Operational Readiness to Innovation Journey
Operational readiness is the key:
Organizations start their innovation, process improvements journey at different points in time. It depends upon the leadership, their budget, whether it is a legacy organization or an organization looking at the future, the leadership vision and other factors.
However, before starting the innovation journey, an organization need to look at whether their foundations are alright. This is very important for process driven organizations.
When the foundations are not well layered and it is shaking, this is not the right time to look at innovations, but to set right the foundations right. This will ensure keeping the existing customers, and do not encourage outbound flight of contracts and deals.
Therefore, the leadership need to be vigilant about the following factors for a healthy organization and its work practices.
Standard Operating Procedures:
The term operational readiness in this context, refers to the ability of the organization to meet the goals and operational performance. For enabling that, we have Standard operating procedures for each of the process or performance area.
In case of the aged contracts, the SOPs may not be reviewed for years or revisited to get it compared with the current process. This throws up many ironies between what we talking as part of the SOP Vs. What we are currently delivering?
This could result in larger gaps which needs our attention immediately and fixing them for the process to perform optimally. Every operating manager need to focus in this area to meet expectations and to reduce escalations from the customer.
Process & Risks:
Risks is an area of importance for every process to operate effectively. The number of Risks or process failures incident tickets are a clear testimony to represent the health of the process.
In the banking environment, there are greater possibilities for operational incidents because of large number of financial transactions, urgent transaction requests, book closures and other priority transactions from customers.
Unless the number of incidents are reduced in a process driven organization, it is not going to take us anywhere. Therefore, the best way is to compare our operational practices with SOPs and find out whether, it is in line with them. The other aspect is to find the erroring employees and retrain them or provide job rotations to them rather than punishing the indvidual.
SLAs - Service level Agreements:
The contracts represent categories of our performance such as exceeding expecations, meeting expectations or not meeting the expectations.
A opertional or innovation manager need to look at areas like - Meeting expecations with borderline and Not meeting expectations.
Focus on these areas and finding out root causes are the important step rather than attempting for new improvements. However, whenever you root cause and attempt to fix some of them, these will result in improvement opportunities.
Implementation of low hanging fruits in this area will result in, the customer complaints going down and improvements will result in the smooth operations.
Operational Transparency:
This is something completely in the hands of the operating manager. The term transperancy represents, how openly the team opens up about problems and challenges?
All is well is not a good methodology for a long time. The team needs to brainstorm about issues and challenges and seeks manager's assistance in fixing them or colloborate and fix them.
However, it does not happen in a bureaucratic organization or an organization where the manager is not able to differentiate between informality with the team vs. operational performance.
Therefore, there should be systematic attemps to understand and engage with people on all of the above headers to keep the operation readiness at a healthy level. This is better than innovation or continuous process improvements in all aspects, for a healthy and long sustainable contract.
