Company

Challenge

I work in the credit card division of a bank.  The company asked me to be the process  manager for the “Decisioning Process”.  The process was to include a specific time in a  customer’s life cycle. The starting point of the process is when a customer’s application  for a new credit card is received.  The process ends when the application is approved,  declined, or could not be finalized because additional information was needed and not  received.  My challenge as the process manager was to monitor the health of the  process.  The monitoring would help us in two ways: to be able to stop breakdowns  quickly and identify areas where improvements can be made.

Selection and Application

To monitor the health of the process I needed to know exactly how things work.

I always tackle problems by talking to as many people as I can. I quickly learned that  taking an application and deciding whether it should be approved or declined is done by  multiple systems and multiple groups. Each group had “how to” documents for their  team or system worked, but not one group knew what happened end to end.

I decided try to figure out what did happen end to end was to draw a picture of it or use  the Visualization tool from Design Thinking.  Visualization is a way to make something  tangible or I like to use the phrase, to be able to wrap your arms around it.

I asked my manager to use the whiteboard that was by my desk to draw this picture.  Using a whiteboard I could put up what I knew and easily change it when it wasn’t right.   My picture was based on a traditional swimlane. I listed out all the systems and all the  groups involved, I put boxes with process steps in, I drew diamonds to indicate a  decision point and I connected the steps with arrows.  I brought groups back in check  my picture and together we added and/or corrected.  This checking and rechecking took  several weeks before we got to a point where we all felt pretty good about the picture of  the current process and could make a “hardcopy” of it!

Insight and Approach

Creating the picture of the “Decisioning Process” was a very revealing journey and not  for just me.  This was the first time that the different groups who handle applications met  each other.  For them understanding what happened upstream and downstream was  eye-opening and enabled them to make changes in the sub-processes that would  benefit the overall process.

Company

The group and I used the picture to identify where we needed information to create  metrics to monitor health.  We also used the picture to find opportunities for  improvement before any of the monitoring started. One of the biggest things the picture  showed was that a customer could be contacted up to three times to provide additional  information to process the application. Each request could stop the application process  up to 30 days. In a world where we expect all things real-time, this was extremely  distributing. So this might be one of the first things we tackle.

I did make a hard-copy of the picture and distributed it to all groups.  The group also  decided to meek bi-weekly by the whiteboard to discuss current challenges, upcoming  projects and make changes to the picture as we go!

