Your Service Delivery Is Killing Itself
As organisations grow so do the complexity of systems and processes within them. Service Delivery is a role within the organisation which provides a skilled person to render a specialist service to a client.
We see the phenomenon of process growth in Service Delivery explode exponentially as companies grow. It makes sense… if your going to up scale especially in Service Delivery you need to make things:
- Repeatable, predictable and measurable
- Easier to on board staff and transfer skills
- Ensure the company meets it’s obligations
Process is a good thing, you need it to scale. All the experts you hire leave a recommendation list of processes and improvements that follow some best practice or existing methodology.
This is a death sentence for Service Delivery excellence
Being a process person structures appeal to my logic as they are predictable well defined responses to reduce knowledge transfer, mistakes, assumptions and improve productivity or some user/customer/staff experience.
As every service or organisation grows it creates teams, departments, with a vision, mission statements. Then layer at the personal staff level key performance indicators, targets, metrics and measures to reach and processes and procedures to follow; all of these processes have a problem.
Process rigidity is a downward spiral that results in organisational silo’s. To resolve this organisations begin to focus of cultural change groups, internal transformation and restructuring. These are all an attempt to regain the spark that was once in the startup enterprise with its staff of great passion, innovation and outcome driven ethics.
Staff are not robots but they do follow the same rules
We can learn from the seemingly simple structure of the Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics, which lead to an inevitable outcome, revolution. These laws are mirrored in our traditional organisations structures today.
Protect.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Ongoing profit or growth is the penultimate goal of our organisational purpose.
Obey.
A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law. The organisation, its departments, teams and staff do as they are told or required to in an effort to meet their defined metrics.
Survive.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law. Staff and teams protect themselves at all costs, specifically by working within the rules provided.
Organisational processes can only lead to one thing: REVOLUTION.
Revolution has begun, unfortunately as a CEO you missed it
Organisations inherently reward adherence to the rigidity, individuals follow the rules, meet their KPI’s, teams meet target and departments are seen as productive while those innovators within suffer as they are not able to diverge, adapt or manipulate the processes themselves.
The staff evolving in a rigid environment of these structures is to be filtered into two groups.
- Stagnant survivalists, who continue to follow process and keep the lights of the organisation running.
- Intellectual property holders, that eventually leave to expand their opportunities in new and more stimulating environments.
You keep the chaff; the wheat started leaving and you didn’t notice.
Where do you start? – keep reading
This series of articles will challenge the status quo of service delivery and look at why it continues unchallenged, unnoticed and is often seen as a failure when viewed from the clients perspective.
More importantly they will lookat how the teams can work differently to achieve both personal and business goals. And answer the question:
“How can we have flexibility and process together wand actually improve outcomes?”
