Process Triaging Moves the Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Needle

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The now famous Gallup® Q12 Employee Engagement Survey (here) has been a benchmark for a number of years.  Gallup® asserts:

“The findings consistently show that the relationship between each element of engagement and performance at the workgroup level is sustainable and highly generalizable across organizations. That means no matter how you look at it, when your Q12 scores improve, and the result is consistently better outcomes.”

The ProcessTriage® Immersion Workshop (summary here) supports all of Gallup’s engagement dimensions to some degree, the strength of support indicated by a maximum of 4 stars ****.  PDF version of this mapping here.

Gallup® Q12  Engagement Question

Strength

ProcessTriage® Immersion Workshop

1I know what is expected of me at work.****Every workshop deliverable reinforces work expectations, from mapping the triaged process to prioritizing the process capability improvements.
2I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.***The Points-of-Pain identify missing resources and their resolution proposals will provide what is needed.
3At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.****Triagers leverage their expertise and insights throughout the triage.
4In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.****Invitation to be a triager is recognition and praise.
5My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.***Like Q4, the triager would not be invited unless a leader cared about them.
6There is someone at work who encourages my development.***The immersion workshop is a professional development experience.
7At work, my opinions seem to count.****All the results of the triage are participant-driven.
8The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.****The host’s Process Capability Goal binds the company’s mission to the triager’s job.
9My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.***The workshop exhibits team member commitment to quality work.
10I have a best friend at work” is really a proxy for trust. We are interested only in whether there is a person at work whom you would consider a best friend “at work”.**Friendships are built during the immersion workshop.  While team building is not the primary objective, a full day of problem identification and solution nomination cements friendships.
11In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress*This is true if the participation in the workshop was part of a professional development narrative.
12This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.****This will certainly be true after the triage, looking forward to the next year.

 

ProcessTriage® surveys participants after each immersion workshop.  A summary of recent results support improved team collaboration and a respectful use of their time (Rosey’s blog post here).

Contact us at info@processtriage.com or call Joseph (Rosey) Rosenberger @ 913.269.3410 to move your needle.

Let There Be… A Process Map

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I’ve been asked several times to write a post in the popular Top “#” List format of what I’ve learned from triaging these many years and businesses.  It’s a long list as one can imagine, and what happens in what order depends upon the situation.  But one thing always comes first, when we’re talking about actually improving a business into a self-healing, continuously learning enterprise. We need some light.

By analogy, in the Jewish Bible’s Creation account in Genesis,  the text anthropomorphically presents the process as declarations of ‘And God said…’, and whatever God said came into existence.  The first openly spoken ‘And God said…’ is in Chapter 1, verse 3:

“‘And God said let there be light’,  and there was light.”

This light was not solor or photon-based light, as that kind of light is not added until three steps later, on the fourth day.  So what kind of light was this primordial stuff?

The Sages say this first light was like the light we turn on in a dark room so we interact with the room; to walk around in it and not stumble, or see its dimensions to decorate it.  The first thing we need is to create is that which enables us to have a relationship with what we’re creating. We cannot improve what we cannot see.

When it comes to creating and growing and fixing and improving businesses, we need to turn on this kind of  light.  We must create something that allows us to have a relationship with the management team we need, as well as those who will do the work or handle the technologies that will do the work.

This first creation is The Process Map —  an illustration of how work flows between the enterprise and her customers. The map also exposes how people and technologies interact with each other, such as who provides what to whom. The process map captures the idea of the enterprise and gives us a way to relate to it, and everything in it to us — a two way proposition.

At ProcessTriage®, the first thing we do in our flagship immersion workshop is build this map. It typically takes most of the morning and uses an very fast Action>Result format, examples here, here, and here (different industries).  The style comes from a very fast way to design information systems databases that accelerate business processes (primer here)

309-1 Host Close (3)

Do you feel like you’re in the dark while your trying to fix or improve how things are running?

Turn on the process map.

