I've started to notice a common weak point in many processes that I wanted to highlight, and perhaps you've spotted it too? It comes when tasks are passed over from team to team (or actor to actor is you prefer). Often, it's not that something is inherently wrong with the handover, all the information's there, the tasks flow, people know what they are supposed to do... it's something else. That something appears to be a combination of lack of ownership around the customer and sole focus on task.With so many contractual or pseudo-contractual arrangements (SLAs, quality targets, incentives, etc) it's easy to forget that it’s a customer and not just a task that's being dealt with.
The symptoms are likely familiar. People performing steps in a process where they don't know what happens next, high levels of repair or worse lost requests, complaints and rework.
Obviously there are huge frameworks on getting processes correct and efficient but one very small step is to encourage the handovers to be considered as 'handshakes'. There's something very different about how you'd introduce two people than how we pass tasks. A clearer duty of care perhaps? A moral obligation? Certainly more ownership. Whenever there's a handover in a processes between 'actors' consider how we might make it feel less mechanical and more human?
