In today's fast-paced global market, time and resources are critical to your business.  The ability to quickly identify and successfully manage improvement efforts is essential in order to "stay in the game." Everyone involved in improvement is searching for the “perfect road map” to accomplish their improvement project and maximize ROI.  So, what's the right map?  Within HP's Software Support Delivery we feel we have found a good road for traveling.

Our “before” picture was much like this:

• We were organizational-chart focused with little understanding of our working processes and how changes to our processes impacted our business
• We had process disconnects with little understanding of why or the impact
• We struggled with process resources issues and lacked a clear understanding of how our processes were being managed
• We lacked process measures to ensure a process is needed or how it impacts the business when it is not working properly

Our present picture looks like this:

• We changed from an organizational view to a system view of the business
• We embraced our new focus on a simple phrase "all work = process"
• We mapped all processes and their relationships
• We established measures to account for the business and the processes that support the business

So, how did we get here?

We changed our focus using industry proven framework/methods.  The key "light blub moment" was internalizing Dr. W. Edwards Deming's “System of Profound Knowledge” and how system thinking can help you understand the interdependencies and interrelationship of your business and processes.

A critical take-away from this study is that Dr. Deming’s “principles” must be viewed as one system; working together and inter-connected.  Grasping this concept will provide you with the first step in the journey of improving your business, but how do you take the next step and make this work in real life?  For HP Software Support, we used a framework built from a proven industry model called Leadership for Business Improvement (LBI).

What is LBI?

Since the Compaq merger, across HP, we have focused on a framework based on the original teaching of QBS (Quality as a Business Strategy) for business improvement and measurement of improvement.  The QBS framework was repackaged within HP along with Lean Six Sigma methodology to provide a business model structure (Six Sigma Plus).  We call the HP version Leadership for Business Improvement (LBI). 

Bottom line: LBI is an approach for leaders to systematically identify and close performance gaps while leveraging measurement tools of Six Sigma.

The benefit was huge for us and allowed:

• Acceleration of organizational improvement ability and measurement of ROI
• Reduced chance of improvement seen as “flavor of the month”
• Aligned improvements with business and customer needs
• Created a framework for ongoing improvement management

How is the framework applied?

Let me share the 5 primary areas of the LBI framework followed by a high level description of how to apply to your business:

• Customer Feedback
• Business Strategy/Goals
• System View
• Performance Results
• Planning and Improvement Management

Customer Feedback – Establish customer feedback methods that feed into your operational measures.  This helps provide a clear trend view of delivery performance in relationship to customer feedback.  The key is to ensure your business’s operational and process measurements are linked to your Customer Satisfaction measurement abilities (linking the system measurement together).

Business Strategy/Goals – Ensure your business is aligned with the overall corporate direction and takes into consideration your customer feedback at the highest level of your business planning.   Establish a clear purpose (mission, vision, and values) that builds from the hierarchy of needs of your customers and provides your people with a clear understanding of the goals of the business.

System view and interaction of the organization – The single most important factor is to view the organization as a system and not in a traditional org chart. This will allow you to:

• Understand the major processes in the organization
• Understand how the parts work together
• Document how these processes link together
• Establish the key measures of performance

Tracking Current Performance Results and Performance Trends – An important step is to determine current performance results by capturing your baseline and setting targets specific to the organization strategy.  Many improvement projects and businesses fail because they do not understand their baseline. Once you have a clear set of measures, review them daily/weekly/monthly.  Consider your measures like the dashboard of your car.  Critical feedback points to tell you the system is working and helping you meet the objective of getting to your destination.  This is where the knowledge of Six Sigma integrates into the model.  Map performance trends via proven Six Sigma data analysis tools (i.e. control charts, etc).

Planning and Managing for Improvements – Once you have a clear view of the feedback methods, your strategy/goals, and how your measure the business performance, you need to manage improvement opportunities.  This is a big step for many businesses because this means you “must” commit to investing time, people and money. Within HP Software Support we made a business commitment to ensure our findings were put to work and improvement efforts measured.  This commitment was made in the form of a special role/position called the Service Quality Manager (SQA). The role of the SQA Manager leads the quality process improvement activities which enable HP Software Support to achieve operational excellence, thus improving TCE and profitability.  

How do you use the framework in a real life situation?

With the understanding of the Power of System Learning framework you can start building the foundation to move this material from theory to practice. Attending a course or two on Six Sigma and/or LBI will provide you with the tools to improve your overall businesses.  However the key to your success is weaving the improvement framework and tools into the fabric of your organization.

You have managers to run your business, you have financial analysts to keep your financial books in order and you have supporting staff to enable the success of your organization. You also need to have a quality focus. The head of the organization needs to commit to having an Improvement/Quality culture and focal point.
 
The LBI and Six Sigma model discussed needs to filter down through the entire organization. A role like the Service Quality (SQA) Manager can facilitate the identification of business issues, get executive management approval to work on the issue, pull a “Tiger Team” together, and monitor the progress of the improvement initiatives.

