My Favorite Process Story

This post is all about the cultural changes that BPM can (and needs to) drive within an organization. But it’s also about some of the ways in which processes don’t live in the clouds — they live on the ground, in real situations, with real people. I think it’s really important to remember this fact in our day-to-day work. I like telling this story because it’s from a long time ago when technology was quite different — and yet there are stark similarities to the challenges that we face today.

When I started at Sprint (my former employer), I was among the people who just assumed that when you picked up the phone, there would always be a dial tone — to me this was no big deal. I didn’t really understand all the technology, all the incredible things in the background that happen to actually put phone service in your home. This was of course ten years ago, so cell phones were popular, but everybody still had a landline, and the company overall was still focused on the latter market.

One of the first things the company did was send me out to a call center. This was part of my “process discovery” phase in my new role (though we didn’t call it that) — my goal was to see and document how things actually worked, and then find ways for us to improve. First I got to key orders from customers for about a week, where we had to get all of their information over the phone. I was very precise with my orders, and I was well-trained by the people I was sitting with to make sure that, in this example, I provided instructions and physical directions for the technicians who would later make the site visits. Again, remember that we didn’t have iPhones and Google Maps! I included every last detail in the order, because when I sent that technician out I wanted to know that they were going to be able to do what we had committed to the customer, in the allotted period of time.

Then I flew down to Henderson, which is outside of Las Vegas and I rode with the technician that serviced the orders that I had keyed, so I would actually get to see the implementation of my work in the call center, on the delivery end of things. As I rode around with the technician, I listened to him grumble all morning about “Those service center people . . .why can’t they give us enough information! Most of this area isn’t developed, we don’t have good maps, all I need them to do is provide me with driving instructions and they just won’t do it.” And I was so puzzled because I had printed copies of all of my orders with me and on line 76 of every one of my orders there was a big remark that had all of the information as far as driving instructions went.

Now, the technician worked from a handheld unit — a small laptop-ish piece of equipment. It was supposed to give him a full download of my order. So I said, “What do you mean you don’t have driving directions? I keyed them in right here.” He looked at the paper order I was holding and he replied, “Well, no I don’t, I have the address, I don’t have this either, or this and this.” And I said “But you need to know that it is the third street down here past the light, on a street called Sun Circle, and after you turn left it’s the second house on the right with the brown siding. . .” And he looked at me like I was an alien. As you know, I was the one that keyed these orders, and once I told him that, the technician felt awful, thinking that he had offended me. I said to him that of course I wasn’t angry in the least, but that I needed to understand why he didn’t have what I keyed in.

Well, we kind of went off into our own little analysis and what we found out in the end was that their handheld units only allowed them to see the first sixty lines of information on the order — the 76^th line just didn’t show up at all. So as a service center rep, I was doing my best and every other service center rep up there was doing their best to provide every bit of detail that the customer was providing and yet the process was fundamentally broken and the technicians weren’t getting the information that they so desperately needed. As a result, the service center people thought the technicians were idiots that didn’t read what was in front of them. The technicians thought the service center people were idiots because they didn’t provide the proper information. Further, these two groups didn’t talk to each other, and they each were pointing fingers at each other, and so here I was as the neutral party, trying to patch things up! About four stops into our day’s work, we had found the real root cause of the problem. It was a technology issue. It wasn’t a people issue, and it wasn’t even a process issue.

I made a very simple call to the service center and I explained to the trainer and the manager up there what had happened. I said, “You know, you have an unused remarks field on line 16, so can you send out a broadcast and have all of your reps start putting their comments there instead of on line 76, so that our technicians can see that?” It was fixed immediately.

And so the technician was hearing all of this as I’m on the phone and we are going into lunch that day and all of the technicians typically gather at the same place. There were about twenty of them that had all congregated, and we sat down and my technician friend walks in like he was dragging the queen of Egypt with him, saying, “You will not believe what we just did!” All of technicians were suddenly empowered because they felt like they were part of solving a problem. And then everybody got so excited that they felt like they could tell me anything and right then and there we were going to solve world hunger.

Sound familiar?

Ultimately that day was all about the people behind the process, and opening the lines of communication between groups and thus being able to facilitate a simple discussion that could change everything. I really love that about process — I like knowing enough about the big picture, to ask stupid questions, and the discoveries that come as a result. I like empowering people to help make changes that profoundly affect their ability to do their job, and in doing so, affecting an overall cultural change where communication and collaboration carry the day. Frankly, it’s why I love my job, and it’s what gets me up in the morning.