(This post is one of six in a series.)
As, I pointed out in the title of this blog as well as my first post, field service is not hard. There are about 6 steps in the process. Some are more important than others, but without quality execution at each level, your field service quality will be poor.
Step 1 is to make a sale, and not a promise. I've never been in sales. I don't like selling (and I sure as hell hate being actively sold to). I am a looker, a shopper and finally a buyer; I proceed in that order at my own pace. Don't push me, Mr. Shitty Suit Car Salesman.
Friday, January 24, 2014
Thursday, January 23, 2014
I hate tyops!
Readers --
Those of you who know me are aware that inaccuracy, ambiguity, and incompetency are three of my targets for global eradication. But none of them hold a candle to the GRRRR-inducing effects of typographical errors. I caught one in a previous post. Feel free to point them out in the comments next time.
Grammar Nazis are welcome here. (Actual Nazis, no. Go away. Heil scheiße essers!)
Those of you who know me are aware that inaccuracy, ambiguity, and incompetency are three of my targets for global eradication. But none of them hold a candle to the GRRRR-inducing effects of typographical errors. I caught one in a previous post. Feel free to point them out in the comments next time.
Grammar Nazis are welcome here. (Actual Nazis, no. Go away. Heil scheiße essers!)
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Reader Horror Story #1: Cox Arizona, Home of the 7-hour Install
Today's Field Service Horror Story comes from sunny Phoenix, AZ:
In January 2013, I moved. I called to transfer my Cox HSD and DVR service, and requested a Self-Install. I was told that option was not available and that for some reason, due to the packages to which I subscribed, a $50 "Professional Installation" was required. I was unsuccessful in getting the CSR to bend on this, and chose not to escalate it. I had to coordinate this with work, as the installation required me to miss some time at the office.
My install was scheduled for an AM appointment, January 21, if memory serves correctly. The contractor arrived on time at 8:05 am, after pre-calling to confirm I was available. I walked him through the property, and showed him the three existing RF outlets that I would be using as well as the location of the ground block and house box enclosure. So far, so good.
The tech disappeared for a few minutes to connect my service at the tap. I took the opportunity to help him out by connecting my modem using coax I had available and plugging it in. It came online immediately. Again, so far, so good.
I came out of the bedroom to find the tech on the phone with Dispatch, swapping my DVR in the living room. He stated that my DVR had failed and was not displaying any video on any channel.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Excel Pro Tip: How to round numbers to the tens, hundreds, or thousands place; not just integers
I just discovered a neat trick for estimating numbers in Excel. This was done in Excel 2007, but should work in the newer versions.
I was working on some retirement account projections, and projecting various growth levels for 1, 5 and 25 years in the future. I was getting some incredibly specific numbers, but that is what happens when you raise a number to 1.075^25th power.
I wanted some ambiguity in the model so that I had nice round numbers. This has real-world applications in consultancy. Unless you're sitting down with Pat the Accountant, no one cares that you're reducing costs by $34,946. Just tell Larry, the jackass Director of Fleet Services, that it's going to be $35 grand per whatever. He's probably not listening anyway, and is just trying to figure out how to retreat back to his office before anyone needs him to actually do anything.
You can even build in your estimates to a certain round number, such as $40,000 -> $50,000 with no results in between.
Here's how to do this in Excel:
I was working on some retirement account projections, and projecting various growth levels for 1, 5 and 25 years in the future. I was getting some incredibly specific numbers, but that is what happens when you raise a number to 1.075^25th power.
I wanted some ambiguity in the model so that I had nice round numbers. This has real-world applications in consultancy. Unless you're sitting down with Pat the Accountant, no one cares that you're reducing costs by $34,946. Just tell Larry, the jackass Director of Fleet Services, that it's going to be $35 grand per whatever. He's probably not listening anyway, and is just trying to figure out how to retreat back to his office before anyone needs him to actually do anything.
You can even build in your estimates to a certain round number, such as $40,000 -> $50,000 with no results in between.
