Never Work Alone

The best ideas are meant to be shared

Check this out - it's a very cool idea-sharing project run by Lisa Haneberg of Management Craft.

Bren, Skip, and I are judges but don't let that scare you. We're practically neutral (though we're all fascinated by any cool gadgetry) and we love to promote great ideas.

So bring out your best - and share.

Reach out and touch someone

In a distributed team environment, it can be quite challenging to keep everyone on the same page, make people feel engaged, and promote continuity in a synchronized way. I recently asked for ideas on how to keep remote team members "connected" to the rest of the team, and I received some great suggestions from the NWA community.

While I fully agree that this issue is not a technology issue, I also feel that the right technology can help facilitate meaningful, productive interactions - and can even promote the development of better communication habit.

With that in mind, my "wish list" was for any technology suggested to meet the following criteria:

• relatively inexpensive

• accessible without requiring a VPN connection

• able to handle structured tracking of tasks, interactions, etc.

With that as a basis, helpfulness ensued.

Theory of Constraints in public education

Michael asked the Group the following question:

As a high school principal, I am constantly enamored of various business theory. In particular I have been reading Theory of Constraints.    

However, I always have to make leaps of thinking to match the business world to a government run, heavily unionized, non-profit institution. I feel quite amateurish at this exercise.

How do I figure out the constraint or bottleneck in the "throughput" of a school?

Is "the goal" graduation or is there more? [we are in a struggling environment where less than 50% of students graduate in 4 years].

I know this question references particular readings. I'm hoping that some of you are familiar enough with it to point me in the right direction or at least ask questions that will stimulate my thinking.

There were a bunch of great responses. Dwayne got it started by asking some framing questions:

Is the goal of the educational system similar to a manufacturing system? If so, the goal might be to maximize throughput of finished goods that meet the market need while minimizing "scrap" and "rework." With that lens you'd want a high percentage of students to graduate with marketable skills, while minimizing the number of dropouts and repeated grades.

Is "throughput" the goal?  It feels right, since you want to maximize the effective output of the whole system.

Even if we take that as true, the hard part is identifying the constraint.

He also provided a pointer to an online chapter of Critical Chain by Eliyahu Goldratt, considered to be the father of TOC. Dwayne noted that Goldratt considers Critical Chain to be his most significant book.

Next, Karl noted that it's best not to equate the school system with a manufacturing system and he offered up some concrete pointers:

I think the most important questions up front are the problems you want to address.  A manufacturing process is really a pretty simple problem compared to a High School.  It sounds like graduation rate is a major goal.  What about safety and order?  College acceptance?  Sports performance (cringe)?  Alumni donations?  Attendance?

The theory of constraints is a very rich field of thought that fits more than just manufacturing, but I would say the most important component of it is a checklist:
1.  Identify the constraints
2.  Decide how to exploit the constraints
3.  Subordinate everything else to the above decision
4.  Elevate the systems constraints
5.  If in (4) a step was broken, go back to (1)

A couple things jump out at me here.  First of all, you are definitely the best person to identify what is keeping your school from being more successful.  And I don't really know what you would consider to be a measure of success, anyway.  It is not important to relate it to manufacturing, though.

Second, this system does depend on feedback of information.  If you are trying to increase graduation rate, do you only get feedback at the end of the year?  Is there any way of improving this, by predictions based on grades, or a representative test every quarter, or something like that?  I don't even know what the measure of success is, so I really shouldn't speculate, but this may be something you can improve.

Michael chimed back in to offer up additional context and followup questions:

We are an alternative type school that uses internships to engage students and connect academics to projects students do at sites and at school. So, if we connect successful internships ultimately to graduation AND we are having a hard time securing internships, I am thinking that "securing internships" is our bottleneck. That's the constraint.

Right now I have staff who do a number of different things that are not directly linked to getting kids on internships. About 20 teachers work on this with their students and about 8-10 others do administrative tasks and some ancillary instruction.

What exactly does "exploiting the constraint" mean in this situation? What about "subordinating everything to that constraint or decision?" Might it mean that I put a moratorium on all administrative and ancillary tasks and have all 30 staff do nothing else but work on securing internships?

