Low Customer Satisfaction Challenge – Visualization

Challenge & Selection

I have worked with my team to conduct a customer satisfaction survey about our services of  providing virtual computing services. The main two identified challenges were the long time it  takes to fulfill their requests and the limited served category of computing Operating Systems  (Oss) flavors. We are only offering two flavors of OSs, namely Windows and Linux Red Hat. The  process of receiving requests and evaluating them takes time due to many validation and  evaluations that involves different entities before fulfilling these requests.

I used the Visualization tool to have a communal understanding of the two issues by multiple  individuals from each entity involved in this process in addition to involving individuals from  customer organizations. I have split the team into six groups and each team used a whiteboard  and sticky notes to visualize the process from the user requirements and needs, going through  submitting the request, reviews and validations, until the fulfillment phase. In each phase, each  team identified the challenges, issues and opportunities. Afterwards, all teams’ inputs have been  presented to the whole team and consolidated their input with priorities in terms of impact and  implementation urgency.

Virtualization was the best approach to address this challenge as everyone in the concerned  organizations knows a small piece of the puzzle and almost no one knows the full chain.  Therefore, having a shared understanding and envisioning of the process is essential to resolve  such a challenge.

Application

I have approached all relevant organizations and requested to assign their top talents to join my  team on parttime basis. I have split the team into six sub-teams of 6 to 7 members, where each  must have a member of every concerned organization and at least one customer. I have provided  each team them with a whiteboard and sticky notes. I have asked each team to identify all the  steps from the beginning to end. I have asked each team to virtualize on the whiteboard the  process itself, include the dependencies, people, required skills, difficulties, technologies  intuitiveness. The process itself was represented by boxes, and arrows to indicate the flow, on  the sides, dependencies and other parameters were included.

The first round lasted for an hour where each team worked alone. Afterwards, I have asked each  team to present their finding of the causes of low customer satisfaction and other teams can  question and debate each team input. I documented commonalities in the insights of each team  in addition to the insights from the whole team discussion. The final product was a list of  proposed modifications that were sorted based on their urgency and value creation.

Insight & Approach

I have seen the great value of visualizing the process, the dependencies and the related  components and parameters on unifying and simplifying the problem understanding among the  team members. Additionally, visualization makes it easy to spot the gaps and solutions on the  whiteboard. Furthermore, participating individuals were able to state their insights using the  visualization aids. The graphic enabled the teams to focus on the issues, nail them and were able  to come up with innovative solutions. Without visualization, it would be very difficult to have the  team synchronized and worked on a very balanced rhythm to analyze and solve the problem.

I will defiantly use visualization in solving the challenges ahead as I have seen the great value that  provides and the ability to listen to others insights and the enablement of getting shared minds  that can come with innovative solutions that were not possible without such a tool.

Next time when I visualization, I will be looking for more tools that enhance the ways of visualizing  a challenge and use new technologies that even advance the way we virtualize things.

