Balance and consistency of approach is valuable in today’s changing environment as it allows for a more effective and rapid response to changing requirements and therefore it is important to understand optimisation, what it means for each business and how it can be achieved and measured.
The principles of optimisation are about seeing the bigger picture (some might say Strategy) but it is the bigger picture of the operation and it is why the most successful companies today have pulled their Sales, Service and Marketing departments as well as Manufacturing and R&D operations together at key levels in the organisation. All the functions of the business can then be considered in terms of the value they bring to the business and customer, and not by the political power they might yield. The most effective pathway is to use the customer as the point of leverage, to align the business to customer’s needs in order to fully satisfy the customers in terms of brand, product and service. Automatically this entails consideration for the end to end processes, the integration of systems, and staff working together across functions. Transforming the business in this way has meant service professionals have had to deal with a steep learning curve, drawing little sympathy from their sales, marketing or manufacturing colleagues who have had the luxury of been able to evolve much more slowly.
The challenge for the management implementing them is to provide a way of working that offers all the “bells and whistles”, but that is also an adaptable application that can upgrade from simple to sophisticated application, without losing credibility in the simple stage and without confusing users in the later stages.
Successful operations set about accomplishing this steep learning curve by ensuring education and staff development and providing an integral staged learning programme. The intention is to gradually build the skill set as the user grows. Imagine a system that can recognise a novice seeking information, who is able to benefit from a graduated information output and develop towards more sophisticated requirements, and also recognise when the user has become expert and is ready to add value and learning to the total application. Optimisation is about achieving a balanced position: and therefore it is important to understand optimisation, what it means for each business and how it can be achieved and measured.
Studying and understanding how excellent people perform in service and what it is they do and don’t do, makes it possible to identify the combination of skills they use to be top performers. The skills will vary according to the individual and may vary within different company cultures, but the top performers provide a benchmark of what excellence in service is within a business. Gaining this insight enables us to identify what is required to get the operation performing at the top levels highlighting what development is necessary to raise performance across the board. It has to be recognised that this assessment must take a number of considerations into account (business/commercial awareness, behavioural styles and approach to the role) and if the gap in performance is wide it will take time to close. However we have found that by developing the senior individuals, and understanding the balance of skills possessed by each individual we are able to identify specific skills to be targeted for development.
