XM SIRIUS Lousy Service Costs them a customer

I recently experienced such poor service from XM SIRIUS, I had no option but to cancel my service. Sadly, no one there gave a crap. A manager was supposedly was calling me back within 48 hours and that hasn't happened in 14 days.
The worst thing about this, for the cash strapped and customer losing XM, is that they owe me a refund, money they already had in the bank.

Why would a company not listen to a customer who has already paid for the company's services.


Go figure

Stop telling me Lean Six Sigma is a strategic initiative

I'm sick and tired of hearing how Lean Six Sigma is a strategic initiative. What a bunch of crap! You and I know that most people have no idea of their organization's strategy. The executives of the organization have no clue.
I believe the following quotes from Gary Harpst's Six Disciplines for Excellence (and I believe the quotes actually are Kaplan and Norton's) are truer today than they have ever been.
“An astounding 90% of well formulated strategies fail due to poor execution.”
“Only 5% of employees understand their (firm’s) corporate strategy.”
“Only 3% of executives think their company is very successful at executing its strategies.”
Nearly 80% of C-level executives say their strategies are critical to success, yet are “nearly impossible to achieve.”
Approximately “75% of business improvement initiatives to solve these problems fail due to lack of sustainability.” (Refer to “Doom Loop” of Good to Great by Jim Collins.)
“The biggest problem in business is poorly executed strategies and plans” … Gary Harpst.

Give me a break, there is nothing strategic about your Lean Six Sigma initiative or projects for the vast majority of you.

Steps to realign an organization around key goals and objectives and avoid the deleterious effects of a recession

I have been preaching since the beginning of the year that you need to have a well documented strategy with well thought-out supporting goals and objectives to ensure your employees are doing the right things to move your organization forward. I even wrote a blog articulating the difference between a goal and an objective. I was surprised by the number of emails I received from readers stating that they never really understood the difference between the two.

Having well documented goals and objectives are especially important now, especially if you think we're heading into a recession. Well documented goals and objectives ensure your employees are not being distracted by insignificant, trivial activities and tasks. More importantly, the documented goals and objectives ensures that your employees know exactly what you're trying to accomplish, how it be accomplished, and how success will be measured.

Many organizations make the common mistake of stating their "goals and objectives" as ambiguous written themes. Such as, "be vendor of choice", "improve employee engagement", "provide unparalleled service", and blah, blah, blah. To make matters worst, the organization then allows mangers to define how they will comply with the goal and communicate it their subordinates. Its also not uncommon for managers to rewrite the company's goals in their own terms that may or may not have the same meaning of the originally poorly written organizational goals. Consequently, as goals are cascaded through the organization the meaning and intent is lost in the various translations and rewrites.

Unfortunately and too frequently, I have seen managers write goals that directly opposed goals of another department or team. Talk about zero sum gain.

Here is what I what you to do in order to be successful even during recessionary times.

* Revisit your current goals and objectives, if they exist. Ensure they are clear and measurable. You can’t drive change using written unmeasuraable themes, however, you can drive towards a clear, well-defined measure. If each objective doesn’t have a measure, establish one, now, and its baseline.

* Make a list of all current initiatives that are underway and or planned within the organization. All initiatives, you will be surprised or more accurately disappointed by what your people are working on or think is important.

* Map every initiative to the organization’s goals and objectives. This will be difficult and frustrating because you will immediately get a sense and magnitude of how much effort and time has been squandered by your employees.

* Review each initiative to determine if it’s strategic or urgent. If the initiative is neither strategic nor urgent, consider canceling the initiative. Don't make the mistake of allowing trivial projects to continue simply because they approaching completion. Kill them now! Develop new initiatives that may have been overlooked and or urgent.

* Prioritize the new list of initiatives and determine how to resource and fund the initiative.

* Re -communicate goals, objectives, measures, and key strategic initiatives.


Good luck!
In the future, I will be blogging about other techniques to recession proof your organization.

Customer Loyalty and Retention

In the book titled, Double Digit Growth author Michael Treacy identifies a handful of factors that have been associated with double digit growth. One of the factors is customer retention. Probably, not a surprise to most of you. However, the question is how do you retain customers and which customers do you retain?

I, for example, tend to be brand loyal. For some unknown reason to me, I believe that if I purchase products of the same brand the products will be compatible with one another. Moreover, it’s my ridiculous belief that if I were to have a support issue, somewhere in the company’s CRM, I will be noted as a brand loyal customer thereby entitling me to preferential treatment or dispensation. Silly me!

In the past few months, I bought a HP Widescreen laptop model 9700 with all the bells and whistles. Recently, I noticed one the little rubber a foot on the bottom of the laptop is missing. I promptly called HP for a replacement little rubber foot. Go ahead and flip your laptop over and take look. All laptops have these little rubber feet.

Guess how much HP charged me for the replacement rubber feet. Go ahead… I want you to guess.

HP wanted $99.00 US dollars to replace those little rubber feet. Not the bottom of the computer. Just the little rubber feet.