Here's how to do this in Excel:
- Start with your number, preferably formatted in dollars (if you're working with money). I don't like the accountant formatting except in special cases; use currency instead.
- In a new cell, use the ROUND function. The number of places you round to will follow the cell.
- Normally, we would round money to two decimal places. Sometimes you want to round it off to the nearest dollar. Zero will give you integer values.
- If you want to round to tens, hundreds, or some other decimal place to the left of the decimal point, use a negative number.
- In the example below, I've rounded my 25th power of 7.5% value several different ways.
- You can also use ROUNDUP or ROUNDDOWN with a negative value. In the example, anything equal to or greater than $30,000.01 will round up to $40k.
Monday, January 20, 2014
The Easy Way
In all areas of life and business, including field service, there is usually an "Easy Way". In everything I do, I am either actively or subconsciously looking for the easy way. I LOVE the Easy Way. I think there is an Easy Way to do nearly everything. Except maybe picking up trash in a roadside ditch. If I had to do that task, I'd outsource it to a group of people with plenty of time on their hands and pay them as little as possible; nothing if I could. Wait -- that's a prison labor crew. Someone else has already figured out the Easy Way for that.
It has been said that people either "have it", or they don't in many aspects of life. Some people have innate math and language skills. Others have charisma and people skills. A lucky few have all of the above. These are traits and abilities that we are born with. The Easy Way is no exception. You can't magically make someone who isn't an Easy Way person into one. My dad is a great example. I spent my childhood watching him turn routine household projects into something akin to prison labor.
For example, we once had to move a load of firewood approximately 20 feet. It was stacked in the bed of his pickup. He opened the tailgate, grabbed two or three pieces of wood, walked across the garage and stacked the wood on the floor. He then turned around, climbed back into the bed of the truck and repeated the process. He says "Come on, son, this wood isn't going to unload itself!"
Meanwhile, I am watching this, thinking, "What the heck? We could not possibly make this any harder or slower." My teenage mind was highly motivated to get back to whatever flavor of adolescent summer nothing I was doing before being recruited for firewood duty.
I suggested a bucket brigade: he would stand in the truck bed, hand me a couple pieces of wood; I would then stack it. This went great. We even optimized the process a few minutes later when Dad discovered he could toss me the wood, which eliminated my walking. This worked well until I whiffed on a piece and completely annihilated my big toenail. (TIP: Do not wear sandals when throwing around chunks of oak.) We switched spots and restarted the process soon after my toe quit throbbing.
How does this cute anecdote relate to anything worth reading? By applying a tiny bit of intuition, I created an efficient, labor-saving (nearly zero walking), robust (injury-tolerant) process: the Easy Way.
I believe there is an Easy Way to do almost everything. Signs of the Easy Way:
For me, I hate folding and pairing socks. I have an Easy Way for that. Before I match the first pair, I strip out whites from colors, all-whites from white with logos or gray toes, and so on, placing them into separate work queues. Random matches are paired if I serendipitously find them during the sort. While this increases the overall number of tasks, it significantly decreases the seek time to match a single sock. (This is the part where a programmer will give us a more effective sock-sort algorithm in the comment section.)
Cable techs: When running multiple new drops or outlets, leave the spool at the splitter location and run the cable end to the destination, rather than the reverse. This saves time spent carrying a heavy reel around inside the customer location. For the company, this reduces on-site time as well as potentially lowering medical costs and lost productive days (lifting injuries) and insurance (accidental damage to customer property).
In field service, your Easy Ways should be those that improve the customer experience and/or reduces cost while simultaneously reducing the effort required from technicians and staff. No one has all the Easy Ways in place yet, so keep an eye out around your fleet. Anything that takes more than just a few hours of effort is not the Easy Way. That's a project by definition in many organizations. It might have merit and positive value, but it's not the Easy Way.
