Are you too focused?

We create teams with a specific focus to improve manageability and outcomes for customers and businesses. That focus, however, can result in unintentional gaps, resulting in issues for customers and growing business impacts if they’re not spotted and corrected in a timely manner.

Image by Mabel Amber from Pixabay

Key thoughts on this topic

• Focus: “Careful attention that is given to something such as a task, or the ability to give your full attention to something:” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/focus

• As individuals, we have a limited amount of attention* (see below). It is implicit therefore that when we focus our attention on something, we give less of it to something else. While in a business sense with teams of people, this doesn’t have to be the case, it often still is.

• When we focus our business efforts then, we can miss the seemingly obvious. The more we focus, the more we can miss other important and relevant factors.

• How we classify data and use it to focus our teams, can result in gaps in our processes which can cause problems for customers and your business.

• A process oversight report can help you take a step back and look at the full context around a process and ensure that you have all these gaps covered.

*Take a look at this famous experiment if you need convincing that our attention is a limited resource and that we need to choose how to spend it. It involves a basketball and if you've not seen it, it's really interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.

Business is complicated

Many businesses today comprise thousands of people and interconnected business processes. From opening a new customer account to managing address changes, taking payments, issuing refunds, sending out marketing information, products, statements, dealing with password resets, customer bereavement, missed payments and so many more. To make matters worse, there are usually multiple ‘flavours’ of each of these processes as we treat customers differently based on factors such as location, customer type (personal or business customer, industry, business classification, etc), products or membership features and economic status.

To manage this complexity, we break our businesses down into departments, functions, and teams and while the names of these business units vary, their purpose is the same. They provide structure to our organisations and bring advantages in focus and specialisation. This allows for economies of scale to be applied where fewer resources can deliver the same or better results through higher skill levels, improved processes, and automation.

In an environment such as this, processes frequently cut across these business structures, and even where they are owned entirely within a single department or function, several different teams may be involved in the completion of more complex processes.

Focussing on delivering great process performance

A team is usually focused on running specific processes and will be responsible for things such as ensuring sufficient capacity, that cases are processed rapidly and effectively and that their part of the business or process is done well.

Measures looking at case volumes and average processing times vs resource availability (maybe staff hours or some other unit of capacity) are commonplace as are service level agreements and other measures such as net promoter scores and more.

These measures usually focus directly on what the team is doing and the part they must play in the success of the organisation. Their measures are reported upwards, with performance targets agreed at a higher level of management.

To facilitate the creation of these measures, reports or data extracts are essential. These will either be focussed at source to the specific remit of the team or will be part of a broader output which someone then cuts the specific team data from to produce the relevant, team focussed measures.

These reports, therefore, show the same area of focus as the team.

Focus, leads to peripheral blindness

So, where’s the problem with all of this?

The problem comes when we step back and look at what this can mean for the functioning of our business as-a-whole. If we look at the broader picture, we can see how easy it is for gaps to emerge – areas which none of our teams are looking at and into which customers or cases can sit and stagnate.

Let me show you how this can happen with an incredibly simplified example and just 2 teams:

In this hypothetical scenario, we’re running a retail business. We only have customers in the UK and the US, and our products are specialised for each of those two customer groups. There are differences in how we need to deal with customers in the two countries such as tax differences, systems, and time-zones and we set our teams up so that we have:

• Team UK: Responsible for dealing with a process for customers who are based in the UK and who have UK products.

• Team US: Responsible for dealing with the same process but for customers located in the US with the US products.

Let’s look a little closer:

An issue with this very simple setup can occur in one of several ways.

1. Business Change

If we expand our business to cover another country, say France, then any customers with this new value would not be covered by either team. This one should be simple to spot however in large organisations with thousands of processes, it can be difficult to trace all possible impacts of a new product or business line.

It’s worth remembering that most changes are significantly more subtle than this one – consider changes to terms and conditions, a new colour being added to an existing product, a change in supplier for some components which are used across several of our products or a regulatory change in how we need to handle payment details.

