Revisiting Response Planning
By
Clay Ricord
Senior Consultant
There are two different work activities in the business world:
operations and projects. When I ran departments for a major P&C company,
I was responsible for the performance of ongoing efforts to meet
customer and organizational requirements; such things as policy quality,
time to service, call center performance, and FNOL handling. As a
consultant today, I run projects with set goals or deliverables and end
dates. Both operations and projects have risks which need to be dealt
with and controlled. However, for ongoing operations, having response
plans in place is of paramount importance if the carrier is to
consistently meet their customers’ expectations or CTQs (the Six Sigma
acronym for “critical to quality”). Even without adapting Six Sigma, you
can gain from leveraging the concept of response planning.
So what is response planning?
We start with the premise that any and every ongoing process is going to
experience variance. Over time, a process performance is going to drift
and be subject to problems or variation. So, even that well-run call
center or high-performing billing operation will, at some point, falter
in its performance. We can determine if the performance shortfall comes
from the process or a unique event or cause. For example, it could be
that a change in the workflow had an unexpected consequence, the process
itself is no longer meeting the customers’ needs, or a specific event or
change occurred. (The details of the causes and types of process
variance are beyond the scope of our short discussion here. For our
planning discussion, the key is that process performance drift occurs.)
If we accept that every process will fail or experience variance at some
point, a predefined plan will allow for more rapid intervention and a
return to a level that will meet the customers’ requirements.
What would a response plan look like? There are six main components to
consider in building yours.
- What are the few process steps that are essential to
meeting customer expectations or CTQs?
- What performance must the process step meet? This requires that
you articulate what the performance level must be.
- How do you collect data and measure the results?
- At what point will you take action? (How much variance will the
customer allow? How much will you allow?)
- What corrective actions will you take in given situations? (A
table or decision tree helps.)
- Who owns the response plan?
You are probably used to thinking of
response plans for major events or crises, especially around the use
of the media. However, response planning, because it allows you to
respond before an outsider brings the performance to your attention,
has a valuable place in the basic tool kit of your operation. If you
would like to discuss response planning further, please drop me an
e-mail. I look forward to hearing from you.
