The "Internal Customer"
This happens when Development thinks Product Management is their customer or when Product Management thinks Sales is the customer and so on. A few weeks back I overheard a variation of the same concept in a meeting "we will completely outsource this to you - let's agree on the budget and SLAs".
The theory is if each team performs to its best level in delivering to the next team and the chain continues in that fashion, the real customer will get the best performance.
In reality, this is a very simplistic view at best and delinquency to the real customer at worst. The fallacy of the thought process are many. To name a couple,
- This gives rise to "buffer bloat". Each team, in its desire to meet the agreed upon SLAs and metrics, will build in its own "safety" buffer. (also known as sandbagging). By the time these buffers are compounded across the chain, it can be scary.
- This also loses the straight line of sight to success. Which means you will find situations where the customer and organizations closer to the customer are not meeting success critieria but other organizations (usually further away from the customer) meeting their numbers and declaring success.
The best culture to grow is recognition that there is only one customer. And that is the person who pays up the money.
Nobody else is the customer. Everbody else is part of a team that delivers to that one customer. To compare with a football (soccer) team, no one player passes the ball to the player ahead of team and declare his/her job is done. Everybody has a position to play - even when they do not have the ball. But they have only one common goal to meet - no interim internal goals.
To mix the metaphor a little, to compare with the American football team, everybody plays on the same game plan. No doubt there is going to be one quarterback (I like to think of that as the sales organization). But there are running backs, tight ends, punters, wide receivers each playing their own position in tandem with each other to meet exactly one goal. But nobody in the team is trying to "satisfy" some other player in the team. Nobody is measured on any other term than the one score that everybody else is measured on.
In summary, dissuade people from thinking they serve some internal teams.
Establish a clear line of sight for each team to the one real customer - one goal.
Align metrics such that no one of the teams can be successful if they whole chain is not successful.
Would like to hear about your experiences...
Thoughts?
Rajib
posted by Rajib Roy | 2:43 PM
4 Comments:
Finally somebody who sees things clearly! One issue I would like to see a comment on is how to change the attitude back? How to convert people from treating other teams as "customers" into one team?
Rajib,
As usual your insights are very valuable. But, I have to disagree to an extent on this posting.
Your analogy of a Football team – with one quarterback and the rest of the team playing in cohesion is an excellent example on how a perfect team should perform. Each team should be lead by a quarterback who commands and the rest of the team is in support/aids and execute based on the decisions made. However, it is also important to understand that the Quarterback is - just - one of the Leaders. There are many “Leaders” in the football field who are required to make the decision and help the Quarterback. However that is not in contention here.
What is also important to understand that the “Team” that you see on the field is a final representation of a lot of work done behind the scenes. To create a dream team – there are a number of sub-teams that are working - the scouts, the manager, the coach, the trainers, the accountants, the ground personnel, the marketing group etc. Not all processes can be run in parallel – nor can it be run in complete synchronization.
I agree that the ultimate goal is to satisfy the end customer. It is also important to understand - who is the customer? For the scout – the end customer is the coach. He has to work with the coach to find out the key players required to fill critical position. It is also important for the scout to ensure that while positioning the right people – he also has to make sure that the player can fit into the organization led by the coach. The best player in the league – for a role – may not be a right fit for the coaching style. For the scout the customer is the Coach and the scout has to make sure that the right person, with the right skill-set and the right quality (attitude, willingness to play within the team, no past baggage etc.) is positioned.
The football team on the field is not the entire organization. The entire organization consists of several teams and each working to a certain goal. So, the concept of a customer is anyone who receives the goods or services from the previous owner. It is important to understand the customer – and what the customer values – as is defined by one of the principles of Lean manufacturing.
The other question you bring up is buffer. There are good buffers and bad buffers. The primary reason for the buffer is to make sure that the goods and services flow through the system without hiccups. A sequential process can run without buffer only in a perfect world where everything is clearly defined and there is no variability. However, in an imperfect world, not everything goes according to plan. You have to buffer against such instances. The question, however remains, what is a good buffer. It depends on many factors – primary lead times, demand volume, variability and experience. The concept of defining the intelligent buffer – of the right material or time – to reduce the impact of unreliability can be defined as a safety stock in operation or in time in services.
During the Internet revolution – the sales channels got streamlined and the middlemen lost their advantage to ease of communication between the end customer and the manufacturer or the service provider. Here the middlemen were just providing Non-Value-Added Task by moving goods – with the help of local market intelligence. As soon as information started to flow from the service provider to the end customer – the middlemen started losing on the opportunity. Faster information transmission does help in reducing the buffer. It is also true within an organization – visibility and information flow can help reduce the development cycles – which will reduce the time or material buffer – “but the ideal state where the buffer is zero is still a dream”.
In summary – organization need different team – to work in unison and use information sharing as a means to reduce the lag times. The customer for a team could be the next team in line – and every effort has to be made to ensure the timeliness and the quality of the deliverable so that that “receiving” team can immediately and effectively start working on the deliverable. Organizations should have multiple levels of Leaders – the General – who gives orders, the Thinker – who brings harmony (synchronization) and looking forward to reduce inefficiencies, the Manager – who brings the right people with the right skill sets at the right time in the right team.
Again it is just my humble opinion.
I agree with you on sandbagging.
But I would like to know your thoughts on how to get rid of this especially when teams are spread over multiple geographic locations and across mutliple organizations ?
I have seen companies eventually end up "completely outsourcing" after dealing with this problem for sometime.
An Organization which works as "ONE" unit and does NOT work in silos is one Happy organization.
You should watch the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" just to see what Steve did to upset his own Organization by Promoting Macintosh Vs Other's withing Apple.
It was disastrous and pitiful. Low employee morale.
The saying goes " like King, like People".
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