P.S.  I read an ultra-orthodox Jewish commentary on Genesis 1:3 written during WWII, while the Manhattan Project was underway (the first atomic bomb) that asserted there had to be a layer of energy smaller than the atom, as the atom was the stuff of visible light — fourth day light. The commentary asserted the Big Bang theory was very likely correct and we should expect to find stuff smaller than atoms — the world of particle physics. Who knew!

Why Startups Succeed – Bill Gross’s TED Talk – Reason #2 is Process Triage’s Sweet Spot

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Every now and then a TED talk zaps me.  My first blog was inspired by one.

Bill Gross presented The Single Biggest Reason Why Startups Succeed  (link here).

Spoiler alert — the #2 reason was The Team.  And nothing syncs up a team for better execution and process capability improving than Process Triaging (on a napkin here).

And, the proof includes our post-triage participant survey question asking, “Did or will the Process Triage workshop improve team member collaboration?” scores an average 8.0 out of a possible 10.0 (more details here).

And, we’ve actually triaged the Startup Accelerator Process (blog post here), with permission to share the Action>Result Triage Map (downloadable PDF here), hat tip to Kevin Fryer at the SparkLabKC.  (Note, the map is typical of the work an expert triage team creates during the morning of  our flagship workshop .  The team-coordination map lasts about two years typically and can be detailed further for systems automation, organization design, and business case analysis quite easily.).

I love it when I sync up with folks smarter than me – who are masters at adding value to their customers.  Makes me want to throw more gas on my little fire.

Rosey

The Rosey-isms List

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Here it is — my list of rules, laws, axioms, truisms, and blinding flashes of the obvious, in no particular order — thoughts that have stuck to my cranium wall after leading hundreds of process triages (on a napkin here).

I hope this list is be good enough to bookmark and I promise to keep it fresh.

  • Usually, it is unwise to fix the most squeaky wheel first.

    Almost every process triage workshop (overview here) illustrates why the most painful points on a process are not necessarily the first improvement investment.  Every point-of-pain, where the process is not behaving right, requires an investment to remove, either an action item-size Small Now or a project-size Big Now.  The triage team ranks remedies, not the amount of pain.  Quite often, a single quite point of pain, usually near the start of a process delivers the most capability improvement compared to where all hell breaks loose downstream.  These less obvious fixes often pay for the workshop’s opportunity costs.

  • If you don’t fix the quality of your work first, you’ll just create crap faster.

    You’d be surprised how often this is overlooked.  Of course, we’re not talking about designed speed where we intend to re-cycle and improve immediately, such as in Agile software development.When we look at a list of triage results — the Small Now’s action item-size  and Big Now’s project-size list, we recommend the process delay volume increases until most of the remaining items are “Enforce –‘x'”, as opposed to Analyze, Design, or Train.

  • Task complexity increases with volume.

    What works at ‘x’ volume blows up at ‘2x’ or ’10x’ volume, especially if it involved human labor.  Processing 25 paychecks every other week is QuickBooks® simple. Cutting 20,000 3rd Party commission sales force pay checks, where each SKU has a different compensation rate, off a base of 1 million point-of-sale transactions per month, is astonishingly difficult.  One of PT’s early successes was triaging such a process, hat tip Wendy Cogan, the host.

    This is why Google can’t update software very fast anymore.  Or why anything attempted by the federal government that involves transacting with hundreds of millions of citizens is incapable of being created quickly (Obamacare exchanges), which is why the smartphone mobile app world is so compelling — it forces simplicity.

  • Individual experts cannot fix what only teams can find.

    All of us are smarter than any one of us. I cannot count the number of times one member of a triage team identified a process’s point of pain in which the solution was obvious to another team member who specialized in an upstream or downstream activity or silo.  And very often, the solution is not the obvious one, nor is it the one the executive would have pointed out.

  • You can free up cash to use elsewhere by (1) borrowing it at interest, (2) trading equity for it, (3) outsourcing necessary  work cheaper, or (4) improving insufficiently capable, cash leaking  processes you should own and lead.  Continuous Process Improvement (#4) demands you actually lead an organization.

