Tag Archives: failure demand

289 – Fire fighter or architect? It is your choice.

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580 words (6 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell

I recently completed a training course in the work of W. Edwards Deming. At the end of the course, one of the participants said they felt as though they now had the knowledge to become an architect in their work and cease being a fire fighter.

It made me think about how it is that leaders become fire fighters. It is a common complaint from executives in local government who are being exhausted on a treadmill of frantic and stressful activity.

I recently saw this piece on LinkedIn by Simon Dodds, a Health Care Engineer at SAASoft Ltd. I have reproduced it in full because it eloquently describes from a health care perspective, the same series of events that shifts managers and directors on the council treadmill from walking speed to sprinting. Here it is.

Failure demand is demand created by a failure to do something right the first time. It is extra demand caused by defects in the process, not by genuine new customer needs. For example, a patient calls their GP practice again (and again) because their need was never fully met first time. These repeated, avoidable demands would not exist if the process was designed to work right first time.

Failure demand increases workload and disrupts flow in unpredictable ways. Over time, it creates a feedback loop that fosters chronic chaos because failure demand depends on how many errors happen and this extra demand can fluctuate greatly. The unpredictability further overloads already busy staff and creates shifting bottlenecks that delay other work. When multiple steps in a process are incessantly overloaded, the service organisation loses stability.

Clinical and operational staff spend disproportionate amounts of time reacting to failure demand rather than working proactively on primary service tasks. This shifts the process from a planned, predictable workflow into a reactive mode where firefighting becomes the norm. This relentless pressure increases stress and fatigue, and stressed staff make more mistakes, which generates more failure demand. It becomes a vicious self-fuelling cycle.

The chaos obscures the underlying cause of problems and staff just focus on quick fixes, so the core process issues remain unresolved and internal demand continues to spiral. Over time, the process becomes inherently chaotic, with unpredictable queues and inconsistent service quality. Everyone becomes habituated to it and everyone loses.

From a systems point of view, failure demand is a reinforcing feedback loop:

defects => failure demand => overload => queues => risks => reactive expediting => corner cutting => more defects.

When I read this, I recognised the day to day existence of a leader in councils today. I substituted ‘managers and directors’ for clinical and operational staff’. I know this wasn’t the case 30 years ago and the change has happened gradually. Anyone who has worked in the sector for less than 20 years would think it is normal. The reality is that it is a choice. There are alternatives.

To help, Simon Dodds offers some advice to stop firefighting’

To stop chronic chaos created by failure demand we just need to:

1. Map the processes and identify where the hot spots are.

2. Measure failure demand separately from first-time demand.

3. Diagnose the root causes of the defects.

4. Redesign processes for right-first-time and give front-line staff permission to resolve issues immediately and prevent rework.

5. Monitor continuously to prevent failure demand creeping back.

6. Maintain the calm efficiency by training new staff in the Zero-Defect way.

 Become the architect of your work and design services to reduce failure demand.

From <https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7382850586318176256/>

280 – Reframing the challenge to councils

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2000 words (20 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell

Introduction

Is the challenge that councils face insufficient revenue to cover costs? Or is it that they are providing services outside their remit? Or is it waste and inefficiency in their operations? Is it all of the above? And, if it is, where do you start to address it?

When you look at the different things councils are doing to respond to the rate cap – arguing for its removal or modification to enable higher rate increases, cutting services and service levels, shaving 10% off every budget to force savings, or implementing an ‘efficiency dividend’ through successive budgets – you could be forgiven for wondering if councils are trying to solve the same problem.

Having a common view of the problem to be solved is a start to genuine and effective action across the sector.

I have been thinking about a simple re-framing of the problem councils need to solve in a rate capped environment.

So, what is the problem?

Continue reading →

221 -The Vanguard method in Australia.

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By Tim Whistler                                                                                                         1000 words

Progressive leaders

The summit offered an opportunity for those who are unfamiliar with the Vanguard method to hear about work that has been done in Australia by IOOF (a superannuation fund manager) and the County Courts Registry using the Vanguard method. Vanguard team members presented public service case studies from the UK.

It was an interesting event and it highlighted the potential for leaders to think differently and better understand how work is being performed in their organisation, what is happening in delivering value to customers, and how improvements can be made.

There were several issues relevant to local government in Victoria. Continue reading →

166 – Long read: Understanding the customer experience in local government.

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Posted by Colin Weatherby                                                                                         260 words

service guarantee

There have been a number of posts on services and customer service, with the most recent by Lancing Farrell . Each post has explored a different aspect of service or customer service. This post looks at customer experience using two excellent articles from the Harvard Business Review as a guide; the first is ‘Understanding Customer Experience’ by Christopher Meyer and Andre Schwager, and the second is ‘Lean consumption’ by James Womack and Daniel Jones.

In their article, Meyer and Schwager describe the customer experience as encompassing

“… every aspect of a company’s offering the quality of customer care, of course, but also advertising, packaging, product and service features, ease of use, and reliability.’

They make the point that in many organisations few of the people responsible for each of these activities have thought about how their separate decisions contribute to the overall customer experience. Worse still, if they do think about it, they all have different ideas and there is no one senior who oversees everyone’s efforts to bring agreement on what needs to be done.   This is local government’s problem with service delivery in a nutshell.

Womack and Jones define ‘lean consumption’ as ‘minimising customers’ time and effort and delivering exactly what they want when and where they want it’. They see it as transforming consumption in the same way that lean production transformed manufacturing. It involves customers and service providers collaborating to ‘reduce total cost and wasted time and create new value’.

How are these two ideas relevant to the local government customer experience? Read on …