Do you think I will ever buy another HP product? No way! Knowing myself, I now harbor the belief that HP couldn’t care one bit about customer retention. Gas is a deal at $4.25 US a gallon compared to the price of little rubber feet replacements.

What are you thoughts? Been gouged lately!

Dan Feliciano - Lean Six Sigma Rock Star

M (802) 316-4063
www.DanFeliciano.com
Dan@DanFeliciano.com
www.linkedin.com/in/danfeliciano
http://danfeliciano.blogspot.com/
Skype: dan.feliciano

You don’t need Change Acceleration Process (CAP) training… you need organizationally defined measured communicated, aligned goals and objectives!

A friend of mine mentioned that his organization was engaging a consulting group to do CAP training for all it’s employees. Please!!

Listed below are some commonly accepted definitions / explanations of CAP;

• Change Acceleration Process (CAP) – CAP is a change management strategy and set of tools that ensures effectiveness of change through cultural acceptance. The skills and tools contained in CAP guide co-workers through the process of accepting change, from creating a shared need, shaping a vision and mobilizing commitment, to teaching them how to make change last, monitor processes, and change systems and structures to ensure the process can move from its current state to an improved state.
• Change Acceleration Process (CAP) participants will learn the tools and techniques to become CAP facilitators and help fellow employees accept and accelerate these rapid changes.
• Course Objectives: By the end of the CAP workshop, students will:
• Be able to explain the “CAP Model”
• Have practiced using and facilitating various CAP tools
• Have applied some CAP tools to your department/organization
• Have coached other participants in effective tool use, delivery, and facilitation
• Share best practices
• Change acceleration process (CAP) is a set of principles designed to increase the success and accelerate the implementation of organizational change efforts.
• create a shared need for the change
• understand and deal with resistance from key stakeholders
• build an effective influence strategy and communication plan for the change
• Drives fast, yet sustainable organizational change.
• Promotes a positive environment for driving change in human behaviors, eliminates resistance and engages all those affected by the change.
• Complements the technical strategy with the human strategy.

All this CAP stuff is very interesting to me. However, if only 5% of organizations employees understand the organization’s strategy, what are the chances that the person asking you to change really understands what needs to be changed and why? It’s not that people don’t like change… they don’t like ambiguity and punishment.

Organizations need to focus on creating and communicating strategies to the employees. Done correctly, creating goals, objectives, measures, targets, and identifying and resourcing key initiatives, organizations face less resistance to change. Especially, if the organization cascades the highest level goals, objectives, and measures to all the people within the organization.

If you want to accelerate change, it can be done easily by creating goals, objectives, measures, targets, and identifying and resourcing key initiatives for your organization and then cascading the measure and initiatives to every person throughout the organization.

Why are Goals and Objectives Important?

You see it, hear it, read it, and often repeat it, “…the economy is doing down the drain, … competition is fiercer than ever and cutting into our profits, … lay offs are eminent, … you need to do more with less, and blah, blah, blah!”

So what are you doing to ensure your organization’s survival! Are you just complaining about the situation you got yourself into or have you decided to take a logical rational approach to improve your survival?

Why previous post about productivity resulted a flurry of emails to me asking me, “why I felt understanding productivity and goals and objectives are so important?” You have to be kidding me.

A frequently referred to set of statistics from Kaplan and Norton state;

1. 9 of 10 companies fail to execute strategy
2. Only 25% of managers have incentives linked to strategy
3. Only 5% of the work force understand the strategy
4. 85% of executive teams spend less than one hour/ month discussing strategy
5. 60% of organization don’t link budgets to strategy

If these facts are remotely representative of most organizations, what the hell is everyone in your organization working on? You don’t need more resources, you just need to have them stop working on unimportant, non strategic activities and start working on the tasks that support your strategy.

According to Barney and Griffin, organizational goals serve four basic functions;

1. they provide guidance and direction,
2. facilitate planning,
3. motivate and inspire employees,
4. and help organizations evaluate and control performance.

Organizational goals inform employees where the organization is going and how it plans to get there. When employees need to make difficult decisions, they can refer to the organization's goals for guidance.

Goals promote planning to determine how goals will be achieved. Employees often set goals in order to satisfy a need; thus, goals can be motivational and increase performance.

Evaluation and control allows an organization to compare its actual performance to its goals and then make any necessary adjustments.

How many of you honestly know your organization’s goals and objectives? How many of you know where to find the organization’s goals and objectives? What criteria are you using to ensure you’re making the right decision and subsequently, optimally allocating your scarce resources?

For organizations, managers, and employees to be successful more emphasis needs to be placed on making sure every employee and every manager knows what he or she needs to accomplish in the present and future. When employees understand needs to be done to succeed, it's much easier for them to contribute. It's also tremendously easier for managers to do their jobs, to improve productivity, and to manage proactively, rather than waste their time stamping out small fires after the fact. Clear purpose helps everyone succeed and, bottom line, that's what we all want.

Organizations need to coordinate the work of individual employees and work units, ensuring that everyone is pulling in the same direction. Individual performance goals provide the fabric that allows this kind of coordination to occur.