    There are a number of tactics the CEO can apply to raise cash without involving more than a few staff members, like borrowing money, trading equity for some, or deciding not to do work others do as well or better less expensively.  But freeing up or generating cash through on-going operations requires business process improvement, which is a TEAM activity.  Improving team performance requires leadership.

  •  A Process Capability Goal is to process performance what Strategic Objectives are to enterprise performance.

    If  there is one behavioral indicator — one thing to look for, to determine if a business process is well-managed, it is the presence or absence of a Process Capability Goal (PCG – template here).   If the managers of a process do not know how well it must behave, in a manner that, if sustained, will deliver its share of the firms financial goals, it will be chaos and ill-conceived and  unfocused improvements.

  • Only managed processes are scalable.

    A process is not scalable that is not measure for speed, quality at essential points, and unit cost consumption.  Period. Full Stop.

  • You don’t understand your process completely until you can see it as a flow of cash.

    Seeing a process as a flow of cash separates candidate executives from impostors, for financial acumen and managerial accounting is lingua franca  of executive management.  As I’ve said, while stomping my feet for emphasis, “Money isn’t everything but it pays the bills for everything ultimately.  Every improvement that improves a process’s capability should make sense financially, and that story cannot be told unless one is aware of how and where a process consumes cash.  So teach your front-line experts, those who see the most capability-inhibiting issues, how their process eats or generates cash.

  • If you will not delegate a task, when it can be delegated, you are the bottleneck that inhibits your growth.

    As an enterprise grows, the time demands on the CEO are more outward facing, with investors and strategic customers and constituencies, leaving less time for inward, operational attentions. The roles of CEO and COO must split into different people.  COO responsibilities cannot be delegated if the business operating model does not push continuous process improvement tactics down into production spaces — delegated to them.  Process triaging is all about teaching and establishing operational improvements.

  • Don’t necessarily fix what you have not counted.

    Do not change your business model unless the one-time problem was obviously catastrophic.  Just count it instead and determine if it will repeat.  After counting it and establishing a trend, then fix it.

Watch a Bi-lingual Management Team Pick What to Improve First

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For readers unfamiliar with Process Triaging (on a napkin here), one of the last steps of the triage has the triagers (the executives’ and manager’s front-line experts in the process we’re triaging), rank the two dozen or so improvements the team has proposed.  Each improvement is captured on triage card. The cards are lined up on a long table for the team to sort by highest value to customers, use of cash, and finally, what most delivers the process’s capability goal (sample here).

I’ve facilitated triage workshops in Hong Kong, Paris, and Zurich for example, noting everyone spoke English.  So it was a delight to triage a bi-lingual team of farm managers at Schwope Brothers Farms north of Independence, Missouri. They have well over a half a million trees under cultivation and grade about a 100+ thousand  trees for  sale a year.  It’s a world of liners, balls, burlap and attention to detial, plus a devotion to growing beautiful trees.

Tory Schwope, the CEO has a fabulous staff of farm managers that, given labor force realities, involve a bi-lingual — English and Spanish workforce.  So it was a delight to watch a triage cross this language barrier.

Here is clip of his triage team ranking their improvement proposals.  Enjoy

SchwopeBrosTriageClip

326-1 Schwope Bros -Group Photo (2)

Hat tip to Fernando Marrufo, handling the triage cards and host, Jeff King.

Is Process Triaging Worth Your Time? Participants Score it 8.6 out of 10 — Absolutely!

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On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most positive score, “Was the workshop worth your and your sponsor’s investment compared to other work in your queue?”

That is the first question we ask in the Participant Experience Survey that concludes each ProcessTriage® workshop.  Answers are anonymous and the questions pull no punches.

We ask this question after the team has worked shoulder to shoulder all day, mapping their process, then examining it for what’s preventing it from delivering a Process Capability Goal that, if achieved, will deliver their team’s share of an overall enterprise objective.  And after they nominated, ranked, and offered to help with typically two dozen improvement proposals.

