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Firstly, you lose time thinking about whether you can prioritise it, where you can prioritise it, and what delivery time to attach to it.

Secondly, you have de-prioritise items/customers on your to-do list so that you can fit this new task in. Due to the inherent variability in service provision, it will be very hard for you to guess accurately how long that task will take.

Thirdly, your decision starts to disturb the processes in the rest of the business. Other people start missing their deadlines either because you will no longer deliver when you said you would, or other people start missing their deadlines because you now make additional urgent demands on their time. In extreme situations, which I've found at Warrender Financial, you actually start employing somebody to go round managing all the expedited items and smooth the ruffled feathers of the now stressed-out employees.

to get service you complain

you get moved up the queue

other people are demoted

they are reprioritised to the top of the queue

you complain again and

Schedule my tasks as diary items. That way I set aside time in my day to actually do them.

I create a process and then stick to it.

If the phone rings and I'm halfway through something important then I will let it go on to voicemail.

Whilst working in a processing centre, the team were being inundated with chasers and demands to expedite queries. Even though it wasn't the most pleasant thing to do, I refused to bump people up the queue. To support this I also developed an accurate tracking mechanism so that I could say to the customer exactly when they would get their piece of work. It took a while, but I did manage to turn around a three-month backlog to same day service. As the backlog came down, more and more resource could return to doing the work rather than storing the work.

When I know I'm going into a busy period, I do block out days in my diary to stop other people deciding their urgent meeting is more important than my commitment to my customers.

Where possible, I do not multitask. Just remember the bottleneck concept; in any given hour I only have 60 minutes. As soon as I do additional tasks, I reduce the amount of time left to do what I originally set out to do. The bottleneck (me) cannot change.


