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Management Services Spring 2012


that. And as for the claims that this service is delivered at half the cost, you’d be thinking there must be something creative going on in accounts.


What did you see? Maybe the better question is, how did you look? What governed the way you looked was how you thought. This is what happens in benchmarking: we fi t what we see into our view of the world. Rarely does seeing something change our view of the world, especially when what we are seeing challenges convention.


Lessons to be learnt And what would you do? The best you could do is copy Portsmouth, but you’d be unlikely to do that because you’d have big doubts about it. If you did, you’d probably get it wrong, for Portsmouth’s design was based on what it learned when it studied its own system. How do you know you’ve got the same problems?


The time when a


conventional thinker ought to visit, but would never be likely to, is back when Portsmouth’s leaders were studying their system, many moons ago. A visit at that time would have been looking in on a roller- coaster of challenges. They would have seen managers admitting they had no real control over their operations. They would also have seen emotional responses to the discovery that management’s measures were part of the problem and they would have seen managers realising that focusing on the productivity of the tradesmen was to focus on entirely the wrong thing. It would have been to witness a maelstrom, a veritable whirlwind of activity, revelations, epiphanies, painful realisations shameful


Benchmarking


confessions and, eventually if you hung around, massive enthusiasm coupled with renewed energy to do some ‘radical’ things which, by the way, no longer seem radical. You might have been inclined, if you were visiting at that time, to ask them why they had no plan; they’d have replied the only plan was to get knowledge. Clearly bonkers, not proper management.


If you had stuck with them through their process of getting knowledge you would have seen, as they did, that more than half of the demand into their repairs centre was failure demand. Not a problem understanding that idea and you’d have been inclined to think this was because the people were not doing as they should – and you’d have been wrong about that. But obviously this is a crap service. You’d have seen managers taking measures of the true end-to-end time it takes to effect repairs and you’d have seen them almost cry to discover it was an average of 50 days and could predictably take much longer. More proof that this was a crap service. But would you have refl ected on the fact that you have no knowledge of either failure demand or the true end- to-end time it takes you to deliver your service? You’d have seen managers discover that one job can become a whole series of jobs in the target culture. Fixing a broken window could mean boarding up (meeting the emergency target) then glazing, carpentry, plastering and painting – all treated as separate jobs (and all meeting their targets). You’d have seen managers discover how the bonus scheme drove the tradesmen to optimise their own pay- packets, not the same as


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