Optimization and automation projects have a tendency to run away from the original estimate, usually because they are poorly scoped and constrained. "Make it better" is not a very good definition of "done". Be careful not to start implementing such a groundbreaking initiative that it becomes all-consuming without a worthwhile return. The Easy Way should never take longer than the original task. That's doing it wrong, doing it the Hard Way (again, courtesy XKCD):
For example, a past employer of mine once invested roughly 12 weeks, 4 full-time IT and operations team members, and unknown dollars into an initiative to save 30 seconds per truck roll for each of our 600 customer-facing cable technicians. At a generous 8 stops a day, this was 20 minutes per tech per week saved at the expense of 1,920 man-hours.
At first blush, this seems excessively wasteful, until you do the math. Assume that IT staff and fleet trucks cost roughly the same to operate per labor hour, which conveniently they do. Close enough for demonstration purposes, anyway (typically more than $30/hour and less than $80):
Input effort:
1920 hours x 60 = 115,200 minutes invested
Output gained:
30 seconds per visit x 8 visits/day/tech = 4 minutes/day/tech
4 minutes/day/tech x 5 days/work week = 20 minutes/tech/week
20 minutes/tech/week x 600 techs = 12,000 minutes/week saved
Payback period:
115,200 minutes invested/12,000 weekly minutes of vehicle operation saved = 9.6 weeks.
This was certainly a worthwhile project. Even if the company was staffed by nothing but sandbagging sandbaggers, and was only completing 4 stops per day per tech, the project would have paid for itself in under 4 months.
This was a classic field service project: drive less if you can; otherwise, don't. We didn't increase our late arrival rate, and saved something like a million dollars in fuel the first year. It was a good cost-cutting project. We saved a significant fraction of the time required for a repeating task. However, as I said before, it was not an Easy Way optimization.
The Easy Way is much subtler, and saves a great deal more time and money with limited upfront cost. Keep your eyes sharp for Easy Way opportunities. They're everywhere. They're often easiest to find in manual work, repetitive "grunt" tasks on the computer, and the household jobs you hate the most. If you are not an Easy Way person by nature, listen very closely to your team member that constantly asks "Why in the world do we do it this way?" If your answer is "Because we've always done it like this", there is likely to be a better, more efficient process: the Easy Way.
It has been said that people either "have it", or they don't in many aspects of life. Some people have innate math and language skills. Others have charisma and people skills. A lucky few have all of the above. These are traits and abilities that we are born with. The Easy Way is no exception. You can't magically make someone who isn't an Easy Way person into one. My dad is a great example. I spent my childhood watching him turn routine household projects into something akin to prison labor.
For example, we once had to move a load of firewood approximately 20 feet. It was stacked in the bed of his pickup. He opened the tailgate, grabbed two or three pieces of wood, walked across the garage and stacked the wood on the floor. He then turned around, climbed back into the bed of the truck and repeated the process. He says "Come on, son, this wood isn't going to unload itself!"
Meanwhile, I am watching this, thinking, "What the heck? We could not possibly make this any harder or slower." My teenage mind was highly motivated to get back to whatever flavor of adolescent summer nothing I was doing before being recruited for firewood duty.
I suggested a bucket brigade: he would stand in the truck bed, hand me a couple pieces of wood; I would then stack it. This went great. We even optimized the process a few minutes later when Dad discovered he could toss me the wood, which eliminated my walking. This worked well until I whiffed on a piece and completely annihilated my big toenail. (TIP: Do not wear sandals when throwing around chunks of oak.) We switched spots and restarted the process soon after my toe quit throbbing.
How does this cute anecdote relate to anything worth reading? By applying a tiny bit of intuition, I created an efficient, labor-saving (nearly zero walking), robust (injury-tolerant) process: the Easy Way.
I believe there is an Easy Way to do almost everything. Signs of the Easy Way:
- Labor is reduced, accelerated, or optimized without an increase in difficulty or effort.
- Tasks are specialized; no one worker completes the entire process chain unless absolutely necessary.
- The Easy Way process has the same beginning and end states as the original Hard Way, thus no changes to the preconditions or outcomes are required.
