John Linton We are sorting through the various actions required by the various operating plan changes completed last week. If you create a business process and it runs well/faultlessly for many years it tends to come as a surprise to begin to notice that problems have begun to develop that never existed in the past. This, in a company that constantly monitors every aspect of its systems via our own and constant customer feed back, is even more surprising to me. Nevertheless it has become clear that things once taken for granted are not being done as faultlessly as they have been in the past. It's disappointing and also surprising given the automated nature of the overwhelming majority of Exetel's business processes. The issue, now that we are subjecting it to some ongoing scrutiny, appears to be that newer people within Exetel have been introducing more and more manual ad hockery in to previously fully automated systems to address changing needs. I have become so reliant on our automated reporting systems which I constantly update and change that I have not participated in ensuring all other parts of the company have continued to develop the systems and processes which they have 'inherited'.
So, it's becoming apparent that we will need to do a more formal, and more complete, audit of our long established processes and recover the long established mantra of "every process must be fully automated - there is no such thing as semi-automated". It sounds simple enough to accomplish and I have always thought it was - but it seems that over time and with less than total attention it is not as simple for people who have not come from a background where total automation is simply the only way to do things. As few/none of our major suppliers (and none of our smaller suppliers) have fully automated systems it requires a lot of effort to make full automation 'happen' and it appears to be that difficulty that, as products and services change, has allowed an increasing amount of manual processes to infect the 'purity' of previous standards.
I am not sure just what we need to do to recover the current situation but it is going to take some time and a different approach from many of our people. Having thought about it for not long enough it appears to me that it falls in to the same category as everything else in life that is 'inherited' - it is just taken for granted and no effort is put in to 'maintaining it' because it 'just is'. There can be no recognition that it' took a lot of time and effort by 'predecessors' to firstly realise it was necessary and then the efforts and time required to actually put it in place. How you go about engendering that thinking into 'newer' people is something that may be difficult to do. While it's part of an inevitable transition from one 'size' company to another it doesn't make it any easier to accomplish.
Food for thought. Just what to do to recover the simplicity of our first five years and the people and processes that delivered those, in their minor way, exceptional results. Perhaps the huge difficulties of the past three successive years have contributed to those circumstances more than I have realised and it's now past time to return to our simple objectives and, more importantly, methods.