NBOP National Board of Operations Professionals

Part four. The Turnaround

Standardise the moving side first

At any seam one side varies more than the other. Fix that one, and the other often needs nothing.

0:49. Captions on by default. Everything said here is also written above, so nothing is only in the video.

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When a seam is failing, the instinct is to standardise both sides of it. That doubles the work, doubles the resistance and usually halves the result. At almost every seam, one side is far more variable than the other. Sales output varies enormously by rep, by deal, by quarter. Delivery intake is comparatively stable. Standardise the variable side first, and a surprising share of the problem disappears without the stable side changing at all, because most of what looked like a mismatch was the receiving side absorbing variation. It is also the cheaper political path. To find the moving side, count the distinct ways the same handoff arrived over the last twenty instances. Not the volume, the number of distinct shapes.

When a seam is failing, the instinct is to standardise both sides of it. That doubles the work, doubles the resistance and usually halves the result.

At almost every seam, one side is far more variable than the other. Sales output varies enormously by rep, by deal, by quarter. Delivery intake is comparatively stable. Support requests vary wildly. Engineering triage does not.

Standardise the variable side first, and a surprising share of the seam problem disappears without the stable side changing at all, because most of what looked like a mismatch was the receiving side absorbing variation rather than doing anything wrong.

It is also the cheaper political path. The variable side usually knows it is variable, and standardising it reads as support. Telling the stable side to change first reads as blame for a problem arriving from elsewhere, and you will spend your credibility on it.

To find the moving side, count the distinct ways the same handoff arrived over the last twenty instances. Not the volume, the number of distinct shapes. The side with more shapes is the side to fix.

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