Monday February 28, 2005

Feedback loops

Individual Program Leaders for Sun Global Resolution Troubleshooting occasionally tie-up with Program Leaders in other companies. Recently two colleagues of mine were invited to the offices of Cisco in San Francisco to talk about the challenges of instituting this in their company. Sadly I wasn't there (I had planned to attend and something else got in the way), and I heard from my colleagues that the Cisco Program Leaders were particularly interested in the process improvement feedback loop we're using in Sun. One day I hope to meet you, until then, this is a drawing of the basic operation of one of the feedback loops we use.

1. In the call flow there are people who are generating work for other people. In this model I'm calling the people who are generating work “Escalation Generators” and the handlers of that work “Escalation handlers” Bear in mind that escalation handlers can also be escalation generators if they then pass work to others. Every day we get a dump out of the case management system of all the transfer of work movements between one group of people and another. A Process Caoch (either a Program Leader of a Process Facilitator) is associated with a group of engineers. This can be the staff the Program Leader has they themselves trained – it provides continuity following the training course.

2. A batch program associates all the work from the generators with their respective process coach, and creates a personalised html form for the coach, making it easy for the coach to visit the work of their coaching group.

3. The coach visits the html form, takes a look at the quality of the documentation and finds coachable moments, both “well done”, or “could do better”.

4. There are two stages to the coaching – the first stage is getting the end users to recognise when they should use a part of KT's process, we call this the “triggers for use” and once we see individuals using a process to document the work we are looking for “Good use of Process”. Program Leaders should be able to recognise Good Use of Process when they see it – if not KT have a definition you can recycle.

5. Feedback or consequences are provided to the individuals one to one, either by email, a phone call or in person.

   Typical emails that we send are:

6. Once the reports are completed by the coaches they are archived (in a mail archive as it happens).

7. We can the do data mining and compare the performance of cases where good quality documentation wes provided compared with not such good quality documentation.