2. Error

With a result identical to that in case 1, it could be that an error in capturing the customer country occurs – for example, it hasn’t been captured at all and the field is blank. This can happen through system error, data input error, and where there is a lack of other controls to prevent this type of issue. In this instance, the customer wouldn’t fall into either teams’ remit.

3. Logical

The way we have defined our teams here has inherent gaps.

With:

• Team UK being responsible for UK customers with UK products and

• Team US being responsible for US customers with US products

Who is responsible for a US customer who has a UK product, say because the customer has moved or because this product was on sale for a short time in the US before being withdrawn?

If our measurement and process selections for each team are restricted on both country and product characteristics, then the answer then is “neither” as both teams define this scenario as out of scope.

Look at the possible combinations and ownership of under the current definitions:

We can see that even without business change or error, simply the way that we have defined our teams leaves potential gaps and that we have two scenarios not covered within our ownership model:

• UK customers with US products

• US customers with UK products

While this may be easy to spot in this example, consider that you may sell some of your products in both countries so defining a product as a US product and a UK product may not be a simple binary selection like this. Often the selection of products is based on lists or categorisations.

This example is also a much-simplified one when compared to real companies and looks at only two different data attributes across two teams providing 4 possible outcomes. In most businesses, with so many teams, departments, products, services, and connected processes, let alone the complexities that we find even agreeing on common definitions for some of these things, this problem is easy to miss.

When a problem like this goes unnoticed, we fail to process things as necessary. This results in customer impact, additional costs to resolve and in some cases, regulatory breaches, fines, and reputational damage.

The impact depends on the nature of the process, the scale of the issue, and how long it goes unnoticed. The time factor is arguably the most important of these as it has an exponential impact on the other two factors, with unresolved issues getting harder to resolve over time.

Remedies

One way to visualise this sort of issue is to consider a rectangular table. If each team has a focus – a circle they draw around their area of specialty, then there is no arrangement you can create that will cover the entire surface area of the table without overlapping these areas of focus.

There are two ways to resolve these gaps between teams:

1 – Agree on a change to the remits of the teams involved

Ultimately, you need to ensure that all possible gaps are covered. To do this, you need to look carefully at the landscape of possible scenarios and ensure that the total sum of teams’ remits covers the sum of all possible scenarios.

In the example used, this could be as simple as agreeing that the remits will simply be defined based on customer location with no regard to the products held. This may not be the best solution however as now it means that both teams must deal with the additional complexities of the products held in each country, you need to make sure that product changes are communicated and trained to everyone which in a large organisation may not be a small undertaking.

Here is a grid outlining some possible solutions. What is right will depend on your organisation, the scale of the issue, and the nature of the problem as well as any other resources you may have available, and your solution may be a hybrid of some of these and involve teams working together. This is intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive.

2 – Prevent the gap from existing in the first place

In talking about the first way to solve this issue, I said it was necessary to agree to remit cover for all possible scenarios. The second way to close a gap, therefore, is to ensure that the scenario described by the gap simply cannot happen.

The ability to do this will depend on the nature of the issue and the business model you are running.

Sticking to the example used here, we could mandate that no customer outside of the US can have a product not defined as a US product. If we did similar with the UK then those gaps should not exist.

Of course, mandating it and ensuring that it cannot and does not happen are entirely different and process changes such as ensuring that when a customer notifies us of a change of address, they must as part of that process close or migrate all non-country specific products. We may also need to implement exception reports which look for any breach of this rule and ensure that we have a process in place to correct those breaches.

If you can put tight controls in place to ensure that the products and countries will always

match, then the gap cannot exist, and it has been closed and a change in team remits is not required

Finding these issues

Of course, to take any of these remedial steps, you first need to know that you have these issues. To that end, we need to also have a structured way to look for gaps that will continue to work over the years as our business continues to change.

