You are currently browsing the daily archive for June 1st, 2009.
Jason Tafler speaks to Marc Gasperino, Partner on Process Improvement in a Creative Environment: The Perfect Storm for Failure?
When I left the shirt-and-tie world of investment banking and first came to work at PointRoll back in 2005, the leading provider of digital rich media advertising solutions, I was amazed by the abundance of tattoos, earrings and flipflops that confronted me at every turn. As a rapidly-growing company (from 50 to 350 employees over the past three years) focused on “enabling creativity” for Fortune 500 brand marketers and their ad agencies through a combination of innovative technology solutions and full-service operations, I had a feeling implementing the process and structure needed to scale the business might be a difficult undertaking. For art directors and designers, process can be viewed as evil. And PointRoll was not only staffed with mostly creative types, but the company had several other elements that drove variation and that would make any process improvement expert shiver with fear: creative freedom, demanding customers, fast turnaround times, numerous stakeholders, high levels of complexity and customization, and poor quality of inputs. PointRoll dominated the rich media ad market, but after growing at a 75% CAGR for five years, the company’s stellar service showed signs of weakness, which resulted in more and more disappointed customers and declining market share.
Isn’t Six Sigma for manufacturing?
I knew that in order to extend the company’s lead on the competition and to truly delight customers on a consistent basis, we had to get introspective and take a long, hard look at our customers’ needs and our internal processes. Two years later, after a significant investment in LEAN Six Sigma (which initially most people laughed off as something only manufacturers or governments use… “this could never work in a creative environment” was a popular response) and a deep evaluation of our processes, we had redesigned our 130-person Operations service division from an inefficient, disjointed functional organization into a scalable, client-focused, cross-functional pod structure with significantly improved service quality and customer satisfaction. The new organization included an enhanced regional management structure with better accountability, standard communication and operating mechanisms across the department, standardized work processes, increased automation, improved career pathing and development, and a new method of “root cause” problem solving when things went wrong.
What have we learned?
Throughout this journey, PointRoll’s team learned a lot about how to scale a creative, service-oriented business while keeping an intense focus on solving customers’ problems and delighting them with great service on a consistent basis. Here are a few of the key lessons we learned for anyone in a similar environment wondering how they can mesh process with creativity:
• Involve people in the process as early as possible through training, lunch & learns, and project participation. Show them that LEAN Six Sigma is really all about focusing on the customer, being creative with improvement ideas, and making employees lives easier.
• Instill creativity into process improvement initiatives through regular open-ended brainstorming and idea/solution generation.
• Fully standardize key tasks, communication & operating mechanisms to reduce variation. Because many tasks are manual vs. automated in a service environment, standardized work & associated training are crucial to consistent quality across the broader organization.
• Focus on quality and accountability at the source.
• Remember to always start process/problem discussions with the customer and try to integrate as deeply as possible with your customers’ own processes to drive stickiness and loyalty.
• Finally, we learned that growth in an entrepreneurial company can hit several ceilings and that one must continually evolve to break through barriers and stay ahead of the competition.
In my opinion, the lessons we learned are even more relevant in a difficult economy, as the best companies will take this opportunity to figure out what is really most important to their customers, to take a hard, honest look at their own performance (as scary as that can be), and to redesign their processes and structures with a focus on quality, continuous improvement and scalability.
So the next time you’re confronted by a creative type with a nose-ring and a full “sleeve” tattoo on his arm, telling you that it is impossible to improve a process in a creative environment, smile at him, pull out some markers and start drawing him a (colorful) process map… and let the creative juices flow.
