our observations periodically to the Steering Committee for prioritization and some investment from their side as well for more efficient system and with more productivity. (CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT)

Can the Customer say now that we are fixing the tickets without Interest on Customer ?