Mission Critical?

One of the things I most enjoyed about my career in management consulting was the constant stream of insights I gained into areas of business and industry of which I had no prior knowledge. For most of my time, my consulting practice was focused on operational improvements but occasionally we discovered things that had a strategic impact.

One such assignment was carried out for a company whose business was the repair and maintenance of lifts - elevators to my transAtlantic friends. They were in receipt of a constant barrage of complaints about the speed and cost of their services although they were putting huge effort into both. One of the things we did as part of our practice was to hold what we called Painstorming Groups, where members of various parts of the stakeholder population were invited to share the problems they experienced. This led to a survey to prioritise them which then enabled us to recommend and lead a process for improvement.

The client's customers were from all parts of commerce and industry from factories, offices, hotels and hospitals, and we organised the painstorming groups to consist of members of similar sized organisations. The group that I most remember consisted of facilities managers from large sites, and two contributors stand out. The first was from a car assembly plant - he explained that the line was on the ground floor and the stores on the first. Each line had its own lift so that, if the lift broke down, the line had to be stopped. The second was from a large acute hospital. They had two theatre lifts serving six theatres; if a lift broke down, three theatres couldn't receive any patients which cost the hospital £1000 an hour for each theatre.

To cut a long story short, the project led us to realise that there were two kinds of customers - those who wanted their lifts repaired quickly and cheaply when they failed and those who couldn't tolerate a failure under any circumstances. Members of the second group were not price sensitive.

The client reorganised his business to deliver these two different services; service engineers were often based at the sites with low failure tolerance.

OK, this all seems pretty obvious now but at the time it was seen as a breakthrough.

You win some, you lose some

It's a while since I posted one of my management consulting anecdotes, so here goes:

Some years ago I undertook a project for the UK operating subsidiary of a global pharmaceutical firm. The project went well and I was ready to present my findings to the client. The presentation was arranged for their next Board meeting, which was to be held at a hotel named the Anugraha in Egham, not too far from Windsor.

I was timed to present at 9:30 am and started on time. I had just started talking to the third slide of my presentation when the fire alarms went off. We were in a ground floor conference room with French doors, so we left through the doors and trotted through a steady drizzle to the assembly point under the front entrance canopy. After about half an hour we were given the all clear and went back to our conference room. The Chairman said "I think we all lost track of what you said - best to start again", which I did. I had just started talking to the third slide of my presentation with the fire alarms went off again, and we repeated the earlier evacuation procedure, though this time in somewhat heavier rain.

Eventually we were given the all clear again, and returned to the conference room. However, this time the Chairman said, "I'm sorry, we have a lot to get through today so I will have to ask you to defer your presentation to the next Board Meeting." I groaned inwardly - I had psyched myself up for this day, and the delay also meant a month's delay in receiving our final payment. However, I had no option but to agree, so I did and returned to our office, not far away near Maidenhead.

A couple of weeks later the Chairman's PA called me. "I understand you have a spot at the next Board Meeting." I agreed. "Good," she said, "I have your tickets". "Tickets?" I queried. "Yes," she said. "Didn't he tell you it would be in Montreux?" I raised no objection.

On the day before the meeting I flew to Geneva and was picked up by a chauffeur in a stretch limo, who took me to my hotel. It was one street back from the shoreline but my room had a spectacular view of the lake and the food, as you can imagine, was top notch. I discovered that the Montreux Jazz Festival was in two weeks time, and Montreux was in a state of high excitement.

This time my presentation went according to plan, was received with gratitude, and we got paid.

You win some, you lose some.