David asked some clarifying questions:

Is the success (or to a degree) of your students dependent upon your staff successfully securing internships and then placing the student with the right organization?  And are these  internships dependant not only on the students input but also that of the participating company? 

Michael replied that the answer to both questions was yes and offered up a link to The Big Picture Model which he and his staff follow.

Finally, Clarke chimed in with a really helpful link to a website dedicated to using TOC in education! He also noted that:

You'll not see many references to bottlenecks on the site because they tend to focus on using the "Thinking processes", which were first mentioned in Goldratt's novel "It's not luck".  They're incredibly powerful tools for uncovering and managing underlying systemic root causes.

Clarke has done a lot of work with these thinking processes within the field of software development and pointed to one of his weblogs as a resource for further study.

Doing business the way your customers want to do business

In our first scenario on the Never Work Alone Google group, we grappled with the following scenario:

A customer comes into a business and asks to buy a product and bill them in a certain way. The person at the counter didn't know how to bill the customer for the product in that way. The customer got frustrated and took their business elsewhere.

The person posing the question felt that the request was reasonable, but questioned whether or not the clerk saw the "big picture" in all this. On the surface, this seems like a staff training issue. However, when you dig deeper it's much more than than - and it can apply to virtually any organization. This issue boils down to how you answer a few specific questions:

1. When a customer wants to transact with your business in a new and different way, how does your organization respond?
2. Have you given your employees enough information and context to both determine whether that particular request is good for the business?
3. Have you given your employees enough authority to take reasonable steps to satisfy the customer's needs?
4. If the employee determines the request is beyond their authority or 'comfort zone' have you provided them with the means to escalate and/or document the request?

Evaluating and Responding To Customers' Requests

To effectively deal with unconventional customer requests, employees need context and rules. Above, I mention that the crux of this issue is deeper than training. Sure, training is important but it's more than process and procedure training. For employees to make appropriate decisions about handling unusual customer requests, they need to understand the rules, but the more they know about what makes the business 'tick' the better they'll be equipped to make the right call. This means training them on more "philosophical" aspects of the business, such as:

• Why are you in business, and how do you want to build the business long-term?
• What sort of authority do they have with regard to discounts?
• What is the organization's return policy, and when can they make exceptions.

Skip pointed out another aspect of this that can be trained: Answering the request with a "can do" attitude instead of a "no, you're out of luck" kind of attitude makes a huge difference. Create employees that are willing to explore options.

Empowering Employees

Here, I'd like to build on Rosa's solid advice on how to empower employees to do what's right without fear of retribution:

• Provide an environment where your staff is empowered to simply "get it done" - and build in good safety nets to mitigate risks to the business (like second level approvals, management review, escalation procedures, etc.)
• Keep a record of what's been requested and continually test every possible scenario a customer may face with you in the business. Not only does this provide the basis for learning and teaching, the testing enables you to better empathize with the customer because you develop shared perspective with them.
• When there's a glitch coach your staff on how to offer alternatives - escalation policies mentions, or simply asking the customers "what else can I do for you?" According to Rosa's experience, customers (amazingly) often offer easier/ cheaper/ better ideas.

Underpinning all of this, we need to understand these things only happen when our staff has high trust in us, feeling that we've provided a workplace where "fail safely, mistakes are cool when we learn from them, improve and adjust" is the walk of the talk.

Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reasons

With knowledge of the "why" of your business, the employee has a better idea what's good and bad for the business and is in a better position to do what Marc suggests by providing an informed response of "why not" when a customer's request just doesn't seem right for the business.

Then, by keeping track of all the requests, the business as a whole can learn from its customers over and over again.  Success in business is all about relationships, which are all about communicating with - and especially listening to - your customers.

---

This is the first summary post of the Never Work Alone group, and thank you to everyone who helped promote this, participate in the lively discussion, and get this thing off the ground.

If you want to check out the raw materials that fed this post, head on over to the Never Work Alone Google group. And while you're there, pull up a chair around the conference table and join in the discussion!

Thanks,
Dwayne