The focused, full day workshop is hard work that precedes 90+ days of even more work to improve the process.

Reviewing over the last dozen or so workshops, 106 triagers scored  ‘Worth our time‘ an average 8.63 out of 10, with a minimum value of 6 and a maximum of 10. The median was 9.o! (the middle number of the sample).

Here are the results of two other questions, again a score of 10 is the most positive:

“Did or will the ProcessTriage® Workshop improve team member collaboration?   Average score: 8.0, Min=6, Max=10, Median= 8.2

“Were you satisfied with your ProcessTriage® facilitator’s performance?? Average score: 9.0, Min=7, Max=10, Median=9.1

298-4 Sponsors observe deck ranking (2)

Interested?  Process Triaging on a Napkin (Here)

 

It’s Not Bragging If You Can Do It: HINT’s 1st Triage Had All Small Now’s!

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For those of you unfamiliar with process triaging (primer here), we spend a full day with a team of experts who do the work of an enterprise’s critical business process and nominate improvements.  At HINT, a creative services and video production company in Kansas City, their drive shaft process is the Creative Services process.  While every production is uniquely creative, the repeatable process of doing it is an ideal triage candidate.

327-1 Hint Triage Team (1)

One of the primary deliverables of the triage is the deck of process capability improvement proposals, typically two dozen.  Each one of these proposals, if completed, will improve the process toward a capability goal that, in turn, enables the process to deliver its share of the firm’s strategic goals.  These proposals are sorted by their level of effort, estimated by the team into Small Now action item-size tasks — simple enough for one or two people to accomplish without a lot of complexity, or a Big Now project-size effort, one that requires a plan, a budget, some sponsorship perhaps.

The typical triage proposal deck has a mix of Small Now’s and Big Now’s.  The more Big Now’s, the larger the effort to achieve the capability goal — and we set the capability goals high.   Sponsors and hosts expect a few project-size proposals and set aside some funds before they triage.

HINT’s five-person triage team, sponsored by CEO Teri Rogers and hosted by Tony Welch, generated 17 Small Now’s that could all be worked within 90 days, taking nothing off their plates.   What that says is Teri and Tony are running a very tight ship that’s core process has no serious issues.  It means HINT is entirely scalable, in terms of its drive shaft process.  Their team’s first triage results looks like an extremely seasoned kaizen team.  In fact, most of the proposals focused on enforcing best practices, not figuring things out.  Simply outstanding.

You just don’t see this kind of excellence very often, first triage.

I’m impressed.  Hat Tip, HINT!

 

 

 

 

Reflecting on Seth Gogan’s ‘How To Go Faster’

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Seth Godin pens one of my must read blogs.  Seth was recommended to be by Sean Stormes at 3rd Door, who was recommended to me by Chris Wood, of Paige Technologies and a Vistage member.

Seth’s May 16, 2015 post titled How to Go Faster lit me up, as he offered five thoughts about improving ones decision hygiene (a crisp clean neologism typical of Seth’s thinking).

I was delighted to observe how aligned the ProcessTriage® Decision Cycle sync’d with Seth’s thinking.  Read Seth’s post, then my remarks on team triaging.

SETH: 1. Make decisions faster. You rarely need more time. Mostly, you must merely choose to decide. The simple test: is more time needed to gather useful data, or is more time merely a way to postpone the decision?

ROSEY: If it’s ‘gather useful data’, and the question is about how to incrementally improve a core process that drives your customer experience and balance sheet, team triaging is an extremely fast way to not only gather data, but delegate the decisions on what to improve first and take the decision off your plate for the most part. It means building a business model that keeps these micro-tactical decisions off your plate but makes sure they’re on the right compass heading.  It’s not enough that YOU have a faster decision cycle, but that decisions that should be made by teams cycle faster.

SETH: 2. Make decisions in the right order. Do the decisions with the most expensive and time-consuming dependencies first. Don’t ask the boss to approve the photos once you’re in galleys, and don’t start driving until you’ve looked at the map.

