(25 Apr ’10)
I’m possibly the only
non-MBA in my department. Naturally, I think ‘out of the box’ all the time… in
other words, I’m a misfit. Whatever I think is common-sense, has to be
quantified. Uh, it has to be given numbers, fitted into formulae, structured
into data, analysed. If it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed, that’s what
the text books say. So also, if it isn’t documented, you haven’t done it. The
US of A says so and we concur wholeheartedly, in the bargain using realms and
realms of precious paper. We have lost our ability to think some centuries ago.
Coming to the here and
now: last things first. The documentation bit. My department, Customer Service,
is expected to know all there is about the industry, or at least the
institution, we belong to. We’re the ones that must guide customers through the
maze of paper and computer work that has been created to put systems in place,
make life smoother, be more transparent, etc. That’s why we have to document
whom we spoke to, date, time, matter, what step was taken, vagehra vagehra. Bad
enough. But we have to document grievances if any, who did what wrong, who
sorted it out, how, when, why, where, was the customer satisfied, if not, why
not and the story continues for a couple of pages. So I spend half an hour and
a page to say: man no happy with something; something fixed; man happy. Or, man
not happy with item, gave refund, story over. It’s never that easy, though.
When a new service is
started, we document everything: from the time the door opens in the morning
till the latch is fixed at night. Who entered, went where, sat where, sat how,
moved when, minute by minute, the movements are tracked. Obviously, no single
person can do this, so management trainees do their ‘projects’ or come as
‘interns’ to fill up columns and tick squares to earn their marks. These papers
and then fed into specially created software for measuring feedback. This is
done by another set of young enthusiasts-who-turn-dummies by the time they add
an M to their BA. By that time the study is outdated and a fresh one begins. We
have so many MBAs (many from run of the mill colleges, but a few from fancy
labels, too) employed to monitor what’s going on; they have to be paid
salaries, and then we employ some more to find out just how we can reduce our
costs. Instead of writing a nasty stinker like: “Dear Doctor, If you don’t
stick to your appointment schedule and continue to keep your patients waiting,
please look for another place” we carry out a survey to find out just what’s
displeasing our customers and place a well-presented, hard to comprehend report
on the doctor’s table. Or email it to him. He adds it to the junk the pharma
companies pile on, and without reading it, makes money on the raddi.
I get in and out of
these ‘research teams’ hoping something smart will rub onto me. Unfortunately,
some of it is so worthy of ridicule, that the reverse happens. Instead of me
getting educated, something stupid rubs onto the others and as a result now
we’re all getting to be a bunch of ‘why’r-we-doing-this’ types. More my scene.
I’m in a comfort zone. I’ve learnt how to gather data. First, find out what
questions the customer wants to be asked, so do a pre-study study. From that,
glean the ones that you want. Break them up into simpler ones with yes and no
answers. Or mark from 1 till 10, with smileys or some other childish method of
making the ‘respondents’ (never fillers as in those who fill) understand the
sequence of increase. So a question that arose from: Your institution stinks, I
couldn’t park my car would comprise two parts. One regarding the toilets and
cafeteria, the other the road outside.
Did you use the toilet?
Y/N. Which floor was it on? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. You used it at: 2 pm, 3:30 pm, 6 pm,
just passed by it. The toilet stank because of bad brushes: you fully agree,
partially agree, don’t agree. Or because of bad staff: you fully agree,
partially agree, don’t agree. The same thing is repeated with the parking space
and a hundred other such ‘problems’ customers seem to face. The bundles of
filled forms has valuable data, the forms are numbered, committees are set up
to analyse the findings, and voila, we are told at a high level presentation
done by expensive consultants that a) we need more parking space in Mumbai and
b) our toilets need to be cleaner. Our customers are therefore dissatisfied
with our service. What insight! How clever! Six sigma is a method of measuring
just how dissatisfied our customers are: 5.6 times or 5.78 times. The closer we
get to the ultimate value, the more we pat our backs.
Once we knew just what
was wrong, we went back to the books and discovered that we have to trim our
excess expenditure and our processes. Thus was born the Lean Six Sigma… more
MBA babies around, more paper, more…people employed and therefore a rise in the
cost of the product. Projects zindabad!! I get to learn tenets the of
Management for free.
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