I've written extensively about service catalog adoption being the most important success metric. And I've been talking about Service WhackAMole, not a tasty treat, but a stupid game companies play.
This is when IT responsiveness was so bad, that the business units hired extra contractors to coordinate IT. When a crappy web self-service generates more calls plus the maintenance costs. This is a game where a bad service encounter actually generates ever more encounters, calls, complaints. It's when my computer provider puts so many layers of phone mail hell that marketing has to spend another few million dollars convincing me they have great service.
You've seen it, lived it--behaviour that transfers and increases costs to the the customer. Except in IT, the customer is the same company and unfortunately the cost is not just transferred but increased. It's when one a company adopts an impostor service catalog, fails and now has to fix it; incurring the costs twice.
I called it Service WhackAMole. Now I've learned a new term through this really excellent paper Rethinking Lean Service. The concept of demand failure resonates with me.
Highly recommended. Excerpt follows
Value and failure demand In services, there are two high level types of demand entering the system: ‘value’ and ‘failure’ demand. Value demands are the ones companies want customers to place on the system, the reason that the company is in business is to serve these demands.
Failure demands are: ‘demands caused by a failure to do something or do something right for the customer’ (Seddon 2003 p26). When service organizations do not do something that the customer has been expecting, customers call back, turn up again, or otherwise create more demand and hence more work.
These, and failures to do something right from the customers’ point of view – not solving a problem, sending out a form that a customer has difficulties with and so on, represent a significant means to improve service delivery and reduce costs. Treating failure demand as though it is just more work to be done is to fail to see a powerful economic lever. If we were to use Deming’s language, failure demand is a form of sub-optimization. In Ohno’s language it is a type of waste.
It is noteworthy that failure demand is not among the ‘seven types of waste’ promoted by the lean tools literature. Failure demand is a systemic phenomenon that is peculiar to service organizations; it is, also, the largest form of waste in transactional service systems when managed according to the present style of management. Given the economic leverage its removal provides, it is a poignant illustration of the general argument against ‘lean’ as tools. Starting an intervention with tools is to ignore the priority to know first your problem(s).
The paper is by the systems thinker, John Seddon and Brendan O'Donovan.
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More stories of systems thinking in action can be found at The Systems Thinking Review . co . uk
Posted by: Howard Clark | Saturday, August 08, 2009 at 02:01 AM