articles

Organizing Chaos

By: Janna Pearman Jacobs

November 6th, 2024

Has this ever happened in your company:

Your employees feel like there is constant change. They don’t know what to do and doing nothing feels like the best option.

Or you hire a third party to build a new system to support your customers, but no one will use it.

Or multiple departments need the same information, but it is kept in separate files in separate silos, causing employees to search for data between departments.

These are descriptions of CHAOS, and we’ve all been there. These are real examples of chaos we all have dealt with. In rapidly growing businesses, managing results in an environment of constant chaos is one of the hardest things.

How do you thrive and survive in a changing high-growth culture?

Hire the right people who lead teams for results, see the bigger picture, translate it to the people doing the work, and help their teams succeed.
Embrace cross-functional SWAT teams to understand problems and assemble a plan of attack.
Be disciplined, have a plan, and set priorities.

Setting priorities is one of the simplest and most important things you can do. There are so many problems (“opportunities”) that you need to help people know what to focus on; otherwise, they will focus on everything, and nothing will get solved.

I’ve dealt with this when determining why customers were not using a new system. Where do you start when you’ve rolled out a new system no one uses? You ask for feedback, right! However, employees tell you customers are not using the new system and are unaware of it. How do you work through the situation?

I returned to the problem the team and I were solving to understand why a new system was created. The system was implemented to improve customer satisfaction by reducing wait time and providing a multilingual sales experience. Everyone agreed with this, but customers were not using the system. Why not?

Armed with the purpose and priority, we formed a SWAT team to reach the root cause. We went to multiple locations and observed what was happening (or, in this case, not happening). We discovered there were two problems:

Employee compensation was based on upselling products, which meant dealing directly with customers. Employees saw the new system as a threat and turned it off (or never turned it on). The solution to this problem was easy: adjust employee compensation to account for self-service sales transactions.
On the few occasions the system was on, it was slow, and transactions timed out. This was harder to solve, but we did. We found a solution that allowed for performance monitoring, giving us visibility from the beginning of the transaction to the end. We used the information to tune the system, starting with low-hanging fruit and working up to more complex and impactful changes.

The system has been used for over 20 years, so to say it achieved its return on investment is an understatement.

There are many examples and situations of chaos in companies. Here’s another example to help you consider what is happening in your company.

A common occurrence is multiple departments needing to use and share the same data. Employees email information back and forth all day. The squeaky wheel gets information first, and everyone else gets information last – or not at all. Managers are concerned about having incomplete or outdated information, which delays decisions. Employees are frustrated because they don’t have the information they need to make decisions and do their job well. Senior leadership is upset because customers and the bottom line is negatively impacted. Wow, how do you get your arms around this situation?

Here’s how the team and I fixed the problem. We went back to the basics and started validating these departments' purpose. What was their priority? Their priority was getting equipment repaired quickly, cost-effectively, and back in inventory. Then, collecting on repair bills. Surprisingly, the priority was NOT being good at collecting and organizing data.

Once we validated the priority, we formed a task force with people from multiple departments to understand what data they needed and when. We traveled around the country interviewing and observing people asking the same questions. This was important because, over time, people developed different processes to deal with the volume and location of data.

We found some of the processes to be really good, and as expected, some of them were really bad. This took time, but the result was a multiyear people, process, and technology recommendation to integrate data and processes across multiple departments. There were short-term and long-term improvements in financial decision-making, time to repair decreased, repair collections increased, and employee satisfaction improved significantly. Even better, servicing the customer and bottom line improved!

The result of this work has evolved over the past 20 years and the technology has transformed into a source of revenue. The systems became a profit center by selling information (“big data”) to improve customer operations.

If you find yourself dealing with growth-driven CHAOS, trying to keep up and do the right thing. There are ways to get the job done right. If needed, GET HELP. Chaotic situations don’t fix themselves!

articles

Organizing Chaos

RKC Managment Consulting