The Classroom-Day 1
Mary Scott, director of the call center at Tech Dyno, stood in front of the classroom, about to introduce her new boss, Dennis Tisda. She was glad that Dennis had arrived to kick things off, making it clear to everyone that he thought the workshop was important.
“Good morning, everyone!” Dennis almost shouted. “Welcome to Quality 2.0 leader training. During this workshop you’ll learn about the new system of management that will be used at TechDyno. It’s different than what you’ve used in the past. Our CEO, Steve McDowell, will use Quality 2.0 to make his dream a reality. You’ll play a vital role because without you things won’t change.” Dennis overviewed how the primary operations of the contact center linked to Steve’s metrics.
A few questions and answers followed, and then Mary found herself center stage introducing the trainer, Troy Polaski.
Troy began by laying out the Quality 2.0 leadership process. The major steps were pretty straightforward:
1. Organize for process excellence.
2. Determine key outcomes and metrics.
3. Identify process owners and drivers.
4. Plan for improvement.
5. Improve
These steps each had a set of what Troy called level 2 steps. For step 1, the level 2 steps were:
1a. Organize for process excellence. Establish a process excellence leadership team, or PELT.
1b. Conduct a PELT workshop.
1c. Schedule PELT meetings.
Troy explained that they were on step 1b already, with Mary’s leadership team being the PELT for the contact center.
Troy covered level 2 for step 2:
2a. List contact center goals and strategies.
2b. Use the list in 2a to determine differentiators for the contact center; plot historical data for these metrics.
2c. Use the list in 2a to determine key requirements for the contact center; plot historical data for these metrics; identify competitive gaps.
2d. Create a balanced scorecard and dashboards.
Mary explained that their first metric, net promoters, represented the difference between how many customers would recommend you (promoters) and how many would not (detractors). Troy facilitated as Mary led the discussion of how the contact center contributed to increasing net promoters.
At the end of the discussion the walls were covered with flip charts of objectives that might be important. Mary’s stomach tightened. She imagined the workload to keep track of all of these, but Troy’s next exercise helped ease her mind. He asked her team to sort the list into items that would “differentiate” TechDyno’s contact center from their competitors and those that would not. The list of “differentiators” was blessedly short. These would be the focus of Mary’s PELT. Troy suggested that a subteam of analysts collect data on the other items, which he called “key requirements,” to see if any of them were performing at a noncompetitive level. The PELT’s dashboard would be used to track the differentiators and the noncompetitive key requirements.
After the break Troy took the PELT through an exercise that involved identifying strategies to move the drivers. Then Troy introduced the concept of an “operational definition.” Strategies, Troy explained, were not defined until the metrics that would measure them were defined. The next exercise was to operationally define their differentiator strategies. They also spent a little time on a few of the key requirements that the PELT thought were likely problems.
At day’s end Mary took stock of their accomplishments. Although she and her staff had plenty of notes, diagrams, and lists of “to dos,” her favorite take-away was the figure showing how they would contribute to customer loyalty (see figure 1). They had similar diagrams for Steve’s shareholder and employee visions as well. Somehow, these simple diagrams made things a lot more clear to her and, Mary hoped, to her team. She found herself actually looking forward to the next day when Troy would introduce them to something called QFD. He promised that it would clarify their work even more.
Thomas Pyzdek is the author of The Six Sigma Handbook (McGraw-Hill, 2003), Quality Engineering Handbook (Marcel Dekker Inc., 2003), and The Handbook for Quality Management (Quality Publishing, 2000). He is a consultant on process excellence. Pyzdek recently received ASQ’s E. L. Grant medal. Learn more at www.pyzdek.com.
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