ROSEY: Team triaging is all about taking on the most capability-improving proposals first, while maintaining awareness of the customer experience and balance sheet impacts.  And the process triage maps we craft in the morning spell out the earliest-finish order of what should be done first, then next.  (I knew I had to write a comparison blog post after I read Seth’s #2!)

SETH: 3. Only make decisions once, unless new data gives you a profitable reason to change your mind.

ROSEY: Nothing to add here. Check!

SETH: 4. Don’t ask everyone to help you decide. Ask the people who will either improve the decision or who have input that will make it more likely you won’t get vetoed later.

ROSEY: This is spot on correct. Every capability-improving proposal that’s generated by our triage team workshops has the buy-in of the process’s expert team and thereby removes any buy-in risks. And by the way we coach our hosts to select the triage team, they are by definition the ones who will improve the decisions on what process improvements to fix first.

SETH: 5. Triage decisions. Some decisions don’t matter. Some decisions are so unimportant that they are trumped by speed. And a few decisions are worth focusing on.

ROSEY: Amen. What we tell our team triage sponsors – usually C-Level business unit owners (P&L or real budget authority) is to not overly concern themselves with any of the triage team‘s two dozen or so process capability-improving proposals individually, but focus on the whole deck. Focus on getting the whole list completed, then refresh the list as soon as practical.

It made my day to see PT’s business model align with Seth’s kind of thinking.

Something From Almost Nothing (a Mother’s Day tribute)

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Where do I begin, this Mother’s Day?

Duane & Betty Rosenberger - Sidney IA - 1951

The more I remember my mother, Betty Grimmer Rosenberger, of blessed memory, the more I admire her.  For those who did not know her, my older brother John’s eulogy (here) sums up the essentials.  The slide show preceding her funeral service is short and sweet.

Mother kept a journal most of her life, from about 8th grade well into her 70’s, with some seasons of her life well detailed and others seemingly skipped.  Her journal entries during my early childhood are a marvel.  While I was playing on the Pecos River, burying cantelope in the sandy river bank to cool it down and marking its spot with as stick so as to find it later, Mom was wondering how much credit the grocery store in town would allow before her meager school teacher paycheck arrived at the end of the month.  Or the short, sad entries of ‘D’ (Duane, my Dad) out late and home drunk again.’  (Dad turned his life completely around some years later, but that’s another post of another day.)

I thank my mother most for demonstrating tenaciousness in the perfection of ones talents. Before I left for boarding school at age 14, she returned to her first love, painting.  (Our family’s fortunes improved with Dad’s race horse breeding and training business hitting its stride.) She earned a fine arts degree at the University of Iowa as WWII concluded, then sought a teaching job as close to Ozona, Texas as she could.  She longed to return to her childhood community and her beloved grandmother, Dixie Davidson.  The closest she could get was a Pecos River oasis town of Ft. Sumner, New Mexico.  She was smitten by a quit-high-school-to-fly-a-P51-Mustang-in-the-Army-Air-Corps cowboy.  Dad introduced himself at Sprout’s Cafe (then on main street next to the bank) based on Bill Hitson’s bet he couldn’t get a date with such as nice school teacher type.  They almost eloped but Mom’s mother, a pre-Law graduate from the University of Texas essentially read the riot act to her.  Anyway, I found her one morning asleep at her work table with her hair matted to a church painting she was working on, with a couple of 100 watt lights glaring over her shoulders.  The ‘Churches of the Rio Pecos’ collection, fourty of them, are a legacy and treasure of New Mexico history, 39 of them hanging in Dos Palomas (two doves), the home John and I general contracted for her to display them.

The point of this remembrance is mother taught me now to make something from almost nothing, but hard work and trust in the talents and gifts one is blessed with.  Granted, Mom had a college education — a liberal arts education, when a college education mattered, but painting is a craft.  She did not hit her stride until thousands of hours of practice, as Malcolm Gladwell asserted in Outliers (Little, Brown & Company, 2008)

Mom is my reference point for growing ProcessTriage®  and finding Immersion Workshop Facilitators — men and women who can unconsciously lead a team of strangers through a crazy-focused team building moment.

