Why bother?
If you work in a service business this blog will give you some practical ideas about how to go about improving its performance. This isn’t about risky and expensive wholesale redesign. It’s about taking an existing business and working out what you can do relatively quickly to improve it.
It’s a place for me to share and discuss what I’ve learnt during 20 years of improving the performance of financial service businesses from banking to insurance. The lessons I’ve learnt will apply to improving most high-volume service business.
Done right, it means your improvement effort will be targeted on the most valuable areas. It won’t require substantial investment so the financial return from doing this improvement work is high.
What’s the problem?
Processes in service businesses are a lot less tangible than in physical manufacturing. It’s often very difficult to see what’s happening just by wandering round the floor of a department or team. But it’s the process that determines the outcome a business achieves.
There are three big problems which I find crop up regularly in service operations:
- poorly defined processes,
- measurement black-holes
- performance variation
In most service businesses, processes are often not well defined or if it has been done it’s at the wrong level: 25 page Visio documents where it’s impossible to get an overview of what’s going on and why.
Measures tend to suffer from what I call performance black holes – a myopic fixation with workload and handle times, but little in the way of measuring quality: how well a particular process is being performed.
Finally, there is often little appreciation of the impact of process variation. In many financial service businesses, operational people are being paid to take decisions at scale. There is little understanding of how decisions (and therefore performance) varies between people and why.
Defining the high-level process and measures of how well each stage is being completed will give you a mountain of improvement opportunities – levers you can pull to improve performance and profitability.
Who’s it for?
Broadly, I think it’s for 4 groups of people:
- People in charge of service businesses who want to know what they can do to make them more profitable without substantial investment.
- Operational directors and managers who need a way of responding to the constant demand to do more with less people and resource.
- People who work in business improvement support roles who would like some new ideas about how to make processes more effective and efficient.
- Data analysts who want some ideas about how to provide actionable insight from data.
What will it cover?
This blog will explain how to measure and improve performance in financial service businesses. It will be illustrated with real life case studies, [like this one] anonymised to protect the innocent (and not so innocent).
There will be ‘how to’ guides to enable you to try these techniques in your own business and we’ll also cover story-telling with data so that when you find those insightful nuggets you can get your point across and take people with you.
David Hignett
I’m David Hignett. My career has been at the intersection of Finance, Operational Improvement and Data Analysis.
I trained to be an accountant because I wanted to understand how business worked. But, I found working as a practicing accountant to be more than a bit dry and technical. It didn’t really teach me much about how to improve how businesses work.
After qualifying I moved via a number of commercial finance roles into process and performance improvement. Since then, I’ve had 20 years experience of improving financial service businesses. I’ve been head of process excellence at Capital One in the UK and established and led the claims operational insight and improvement team at RSA insurance.