	Breaking the Bottleneck! 10 profitable ways to use the 'Theory of Constraints' in Services *Use your browser's back button to return to the index* Chapter 3 Solution secret No 1: Control your workflow! Key “Theory of Constraints” concepts: Maximising Throughput Elevate the constraint Dangers of expediting and reprioritising STOP EXPEDITING! Well, did that get your attention? I hear you asking “how can I possibly stop expediting or re-prioritising. I do it every day. How else would I get to my to-do list?” Most of us will have been on time-management courses where we learn the importance of prioritisation, to-do lists and being extremely organised. On reading “The Goal” it becomes abundantly clear that there are limitations to doing this. Think of your workday as a process with tasks coming in, you dealing with them, and providing the service to the customer. If you use the Theory of Constraints, then terms such as bottlenecks and Herbies are great ways to understand what is really going on. Don’t you just love it when you get to work from home? You seem to get so much more done. You decide what you want to do, you work in the order you want to do, and you progress through your list uninterrupted. So why doesn’t this happen in the office? If you are lucky, you get to your desk and have a few minutes where you can get organised before the first interruption of the day arrives. Increasingly - and particularly in service organisations - that interruption will come in the form of a telephone call or e-mail. And immediately all your time management skills go out the door. For now, you have to react to somebody else’s urgent issue. And like all good well-trained staff, you immediately adapt your to-do list to accommodate the change in priorities. You have reprioritised and, if it’s a chaser, expedited! In “The Goal”, the bottleneck is seen as a particular machine within a process. In services, however unflattering this may be, think of yourself as that machine. You are that bottleneck. Despite what some people may tell you, there are only 24 hours in any one day. You cannot store any of that time, you have the same amount as anybody else, and if you don’t use it you’ve lost it. A number of things happen when you choose to reprioritise / expedite a request: Firstly, you lose time thinking about whether you can prioritise it, where you can prioritise it, and what delivery time to attach to it. Secondly, you have de-prioritise items/customers on your to-do list so that you can fit this new task in. Due to the inherent variability in service provision, it will be very hard for you to guess accurately how long that task will take. Thirdly, your decision starts to disturb the processes in the rest of the business. Other people start missing their deadlines either because you will no longer deliver when you said you would, or other people start missing their deadlines because you now make additional urgent demands on their time. In extreme situations, which I've found at Warrender Financial, you actually start employing somebody to go round managing all the expedited items and smooth the ruffled feathers of the now stressed-out employees. Some examples to think about: When you answer the phone instead of deal with the customer in front of you, you immediately de-prioritise your current customer and create a backlog (existing customer waiting to be served). Now I know you would have never done that, so think of it from the customer perspective. Where have you needed service, only to be de-prioritised because the person thought the phone was more important than you? In the fast food take-away? Meeting your accountant, lawyer or financial adviser? Buying tickets in person? Immediately that phone is picked up, you become backlog/work in progress/work in process/less important (whichever term means the most to you). Unwittingly, the business now has that Inventory carrying cost. They also run the risk of losing your custom both now and in the future. Many services are provided at a distance, so we as customers don't realise quite how unimportant we are to many businesses. Having waited days or weeks for replies to very simple questions, we eventually resort to complaining. As if by magic, now we start getting the service that we wanted. And the only way that has happened is because the business (someone just like you) has now re-prioritised you and moved you up the queue. And every other customer has been demoted. It doesn't take a lot of brain cells to see where this is going: to get service you complain you get moved up the queue other people are demoted they complain they are reprioritised to the top of the queue you are demoted you complain again and move up the queue By expediting and reprioritising, in extreme cases, the business will end up with all its customers angry, disinclined to use them again, and delighted to bad-mouth them to their friends. From the business perspective, much of the working day is now taken up with complaint handling, decision-making, list maintenance, tagging and expediting, and disrupting processes throughout the business. This all costs money. This all costs reputation. This does not make sense. And still some people do it! Expediting within a company could be explicit or implicit in the way it works. The research carried out at Warrender Financial highlighted both. The customer trend was first that they would write, then after a week to 10 days they would write again, and then they would phone and then they would complain. With backlogs already hitting twenty to thirty days, more and more management time was taken up dealing with reprioritisation. Not only did you have the carrying cost of dealing with the extra pieces of mail and the extra phone calls, you also had to go and find and match up previous requests. Then decide where to place them in the queue, and communicate back to the disgruntled customer a new revised deadline. Due to the regulated nature of financial services, those who complained also had to be treated following a particular regulatory process. This is additional cost. It adds Operating Expense and Inventory because Throughput isn’t working! Within customer services, the result was a dedicated team of complaint handlers, a dedicated team of people who would deal with urgent telephone calls, staff employed to log and store incoming work, managers to oversee and monitor complaints, chasers, urgent cases, and the length of the backlog. You can imagine the cost! Realise also that an individual acts like a bottleneck when the volume of work they have to deal with exceeds their capacity. Returning to the concept of Herbie as the bottleneck, the Theory of Constraints makes it easy to identify people who are struggling to keep the Throughput or flow of work flowing. In front of each person or Herbie you will find a queue of work. That may take the form - say in Starbucks or a fast-food restaurant – of a queue of people waiting to be served (why is it more important to serve somebody their hamburger in their car than to serve somebody on the other side of the counter?). If you work in an office, just think of your e-mail inbox: an endless supply of to-do items where you have little or no control on the impact on your workday. Carry out this test to find out how good you are at not expediting: (1) Look in your Inbox. (2) Look at the date of the oldest item. Need I say more? Why have you not got round to dealing with that item? Do you think the customer is still waiting for you to do something? And before you say "yes but…", the only reason you have not dealt with that item is because you have not had the time. Other items keep coming in that you feel are more important. And don't use the excuse that it's complicated. That just means it takes longer to resolve, and more important things take up your time. You keep expediting! In simple terms: · Expediting interrupts your to-do list · Expediting costs you time · Expediting interrupts other people's to-do lists · Expediting means you treat customers differently · Expediting means missed commitments · Expediting creates stress · Expediting adds cost · Expediting creates backlogs So the secret is to stop expediting. How do I actually do that? Well, STOP EXPEDITING! Here are 10 ways you can do this: 1. Always deal with the task at hand 2. Stick to your plan 3. Let the phone go on to voicemail 4. Set aside time each day to deal with predictable urgent requests 5. Make sure your boss knows how big your backlog of work is 6. Don't deal with e-mails as they arrive, deal with them when it suits you 7. Tell your customers that you do not expedite (explaining that if you give in and expedite their case, you will just do the same to the next person, thus negating the value to them) 8. If you have an electronic calendar, move your task list into the calendar. You must schedule time to do your tasks!!! 9. Be assertive. Remember it's your time not somebody else's. Blank out your diary so that people can't just book your diary. 10. Reward achievement, not those that fight fires by expediting. Fix the cause not the symptom. Okay, so is easy to come up with 10 ways. But do I walk the talk? I wish! What I have done though is the following: Schedule my tasks as diary items. That way I set aside time in my day to actually do them. I create a process and then stick to it. If the phone rings and I'm halfway through something important then I will let it go on to voicemail. Whilst working in a processing centre, the team were being inundated with chasers and demands to expedite queries. Even though it wasn't the most pleasant thing to do, I refused to bump people up the queue. To support this I also developed an accurate tracking mechanism so that I could say to the customer exactly when they would get their piece of work. It took a while, but I did manage to turn around a three-month backlog to same day service. As the backlog came down, more and more resource could return to doing the work rather than storing the work. When I know I'm going into a busy period, I do block out days in my diary to stop other people deciding their urgent meeting is more important than my commitment to my customers. Where possible, I do not multitask. Just remember the bottleneck concept; in any given hour I only have 60 minutes. As soon as I do additional tasks, I reduce the amount of time left to do what I originally set out to do. The bottleneck (me) cannot change. *Use your browser's back button to return to the index*

	© ChangeNRJ Ltd 2006-9

Solution secret No 1: Control your workflow!