Same People, Better Results

"If you're not keeping score, you're just practicing."

-Sonny Perdue, Governor of Georgia and former football player at the University of Georgia

When I left you last, a former entrepreneur named Joe Doyle had been given the task of fulfilling his Governor's promise: Georgia will have the best customer service of any state in the country. Doyle started by keeping score of Georgia's customer service, and, ouch, discovered that the average wait for a driver's license was two hours, the wait for action on a child support issue was 14 weeks... on and on. In other words, he had big challenges and no new money to offer to State agencies. His only resource was a Governor who demanded that state agencies start keeping score.

Doyle began asking each agency to name a Customer Service Champion. Naturally, he and his "champions" faced cynicism. As he described it, "It's my experience that in any organization you'll find 20 percent of the employees are passionate about what they do and 20 percent are on the other end, the whiners. The battle is for the 60 percent in between – who are they going to listen to?"

Among his first efforts was an anti-whine campaign, telling each group that the motto "Better results with existing resources" was NOT code for "lay-offs" or "budget cuts." Instead, he announced that "no one has ever lost a job because of this work" and that "no one is going to be asked to work more."

So here were Doyle and his champions, promising to improve results using this formula: same budget, same people, same hours, better results. Hmmm.

The employees in each of the State agencies began by mapping out every step in the process of delivering a single service. Take, for instance, a woman who came in to ask for help in getting financial support from her child's father. She'd fill out paperwork, which would, in about 10 days, be put into the system, and then, after about 20 more days, result in her meeting with a case worker, who'd assign an investigator to locate the father and so on, leading to an average turnaround of 14 weeks. However, when the mapping had been done, during those 14 weeks, actual employee time spent on the typical case was about three hours.

The employees then reconfigured the process with customer efficiency in mind. For instance, in the child support example, protocol dictated that the agency would assign an investigator to locate the father; however, in virtually every case, the mother knew where the father was Ð for some reason, it had been considered politically incorrect to just ask her. The upshot is that a process that took 14 weeks is now same-day service. And those improvements are happening in every agency in Georgia.

What can we learn? Doyle and the champions didn't attack the employees or the management, just the problem. They didn't go in to "fix" the people, just improve the processes. Indeed, the employees, given the opportunity, fixed the process. And, once one process was improved, all Doyle had to do was ask, "Is there anything else you'd like to speed up or do better?" And soon his champions really were just that; they had a string of victories.

Same people, better results. "If you aren't keeping score, you're just practicing."

(Leading innovation was the topic of last week's column; if you've fallen behind, you can catch up at dauten.com.)

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Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators' Lab.  His latest book is "(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success" (John Wiley & Sons).  Please write to him in care of King Features Syndicate, 300 W. 57th ST, 15th Fl, New York, NY 10019, or at dale@dauten.com.

Copyright © 2009, King Features Syndicate

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