To find that you have an issue of this type, you must step back from the detail and start by considering what does ‘everything’ look like. In my analogy, I talked about a table with circles of focus on it - what is that table? In my example, the table represents every customer record in the system (not every customer with a product, not every customer in the US or UK, but every customer).

The first step in finding and correcting an issue of this type is understanding how these issues come to exist and why they occur. Hopefully, after reading this you are well on your way to doing this.

The second step is to create a Process Oversight Report. A process oversight report is a type of data reference sheet (something I will cover in more detail in another article) and while this doesn’t sound very sexy, in my view, data reference sheets should form a cornerstone in your control environment.

The process oversight report

The process oversight report looks at the full scope of a process and looks at where each ‘case’ should sit – it defines for each case, who must own that case. Note that it may be as in the example that the process is split so that certain cases are being worked by different teams based on customer location or just as likely, the same case transfers ownership over the course of its life so that it is being worked by different specialist processing teams. Whatever the split should be, the control data reference sheet must show all cases and ensure there is clear ownership for each.

Steps to create:

• Establish the report such that it looks at all cases (when I say cases, I refer to whatever the scope of the process covers, this may be customers, sales, refunds or whatever the broader context is. Ensuring that the full scope is covered is essential.

• Apply the business selection logic for each team and ‘label’ each case with the team they should fall into based on the definition of the team remit and other business logic. I’d recommend that this is done through the application of a single label/database field to ensure that each case can only fall into one team*

• Reconcile these numbers to what the teams believe they have in their remit to ensure that the logic is correct and matches what each team has on their work stack. This should be done when initially creating the control sheet and ongoing to ensure that the report remains accurate through business changes. The frequency of any ongoing check will depend on the process & risk of this kind of error. For many processes, an annual check is sufficient but monthly or quarterly – or a specific check after a known business change may be appropriate.

• Any cases which appear on the report without a label at this point represent an ownership gap. The features of these cases need to be looked at closely and a decision made over ownership by applying one of the two methods to fix the issue (changing the team remits or putting in place controls to ensure the specific gap cannot exist). If, after reviewing a batch of cases, it is decided that this group of cases doesn't need to be processed so don’t need ownership, then a specific label for each category of these should be created. To ensure that the report represents the entire scope of what needs to be processed and that this can be verified as ‘everything’ you must make sure that you do not lose sight of this baseline. Here are the critical rules to make sure you do this right…

  • Label each category of non-ownership with selection into that category specifically on rules which define that category.

  • Ensure that cases are not excluded from the report due to non-ownership.

  • Ensure that non-ownership is not some form of default label if no specific ownership can be determined.

• Refresh the report and repeat the last step of reviewing all unowned cases, establishing ownership or out of scope rationale until every case has clear ownership established.

• Run and review this control sheet on a regular basis, checking for those unlabelled cases and matching the case volumes on the sheet to the cases each team has for processing.

*I am here assuming a mutually exclusive business model here where only one team is handling a customer/case at a particular time, and this enforces it. If you haven’t read it, you can read my article on enforcing the mutually exclusive here: https://www.thecontrolpeople.com/post/enforce-the-mutually-exclusive. If more than one team can own a particular case at the same time then, while this approach can be used with some relatively simple adaptation, you do need to carefully consider how to ensure you don’t double count. This is out of the scope of this article, and I will discuss it separately another time.

Summary

· In complex businesses, gaps are likely to form as we aim to specialise teams and define their remits tightly for optimal advantage.

· Uncorrected gaps in processes build to a scale and grow become exponentially more costly to resolve over time.

· Take a step back, look at the whole scope of what needs to be covered and look to ensure that every ‘case’ has clear ownership.

· A Process Oversight Report is not difficult to create and can help you establish where you have gaps and drive efforts to close those gaps.

First Published 05/11/2021

All views expressed in this article are solely those of the author

© Alex Cowhig 2021