Recently, in my street, a gas company was relining all the gas pipes under the road, and to each house. There was a safety problem. And it needed them to turn off gas supply to each house one by one as they worked on each of the delivery pipes. Unfortunately, the method of communication of when your gas needed to be turned off was by knocking on your door and talking to you. Perhaps during Covid lockdowns, this worked OK. But not now – they kept missing me, either because I was out or because I was on a work video conference. This led to frustrations on both sides and when they eventually got hold of me, they complained at how difficult I was to contact. I asked whether anyone had considered using a phone or perhaps dropping a message through the letterbox. “That’s a good suggestion!” the workman said. I pondered this for a while. This is a national company and they do this all the time. This “problem” must have come up before, surely? Why didn’t they have a standard process for contacting householders? They know all the addresses after all.
A really challenging area in process improvement is how to make changes stick? Processes invariably rely somewhere on people. And people get used to doing things the way they have always done them. So, to change that takes effort – change management. But after the improvement project is finished, what if people go back to doing things the way they always did? When thinking about the “Control” part of process improvement, you have to think carefully about how you can ensure the process changes stay in place. And how those responsible can get an early signal if they do not. If you don’t do this, the improvement may gradually be lost.
As I was leaving the house later that day, I bumped into the same workman. He told me to give them a call as soon as I was back so I could get the gas turned on again. He gave me a card with the phone number to call. The phone number was on a card which was designed to be dropped through someone’s letterbox if they were not at home. It had a space to enter the start and end date of the work and a phone number to contact. He had not thought to use it for its actual purpose! Presumably, at some point, someone had made a process improvement and introduced these cards, but the change had not stuck.
You might be wondering, in this example, how you could make sure the changes are permanent. Well, you could ask residents about the service and monitor the responses for the original issue repeating. You could audit the process. And you could monitor how many cards are reordered to give a signal as to whether they are being used at the expected rate.
Any changes you introduce to a process need to be effective. But if they work, you also want to make them permanent. Thinking about how you can make those changes stick is an important part of any process improvement project.
Text: © 2022 Dorricott MPI Ltd. All rights reserved.
Image – Pavel Danilyuk, pexels.com