- The Easy Way process improves on the metrics already used for the original process outcome, such as duration, cycles per day, or fulfilled SLA commitments.
- Interprocess cycle times are typically (but not always) reduced; overall cycle times should be less than or equal to the original process (as required in Bullet #1).
- Preparation steps may add to the overall steps in the process chain, but they must save time and/or effort in a subsequent step.
- Potential risks that would impair or halt the process (injury, subtask failure, etc.) are easily identifiable to both workers and outside observers, and have intuitive solutions which creates built-in robustness.
- It's the Best Way, and it is self-optimizing. You should figure out minor tweaks as you familiarize yourself with the new process. Major changes mean you didn't have the Easy Way the first time.
If you need help reading the chart, the upshot is that if you try to save an hour doing your taxes next year, you can't spend more than 5 hours optimizing the process without needing over 5 years to get that time back. On a smaller scale, spend more than a single day's effort to "Easy Way" a single minute out of a daily task, and you will need more than 5 years to recoup the time invested.
Part 2
For me, I hate folding and pairing socks. I have an Easy Way for that. Before I match the first pair, I strip out whites from colors, all-whites from white with logos or gray toes, and so on, placing them into separate work queues. Random matches are paired if I serendipitously find them during the sort. While this increases the overall number of tasks, it significantly decreases the seek time to match a single sock. (This is the part where a programmer will give us a more effective sock-sort algorithm in the comment section.)
Cable techs: When running multiple new drops or outlets, leave the spool at the splitter location and run the cable end to the destination, rather than the reverse. This saves time spent carrying a heavy reel around inside the customer location. For the company, this reduces on-site time as well as potentially lowering medical costs and lost productive days (lifting injuries) and insurance (accidental damage to customer property).
In field service, your Easy Ways should be those that improve the customer experience and/or reduces cost while simultaneously reducing the effort required from technicians and staff. No one has all the Easy Ways in place yet, so keep an eye out around your fleet. Anything that takes more than just a few hours of effort is not the Easy Way. That's a project by definition in many organizations. It might have merit and positive value, but it's not the Easy Way.
Optimization and automation projects have a tendency to run away from the original estimate, usually because they are poorly scoped and constrained. "Make it better" is not a very good definition of "done". Be careful not to start implementing such a groundbreaking initiative that it becomes all-consuming without a worthwhile return. The Easy Way should never take longer than the original task. That's doing it wrong, doing it the Hard Way (again, courtesy XKCD):
For example, a past employer of mine once invested roughly 12 weeks, 4 full-time IT and operations team members, and unknown dollars into an initiative to save 30 seconds per truck roll for each of our 600 customer-facing cable technicians. At a generous 8 stops a day, this was 20 minutes per tech per week saved at the expense of 1,920 man-hours.
At first blush, this seems excessively wasteful, until you do the math. Assume that IT staff and fleet trucks cost roughly the same to operate per labor hour, which conveniently they do. Close enough for demonstration purposes, anyway (typically more than $30/hour and less than $80):
Input effort:
1920 hours x 60 = 115,200 minutes invested
Output gained:
30 seconds per visit x 8 visits/day/tech = 4 minutes/day/tech
4 minutes/day/tech x 5 days/work week = 20 minutes/tech/week
20 minutes/tech/week x 600 techs = 12,000 minutes/week saved
Payback period:
115,200 minutes invested/12,000 weekly minutes of vehicle operation saved = 9.6 weeks.
This was certainly a worthwhile project. Even if the company was staffed by nothing but sandbagging sandbaggers, and was only completing 4 stops per day per tech, the project would have paid for itself in under 4 months.
This was a classic field service project: drive less if you can; otherwise, don't. We didn't increase our late arrival rate, and saved something like a million dollars in fuel the first year. It was a good cost-cutting project. We saved a significant fraction of the time required for a repeating task. However, as I said before, it was not an Easy Way optimization.
