2 min read

What Do Big Hero 6 and Service Management Outcomes have in common?

What Do Big Hero 6 and Service Management Outcomes have in common?

My son picked the movie this past weekend, Big Hero 6. I didn't know much about the movie going in but pleasantly enjoyed the story. I don't want to give away any of the surprises, but there was a scene that brought back memories of innovation methods. 

Tadashi introduces his brainchild younger brother, Hiro, to Nerd School, the college he attends in San Francisco. Hiro is so enamoured with Tadashi and his peers that he wants to attend as well and needs to create a project to showcase his talents. He sits down with a pad of paper and freezes. I think we have all been there. Tadashi picks up his little brother and shakes him around, at one point upside-down, saying "I'm shaking things up! You need to look at it from a different angle." 


Shake Things Up!

The theme re-emerges several times during the movie.

Linear thinking is very logical and great for incremental improvements, is adored by accountants and budget conscious managers who believe balancing is the most critical part of business, but is also limited since it tends to move in a single direction. Innovative, disruptive, creative or step-change ideas, the ones that raise the bar fast, most often come from nonlinear thinking. The kind of thinking that connects information that was previously disparate, merges the rational and the intuitive, and does not avoid looking at things in a new way.

Good Sign Service Management

So what does that have to do with service design thinking?

I recently heard someone far more experienced than myself in service operations say that first call resolution is essentially bogus. If the problem could be fixed on the first call, it should have been avoided in the first place. Real problems need real information gathering, analysis and well thought out resolution.

What if you were to take every measurement you currently use to measure your service management operations, put them aside, and think about what you would measure when comparing your services to, let's say, a world class manufacturing operations or logistics operation?

  • In innovation circles, such as IDEO, this is called cross-pollination.
  • In manufacturing, with Six Sigma methods, defects are measured in parts per million because 99.99% isn't good enough.
  • Good Sign brings a manufacturing mentality to the service management business, so we look at problems a different way.

The Take it Back Syndrome

To illustrate in more practical terms, what would you think if you purchased a brand new TV, brought it home, hung it on the wall, plugged it in and you saw nothing because the manufacturer had forgotten to attach the LED screen. You would be quite unhappy. You might bring it back and replace it with a different manufacturer. You probably would not even use the same retailer again. I certainly would not.

Yes, the First Call Resolution!

Contrast that to a service operation that orders a computer for a new employee, loads the needed software by job role and delivers it on time:

The first day the new rookie turns on his computer to start managing his project he notices he doesn't have the necessary project management software. That is a defect and a failure. And it is not the failure of just one process, it is the failure of the end-to-end employee onboarding value chain process. To add insult to injury, when that employee calls the help desk and has the software instantaneously installed, you may actually measure that as a success!

First call resolution! And... it was actually delivered on-time - double success! Lunch is on the company for doing such a great job! 


Remember to Manage the Outcomes

And shoot for earned, free lunches. Service design needs to move towards managing outcomes. We look at meeting those outcomes in terms of service bills of material. A SBOM defines how service is designed, what components in terms of parts, configuration and actions are necessary, and how they work together or are assembled. 

This follows the service every step all the way through to the user.

Forget tools, software, and solutions for a moment and think about design. We think your best people should be more focused on designing, testing, and validating best in class services and spend less time resolving repetitive problems, even if they do it really well. 

What's your take on the subject? Let me know, please comment and get the dialogue going!

 


 

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