Page 284 - Performance Leadership

Chapter 15 Telecom Performance Network • 273

In transactional internal relationships, internal coordination, or hor-
izontal alignment, is usually done using service level agreements
(SLAs). SLAs often trigger transactional behavior, and tend to focus on
costs. Cost savings on a departmental and divisional level are usually
achieved by optimizing economies of scale in one’s own process, instead
of alignment of the overall process. Also, SLAs tend to be defined in
terms of the department’s own processes, or the “internal customer’s”
processes, instead of the real customer’s (the consumer’s) results.
Information exchange is often very transactional of nature, such as
planning details or many kinds of internal charging. Although the
results for each department may look acceptable or even good, the
results in terms of customer satisfaction may not be good. In general,
performance indicators should not focus on department processes, but
on customer processes, such as concept-to-market, lead-to-cash, and
trouble-to-resolve processes.
To measure the speed of the processes (“fast”), performance indica-
tors should shift from optimizing the planning for their own depart-
ment to overall installation speed. Optimization per department leads
to large batches of repetitive work or single activities, to get efficiencies
of scale. This means, however, that each individual installation must
wait until a complete activity batch is finished, before the installation
moves to the next process step. The average time from order to fulfill-
ment will be much longer than needed, due to long waiting times
between steps. On the managerial and coordination level, speed on a
transactional basis is measured by the turnaround time for every query
that comes in. As important as it is, success comes from a more strate-
gic perspective: a shorter time-to-market, and swift cross-domain deci-
sion-making processes.
On the transactional level, quality is measured based on the output
of the department. Service level agreements are put in place to provide
transparency to other departments. Process data quality is important to
create valid reports. Within a joint-value relationship, all this is of sec-
ondary importance. The key metric is which percentage of installa-
tions is done “right first time,” sometimes also referred to as the “once
and done rate.” No errors, no need to come back.
Internally, the coordination between departments can be improved
by tracking the quality of handover moments, how many mistakes are