The Easy Way is much subtler, and saves a great deal more time and money with limited upfront cost. Keep your eyes sharp for Easy Way opportunities. They're everywhere. They're often easiest to find in manual work, repetitive "grunt" tasks on the computer, and the household jobs you hate the most. If you are not an Easy Way person by nature, listen very closely to your team member that constantly asks "Why in the world do we do it this way?" If your answer is "Because we've always done it like this", there is likely to be a better, more efficient process: the Easy Way.
Friday, January 17, 2014
Readers: Send In Your Field Service Horror Stories!!
Yesterday, while researching how to not do electrical work wrong, I stumbled across a wonderful showcase of code violations and assorted horror stories. I can't remember the link, but here's a similar one: http://www.qualhome.com/HorrorStories. Here is another: http://www.house-whisperer.com/Nightmares.
I'd like to host YOUR horror stories about field service. Some of you may have had a bad experience with the phone installer, cable guy, or plumber. Of course, field service is not limited to home services. If you have a problem with the delivery guy, or your gardener, let's hear about it. Since this blog focuses on how NOT to do things wrong, your worst examples could be our best story, and become a featured article!
How to get featured :
I'd like to host YOUR horror stories about field service. Some of you may have had a bad experience with the phone installer, cable guy, or plumber. Of course, field service is not limited to home services. If you have a problem with the delivery guy, or your gardener, let's hear about it. Since this blog focuses on how NOT to do things wrong, your worst examples could be our best story, and become a featured article!
How to get featured :
- Send your story to:
- Keep descriptions as brief as possible, but include the relevant details. If that means an 800-word diatribe, so be it. Don't forget to include the company name, and any contact information you may have for them.
- Include pictures of the problem; PNG or JPEG format, no larger than 1 MB filesize each. We will resize them to 1024x768 resolution if they come in larger.
- Include names of the people you've already contacted.
- Let us know what resolution you're hoping for. If we can find contacts at the organization, we'll do our best to pass your story along.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Procrastination cost me $250 yesterday
That’s right, I had to spend a lot more money than I had intended, and it was directly due to procrastination. Damn it! I know better!
Here’s the story: our 18 year old dishwasher finally bit the bullet and needed to take the trip to the appliance heaven. We shopped the outlet stores, but the scratch and dent special was not what we needed. I didn’t feel like wandering around the big box stores at 5 pm, so we headed home.
We found a screaming deal online from Lowes. $500 Frigidaire dishwasher for $369 with free delivery. Caveat: Only available in the store in the ‘burbs that is 22 miles from me. Boooooo fail, thumbs down.
“Fantastic, we’ll pick it up tomorrow” I said to theFuhrer wife. Ooh honey look though, the webpage says only good through January 14th.
I assumed that was some web marketer’s attempt at creating urgency to make a quick sale. Creating a sense that one could miss out on the special: it’s Marketing 101 (well, actually MKT 300 in the Arizona State University course catalog).
In stereotypical dumbass fashion, I missed out.
Here’s the story: our 18 year old dishwasher finally bit the bullet and needed to take the trip to the appliance heaven. We shopped the outlet stores, but the scratch and dent special was not what we needed. I didn’t feel like wandering around the big box stores at 5 pm, so we headed home.
We found a screaming deal online from Lowes. $500 Frigidaire dishwasher for $369 with free delivery. Caveat: Only available in the store in the ‘burbs that is 22 miles from me. Boooooo fail, thumbs down.
“Fantastic, we’ll pick it up tomorrow” I said to the
I assumed that was some web marketer’s attempt at creating urgency to make a quick sale. Creating a sense that one could miss out on the special: it’s Marketing 101 (well, actually MKT 300 in the Arizona State University course catalog).
In stereotypical dumbass fashion, I missed out.
Monday, January 6, 2014
Monkeys and Lion Tamers
A key component of an organization's field service team is its personnel. I'm not a micromanagement expert or wonk, nor HR guru, but I understand people and their motivations. (In the aggregate, that is. I've sometimes been called just close enough to autistic to excuse my occasionally odd interpersonal interactions.)