How To Estimate How Much Cash a Process is Leaking

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The simplest tasks at high volume become ridiculously complex.

Compute the commission on a few sales transactions is stubby pencil work.  Try running a commissions payroll for 19,000 sales people selling hundreds of items, each with its own commission schedule because marketing wants to incentivize the sales force?  Best swap pencils for an Oracle or Teradata platform.  Which is what a company I triaged a few years ago did over a decade of solid growth.  Did I say it was hemorrhaging cash?  It had to process over a million point-of-sale records per month and was creating over a net 100% paycheck errors.

So we know a process at some volume will need oversight and end-to-end monitoring.  When should we think about biting the bullet and buying some dedicated process metering and management?  Some continuous process improvement?

Here’s a simple calculation to indicate when you need to deliberately manage a process and put it into a state of continuous improvement.

Step 1: name the process and set its boundaries, from what triggers it to its final work products:

  • Manufacturing from Factory Order Received to Installed and Accepted.
  • Loan Processing from Loan Submitted for Processing to Cleared for Close
  • Site Construction from Design Finalized to  Client Accepted

Step 2: Estimate how much cash this process is consuming per month.  Include direct and indirect costs, such as labor and floor space rents.  For labor, use a loaded labor rate, which is base salary + 20% (for benefits and some office automation).   Round it to the nearest $5K — just ball park it.   If the process generates revenue, add the average monthly revenue (before accounting adjustments) on top of the expense amount.

Step 3: Consider how capable  this process is, in terms of how well it runs.  Is there a lot of rework or rejects?  Is there a lot of employee turn over?  If this process is not running effectively and efficiently — whatever those terms mean in your context, then what percent (%)  is it under-performing?  10%?  15%?  35%?  A SWAG (Scientific Wild Arse Guess) is okay, but be conservative.

Step 4: Multiply the amount of monthly spend (from the second step) by the previous percentage.  That’s how much cash your process might be bleeding monthly. So multiply that number by 3 to see how much you’re spilling per calendar quarter.

For example, a $2,000,000/month process that is 15% not capable enough suggests $300,000 x 3 = $9ooK could be put to other use if we could see and stop the leakage.

So now you know if you need to buy some deliberate process management — if your estimate of the process’s capability shortfall is greater than the cost to make it capable. 

The ability to not spill this$300K/month (insert your cash amount here) will cost two things:

  • The cost to know what the best capability improvements might be — the Cost of the Improvements List, and
  • The cost of improvements on the list your team cannot get to, taking nothing else off their plate — the Cost of Not Yet’s.

Our flagship service, the Process Triage Immersion Workshop, generates this list of typically 20 improvement proposals that:

  • Have the  absolute buy-in by the producer / performer experts that must implement and live with these improvements AND…
  • Will improve the process’s capability (speed, use of cash, work product quality, scalable volume, better cross-silo work flow, etc.). AND…
  • Thereby better deliver the process’s share of your overall financial goals, AND…
  • Will specifically consider the impacts to your customer’s experience and your (CEO’s) bottom-line impact, AND…
  • Based on a completed staff work recommendation by the manager I choose, be achievable in the next 90 days, or have a price tag for what can’ be delivered that fast, AND…
  • It will only pull my best expert producers off the line for only one day, as a team, to deliver this raw, unassigned and unscheduled list for my manager to analyze and submit in an execution plan with10 days afterward, AND…
  • The immersion experience of producing this first list is absolutely repeatable if I need this team to refresh the list with minimal, optional outside facilitation.

So the kind of list we’re talking about is not your grandpa’s Suggestion Box, or organization survey.  Our Process Triage Immersion Workshop produces this list with your own process experts in ONE DAY of their time (and about three days of our certified facilitator’s effort).

What would you pay for this ProcessTriage quality list?

You will continue to bleed this much cash, monthly,  until you do something about it.