What
As part of my quarterly performance review I received feedback that there was a perception that my team often didn’t take ownership of issue resolution. I reviewed a number of cases with the team and found that there were opportunities to improve. Some of the aspects were indeed perception, other aspects were actual issues with our process that needed to be resolved.
So What
As we reviewed the tickets, I started drafting a framework which addressed each of these issues. We didn’t have control of initial issue definition, however we resolved to take ownership of addressing any poor definitions by walking through the definitions with the requester in person or by phone. We defined a few approaches and discussed which approaches were appropriate to high frequency issue types. We applied a review process to any long duration items which estimated their duration for feedback to the client and provided regular updates. We improved the item closeout communications and handover detail to indicate the resulting fix and any remaining issues, and we defined who were appropriate resources for escalation and how the escalation would occur.
Now What
◆ Bringing the team together to address the feedback themselves was a reasonably effective way to build consensus of any process changes within the team, but didn’t immediately confer ownership of those items to the team members themselves.
◆ If I needed to do this type of activity again I would appoint team members to draft the framework items themselves to increase the effective ownership of the process changes.