According to Locke and Latham, goals affect individual performance through four mechanisms;

1. goals direct action and effort toward goal-related activities and away from unrelated activities.
2. goals energize employees. Challenging goals lead to higher employee effort than easy goals.
3. goals affect persistence. Employees exert more effort to achieve high goals.
4. goals motivate employees to use their existing knowledge to attain a goal or to acquire the knowledge needed to do so.

Setting individual performance goals provides a framework for translating the goals of the organization into smaller chunks that are then assigned or delegated to individual employees. This needs to be done for an organization achieve their overall goals to the extent that each employee does his or her part in completing the right job tasks in effective ways.

When an employee knows what needs to accomplished and what is expected, it's a lot easier for that employee to work without constant supervision. Also, by helping employees understand how their individual work contributes to the overall goals of the organization, we enable them to make their own decisions about how to spend their work time so that their work is consistent with the priorities of the organization. The consequences are employees know what they must do, how well they must do it, and why they are doing it. Resulting in a team that is knowledgeable and therefore empowered, to do the right things with much less supervision/oversight. The teams can make decisions relevant to their work without having to consult the manager on every little question.

Clear goals and objectives allow employees to monitor their own progress all year 'round and correct their efforts as necessary. If employees know what they need to accomplish, they can look at their results as they go and identify barriers to achieving those goals.

Believe it or not, most employees want and need to know four things about their work so they can contribute and feel comfortable about where they are in the organization:

· What do I need to accomplish?

· Why am I doing what I'm doing?

· How well must I do it?

· How am I doing?

If you want to know how to get started, give me a buzz.

Do you know the difference between a goal and an objective?

As a consultant, I have the fortunate opportunity, or misfortune depending on your perspective, to review many organizations’ goals, objectives, and supporting initiatives. Despite the size of the organization, it’s obvious that most organizations large and small, public or private don’t understand the difference between a goal and an objective.

For some reason, unknown to me, this drives me crazy. I expect most business people, especially senior level executives to use the terms goal and objective correctly. Perhaps it’s my deeply held belief that in order for organizations to achieve success they have to be able to effectively communicate their goals and objectives and that these goals and objectives will be cascaded down through the organization. Silly me.

A goal is a brief, clear statement of an outcome to be reached within a timeframe such as 3-5 years. A goal is a broad, general, tangible, and descriptive statement. It does not say how to do something, but rather what the results will look like. It is measurable both in terms of quality and quantity. It is time based. It is achievable. It is a stretch from where we are now. Above all, it is singular.

Goals can be described or defined as “Outcome statements that define what an organization is trying to accomplish both programmatically and organizationally.”

As an illustration, some common business goals are, grow profitability, maximize net income, improve customer loyalty and etc. Notice the brevity of these statements.

In comparison, an objective is a specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound condition that must be attained in order to accomplish a particular goal. Objectives define the actions must be taken within a year to reach the strategic goals. For example, if an organization has a goal to “grow revenues”. An objective to achieve the goal may be “introduce 2 new products by 20XX Q3.” Other examples of common objectives are, increase revenue by x% in 20XX, reduce overhead costs by X% by 20XX, and etc. In contrast to a goal, notice how the objectives are more specific and provide more detail.

A goal is where you want to be and objectives are the steps taken to reach the goal.

As I write this blog, 2008 Q1 has come to end and I bet many of you don't have any idea of your organization's goals and objectives. If don't know them, how do you know if you have been working on the right projects/things?

What the heck does "Productivity" mean?

I'm often asked to define productivity and its algorithm. Also, I often hear productivity, production, and capacity used interchangeable. For some reason this drives me nuts because they all have different meanings.
I hope my write up below helps you understand what productivity means.

What is productivity?
Productivity is the ratio of outputs (goods and services) divided by one or more inputs (labor hours, FTEs, capital, expenses).



Improvements in productivity can be achieved by either increasing output without increasing the inputs, decreasing inputs without decreasing output, or increasing output and decreasing inputs.

Output implies production (quantity) of goods and services while input means land, labor, capital, management etc. Productivity measures the efficiency of the production system. Higher productivity means producing more from a given amount of input or producing a given amount with minimum level of inputs.
In other words, the more the output from one worker, one machine, or a piece of equipment per day per shift, the higher is the productivity (producing more output with the same resources).

In strategic operations management, productivity and production are two different terms. Productivity is the ratio between total output and the total inputs used in the production process. Production is an absolute; it refers to the volume (quantity) of output. Production volume may increase but productivity may decline as a result of inefficient use of resources. More efficient use of inputs may increase productivity but the volume of production may not increase. Production refers to the end result of production system whereas productivity reflects its efficiency.

Some of the potential benefits derived from higher productivity are as follows:
1. It helps to cut down cost per unit and thereby improve the profits.
2. Gains from productivity can be transferred to the consumers in from of lower priced products or better quality products.
3. These gains can also be shared with workers or employees by paying them at higher rate.