Our BPGroup research and practice in some of the world’s most successful companies, and the set of approaches within the coaching programme (see http://www.bp2010.com), helps get to this new place of understanding and action.
Essentially the Outside-In logic works as follows:
1. The only reason our organisations exist is to provide service or product for a customer.
2. What we deliver to customers can be articulated as Successful Customer Outcomes (SCO’s)
3. These SCO’s are very specific and can be measured (KPI’s)
4. Linking everything to meeting and surpassing these KPI’s (the achievement of SCO’s) aligns our organisation for success.
Discussion points that arise include:
A denial of (1).
Some traditional higher-ups may argue that we exist to make money for the shareholders/ensure we meet regulatory requirements/etc. etc. Great we say – and how do you do that – only by doing (1) successfully!
But what about strategy – all that vision, mission stuff?
Well yes ‘what about strategy’? The achievement of 1-4 is in fact living breathing strategic execution. Not those ‘tablets of stone’ and the cascade down into the organizations, filtering as we go into our own silo thinking. We specifically begin to work across everything, everywhere to understand SCO’s and then set about meeting them.
‘So what’ some might say. Well when you think about it the only way we can do 1-4 is through our processes. Asking questions like ‘how aligned are we now to achieving SCO’s?’ – What proportion of what we do is explicitly linked with achieving the SCO’s. On that last one we see an alarming 50-70% of what currently happens is NOT aligned. And therein is a massive opportunity.
By stopping the ‘dumb stuff’ and realigning we win the triple crown – that is to simultaneously reduce costs, improve revenue and enhance service.
This is where we talk about Customer Expectation Management, or ‘Management by Expectation’. By truly understanding customers needs (not just their wants) we can easily articulate SCO’s and ensure we meet them every time, without exception. Then we actually begin to reform and create new expectations (lifting the competitive bar) and in doing so develop whole new strategies that seem heretic to the inside-out silo based thinking of the past.
And the great news for you and I is that the only way we can do this is through enterprise process management! After all every bit of work our organisations do is simply that – a process.
We have lots of this ‘hands-on’ material that we use in our sessions, and supporting resources and slide shows for your use in the business subsequently. We are really looking forward to sharing this and helping you move the understanding to a completely new level so that everyone in the organisation, not just senior management, sees and feels the linkage between thinking about what we should do and how we actually get it done.
I hope that helps get you started on the journey and look forward to meeting with you very soon,
Kind Regards
Steve
