Common Sense in Short Supply

How to fail at Process Design

Having an unusual name comes with its own set of challenges. For example, airlines never know whether I’m filed under Muehlen, Zur, or zur Muehlen. My phonebook entry in Germany was listed under M, in the US it is Z. Banks think that I have a middle initial (I don’t). The New Jersey MVS is unable to issue a drivers license that has a space in the last name, and so on. So, when my daughter was born and I went to fill out the birth certificate request form I knew I might be in for trouble. What I didn’t know was how right I would be…

A few weeks later my wife and I received the birth certificate, and alas, my daughter’s last name was spelled Zur Muehlen instead of zur Muehlen. Not a big deal, but being German I wanted it corrected, of course. So I went to the website of the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYHMH) to figure out the change process. There was a form (8 pages) and instructions, thankfully as a form-enabled PDF. No electronic submission, though, because additional documentation was required. Fine. We filled out the form, copied and notarized the additional documentation, found a legal sized return envelope, added $30 for additional certificates and mailed it off.

Four weeks later we received a thick letter from NYHMH - our application was returned because the ID for the mother was insufficient. No problem - we added a copy of her passport and green card, found another legal size return envelope, and mailed it back.

Four weeks later we received another thick letter from NYHMH - our application was returned because the ID with the signature for the mother did not show an expiration date. Hmmmm - her passport signature page (no expiration date) and green card (expiration date) were copied on the same page. You would expect a reasonable human being to mentally combine these to meet the requirements. But no. No problem - we added a copy of her passport and green card, found another legal size return envelope, and mailed it back.

Three weeks later (you guessed it) we received yet another thick letter from NYHMH - our application was returned because the marriage certificate we had added was “only” a notarized copy - they want the original (which was issued by the City of New York itself…). And, of course, the legal size return envelope (with postage) was missing from the returned application again (why? I don’t know. The return mail did not use the provided envelope…).

Lessons for Business Process Design

Involving the customer in your processes (in particular during early data capture stages) makes sense for many organizations. After all, you avoid re-keying of data, and can make sure that all necessary information has been provided before you initiate potentially expensive back-office operations. New York City is one of the better municipalities in terms of its e-government initiatives, much information and many forms is available online. But simply providing forms and instructions may not be enough to ensure a smooth integration of outside parties in your processes.

NYHMH’s change process fails at the first step - the application is received, and checked for completeness. If the application is incomplete, it is marked as such and sent back to the applicant. Now, that makes sense, because you want to make sure that you can actually finish processing the new case. But the crucial element is, how you check, and how you notify.

Being ignorant of the process details, I can only assume that the receiving clerk at NYHMH goes through a checklist of items that must be sent with an application. If one item is missing, or insufficient, the application is returned. But the effort required for finishing the list and marking ALL insufficiencies on the incoming case is much smaller than the cumulative effort for re-opening and re-processing the same case multiple times, as happened in our case. If you tell a client that a process cannot start, give ALL reasons why, not just the initial failure. Our application is in the fourth round of review, and I’m mentally preparing for another missing item or insufficient document notice.

The back-and-forth is aggravated by the time it takes to get the documents to NYHMH and back. Processing probably takes 5 minutes, but postal mail takes 2 days each way, add to that the wait time in the inbox of NYHMH and you get to 3 weeks cycle time for each iteration. The net processing time for this process is only a small fraction of the overall transaction time. We started this endeavor on July 1st, now in October we still don’t have a corrected birth certificate. I estimate the overall processing time that went into the application to be between 2 and 3 hours (time it took us to fill out the form, gather and notarize the documents, and for NYHMH to send them back). The overall process is 100 days old today - that’s 2400 hours of cycle time, with 0.1% actual work time - probably the worst productivity ratio I have ever encountered. To put this in perspective: It took only two weeks to receive a passport.

Bottom Line

When involving Customers in your processes:

• Give them the information and resources necessary to perform their activities.
• Design your interface activities to identify all reasons why a customer request will fail
• Enable your customers to fix possible transaction errors within a reasonable processing time to transaction time ratio
• Provide your customers with visibility into your process, so they understand how their input will be processed

Final Words

The best process design is not worth anything if the people involved in the process execution don’t care about the outcome of the process. You need to align incentives (both financial and other) with the objectives of the process

Your customers care about your processes. So should you.

Postscript (October 14th, 2007)

As you may have guessed, the third attempt was returned as well. The reason? I’ve requested a wholesale change of all last names, and I didn’t realize that my wife’s maiden name is on the birth certificate, which doesn’t need changing. So - the whole stack of documents was returned (this time including the prepaid return envelope) with a request to fill out a blank form and omit the request to change the mother’s last name (a simple cross-out on the original form would have done the same). Welcome to Absurdistan…

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 11:50 am and is filed under BPM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.