Desert Communications Action Plan

Operational Change Action Plan

Leaders often try to change their organizations but struggle to find an effective starting point. Change is dependent on the leader setting a framework of goals and desired outcomes and then bringing together the correct balance of resources, skills, and methods to facilitate the change.

Desert Communications Inc. is a wireless telecommunications organization. Because of a change in the communications industry, their net profit has declined. To help with declining profits, Desert Communications has begun a strategic movement to reallocate their resources to capitalize on the added services of the communications industry. In order to implement the necessary changes, a team of ten will create an action plan to implement the operational changes.

Operational Change

According to Sherman (2009), "Four principles underlie operational change: standardization, integration, centralization, and optimization. Implementation of these management principals doesn't occur overnight or in some random order. Rather, like the construction of a pyramid, they are built up, layer upon layer".

The first layer is standardization. Standards are used extensively in the production, delivery, and maintenance of products and services. Standardization may seem an obvious operational necessity, but many large companies are just beginning to focus on this principle as a means of reducing operating costs and providing a consistent customer experience. Customer support centers offer an example of successful standardization. The standard protocols used for greeting customers, diagnosing and resolving issues, and closing out tickets save companies time and money while improving the customer experience (Sherman, 2009).

The second layer is integration. Integration may be one of the most commonly used terms in business. As professionals, the importance of integrating activities, processes, and systems in day-to-day business is understood. Integration is typically associated with technology, but it's equally important on the business process side of things. It can be categorized into two types: internal and external. Internal integration includes all of the integration aspects within the enterprise; enterprise application integration (EAI) is a typical example of internal integration. External integration covers all of the possible integration patterns across multiple enterprises. For example, within a customer life cycle, many systems and processes are involved, from sales to service or product delivery, billing, and customer service. The ideal situation is to have a seamlessly integrated set of systems and processes to support the full customer life cycle.

Unfortunately, many organizations build specialized applications and processes over time to support new product offerings, regulatory changes, company growth, or acquisitions, and then fail to integrate them (Sherman, 2009).

The third layer is centralization. This is the next step in the progression toward real operational change. Whether part of an overall shared services initiative or not, the core theme of centralization is to remove redundancies and achieve economies of scale. Simply put, you want to perform like functions in fewer locations or with fewer suppliers or vendors. Obvious candidates for centralization are back-office in nature: advertising, accounting, purchasing, human resources, information technology, and legal. It may seem intuitive that the challenges to effective centralization are technical and process-oriented. However, the real barrier is often company culture -- the people dynamics that are involved with change management.

The last layer is optimization. Once the organization has met the transformational challenges related to standardization, integration, and centralization, it's ready to optimize performance toward maximizing value. At this stage in the organization's evolution, it makes sense to deploy proven process improvement methodologies like Six Sigma and Lean. For sustainable improvement, the organization must continuously streamline its systems and processes while building a structured change-management process that focuses on return-on-investment. The key is to find the right balance among quality, cost, and speed-to-market.

Action Plan

The action plan for any organization needs to be carefully thought out and planned. The strategies developed are the most important aspects for successful change and profit maximization. The goal for Desert Communications is to implement ways, while following the four principles of operational change, to maximize profits while reducing cost, improving processing time, and improving product delivery. Some of these strategies for implementation will be carried out immediately while others will be implemented and monitored for success. These actions are:

1. Standardization

a. Educate call center representatives on products offered.

b. Educate call center representatives on the old products and how they relate to the new products.

c. Call center representatives may sample products offered.

d. Monitor call center representatives to develop a standardized protocol, minimize dialogue and call hold time.

e. Implement call tracking for quantity of calls, reasons of call, and products and services sold.

2. Integration

a. Integrate customer surveys by offering: phone surveys, email surveys, or online chat.

b. Develop a computer processes that integrates all applications and products onto the desktop of every call center representative.

c. Integrate software that addresses prior 'issue' tickets that have solutions already documented in the database. In addition, 'prior issues' will be displayed to customers for customer 'self-help'. This will help decrease customer service calls.

d. Disclosures and policies made available on all call center representative computers.

3. Centralization

a. Utilize smart applications that analyze what products the customer already uses and displays, by prompt, suggested products the customer might buy and use based on prior history of sales.

b. Analyze the call center software for recording calls to upgrade the software for less data entry interaction. This will help: eliminate any repetitive application logins, integrate data bases