To make all this work the Business commitment to the Leading Business Improvement framework is critical. The framework must be part of your overall business strategy and a key business initiative. If you do not get this level of commitment it means that your management is not ready to sponsor a quality program and commit time and money to run Business Improvement Initiatives using the framework that we have been talking about.

Once you make the framework part of your business, a key focus of learning/alignment is to start embracing one of Dr Deming’s principles - “Appreciation of a System”.  This is a powerful concept to bring people’s understanding of the business together and resolve complex business issues.

Start using your improvement framework by creating a clear map of your business. One of the greatest tools in creating a System View is to build a System Map of your business unit. You can start at a very high level and drill down to a state that shows all of your core customer support delivery processes and linkage to both business drivers and supporting processes. 

HP Software Support’s starting point began with the LBI model and the Appreciation of a System -  System Map.  After looking at our customer feedback, customer support engineer feedback, system map, financial reports and business metrics, we were able to identify that one of our key support business processes was broken.

The Three Questions – answer these before starting:

• What are we trying to accomplish? Attempting to reduce administrative cost
• How we will know that a change is an improvement? One job description vs. threeand decrease the case transfer time
• What changes can we make that will result in improvement? Move from global to regional model and re-write the job description

This is simple and very powerful.  Make sure you answer the three questions with your team before diving into the problem. Articulate what you are trying to accomplish. List tangible activities, tasks and measures that will help you identify and know that the implemented changes really improve the situation. Finally, list the potential changes that can be implemented. This is a starting point and it will be validated as you progress. Indeed, the changes might be implemented as stated at the beginning of the project but can change as you analyze the problem.

Tiger Team - Create a Tiger Team. Depending on the nature of the business issue, you need to select the right team members. You need a good representation with the right subject matter expertise. If the project is large in nature you most likely will need a project manager.  If available, a Black Belt Consultant will complement the team by making sure you follow the methodology.

Improvement Plan - The improvement plan is a master plan and normally used to highlight the major deliverables and what kind of ROI we can be expected. The plan should clearly state how this improvement is linked with the business strategies and will lead to sign off on the project.

Understand the change - The next step will help the Change Agents. It defines the nature of the changes that will be implemented. It should be as specific as stating the precise changes (i.e. eliminate entry points, reduce control, smooth work flow).  The important elements of understanding the change are defining the type of change, category of improvement, and change concept you plan to use. 

PDSA Cycles - The Plan, Do, Study and Act tool (PDSA) will drive your implementation plan. Here again, you need to look at a logical sequence of steps. Usually, you will need to start with data collection and analysis. This will guide you to potential causes and will initiate ideas on things that you can implement to fix the issue. As you identify a potential change you need to test it at a small scale. The outcome of your test will help you plan for the next cycle or your final implementation.

There are two key elements of using PDSA: Gaining the knowledge of learning from your test and gaining the ability to predict the outcomes. Make sure you experiment. Make sure you note everything that happened and have your entire team learn from it. As you plan a PDSA cycle, force yourself to predict the outcome before you implement your PDSA Cycle. The learning will be exponential based on this approach.

Data Analysis - One powerful way to see if your changes are leading to improvement is to actively monitor your data and/or business metrics. It is paramount that you plan for an effective data collection strategy for your improvement project.  Use Six Sigma measurement methods like Control Charts to help you understand what is going on and to see real time the impact of your changes (back to the car dashboard we talked about earlier).

Return on investment - We are stating the ROI at the end of the sequence here to summarize the financial benefits but please make sure that you capture all necessary ROI information during each step of your project. For HP Software Support, the focus and utilitization of the framework for this specific project netted:

• Time saved for Customer Support Engineer - 3.5 hrs/day for 10 engineers
•  Headcount reduction - 4 Customer Support Engineers with minimum impact on our customers
•  Impact Period – 12 Months

In Summary

Create an improvement/quality culture supported by your senior management.  Understand how your business and processes work together.  Ensure you have the right measures and then go identify business improvement opportunities. Start with a small project and stick to the recommended improvement methodology. We hope this learning and overview of how we’ve utilized the Six Sigma Plus to optimize our Support Organization will help you.

 

About the Authors……………………………………………………………..

George Davis
George Davis is the operations manager for software support at HP with over 20 years experience in customer support.  He is responsible for creating alignment among strategy, goals, and investment plans across all of HP Software Support’s worldwide delivery teams. In addition to managing the Service’s operations George is also chartered with driving industry-leading Six Sigma (Black Belt) process improvement cycles for developing new and innovative ways to understand and act upon the “voice of the customer.”

André Courtemanche
André Courtemanche is software global support delivery quality assurance manager at HP. He has over 30 years’ experience in IT customer support. Recently he engaged in Customer Support Quality to help optimize HP’s Software Support Organization. André is a Black Belt Six Sigma consultant.