I've struggled in the past to explain to managers why they have headaches with certain employees. These are individuals that exist everywhere, with slightly different presentations. Some of these employees seem to be unmotivated by career progression, and simply shit all over the place in the course of their daily assignments hoping to drum up an incentive. Others constantly take a cavalier attitude to changes in process and policy, preferring to "wing it" their way, frustrating management who is trying to implement some new (and usually half-baked) idea.
I call these two groups of people Monkeys, and Lion Tamers. These people are at the extremes of extrinsic (Monkeys) and intrinsic (Lion Tamers) sources of motivation.
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Field Service Is Not Hard (Really!)
There are lots of business problems that are hard. Multinational tax
minimization and terabyte-scale database management are hard. Field
service is not one of these. Field service is not hard.
What is field service? For the purposes of this discussion, I'll take a fairly broad position: Field service is delivery, followed by execution. It's that damned easy.
OK, maybe not quite that easy. Since I don't have any business textbooks handy (and I can supply my own buzzwords without them), I'll invent my own definition of field service: any business segment that requires the business to send employees to the customer location, rather than bringing the customer in to a retail location. For simplicity, and to reference my core area of experience, think "Cable Guy". Not that terrible Jim Carrey movie; I mean your run-of-the-mill overworked and undertrained coax jockey.
We're not just limited to the cable guy. Plumbers and electricians do field service. Pizza Hut, Ray's Florist, and Walgreens all do delivery as a major segment of their operating models, so they are all familiar with the challenges and opportunities of field service. HP, Dell, and other server manufacturers operate field service departments with occasionally ridiculous response time SLAs. (This is not usually the type of field service I'll be talking about.)
So, I've defined it. But just how do I get off declaring that it isn't hard? Trust me, you already know it is difficult, because more likely that not you have already been shafted by poorly executed field service. Ever sat at home for ten hours waiting on your Dish installer? Pizza in 28 minutes or it's free? Still waiting for that contractor to show up to finish the tile on your bathroom remodel? Being consistently late on customer commitments is not only a sign you're struggling with your field service objectives, it's also a great way to piss off customers.
At a high level, field service consists of six relatively simple steps, some of which offer options. I'll cover these more in-depth in future posts:
What is field service? For the purposes of this discussion, I'll take a fairly broad position: Field service is delivery, followed by execution. It's that damned easy.
OK, maybe not quite that easy. Since I don't have any business textbooks handy (and I can supply my own buzzwords without them), I'll invent my own definition of field service: any business segment that requires the business to send employees to the customer location, rather than bringing the customer in to a retail location. For simplicity, and to reference my core area of experience, think "Cable Guy". Not that terrible Jim Carrey movie; I mean your run-of-the-mill overworked and undertrained coax jockey.
We're not just limited to the cable guy. Plumbers and electricians do field service. Pizza Hut, Ray's Florist, and Walgreens all do delivery as a major segment of their operating models, so they are all familiar with the challenges and opportunities of field service. HP, Dell, and other server manufacturers operate field service departments with occasionally ridiculous response time SLAs. (This is not usually the type of field service I'll be talking about.)
So, I've defined it. But just how do I get off declaring that it isn't hard? Trust me, you already know it is difficult, because more likely that not you have already been shafted by poorly executed field service. Ever sat at home for ten hours waiting on your Dish installer? Pizza in 28 minutes or it's free? Still waiting for that contractor to show up to finish the tile on your bathroom remodel? Being consistently late on customer commitments is not only a sign you're struggling with your field service objectives, it's also a great way to piss off customers.
At a high level, field service consists of six relatively simple steps, some of which offer options. I'll cover these more in-depth in future posts:
- Make a sale, not a promise
- Schedule an appointment
- Roll a truck (or don't)
- Be on time (or close enough)
- Do it right (or get out)
- Make the customer "happy enough" (or find yourself doing it again until they are)
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