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Importing data from paper

This capability chart shows us the elapsed time of a DTS (Desk Top Services) help desk to respond to the following demands over time:
  • give me an engineer with a part to fix my problem
  • help me solve my problem over the phone
  • send me a part
  • give me information.
Chart - All DTS Ireland Calls
It demonstrates a succession of stepped improvements over time as a team of frontline staff learned to redesign the work against customer demand. As a result of this continual improvement, flow improved and the capacity of the team increased, enabling more demand to be handled by the system.

The customer calls the DTS help desk who, in their redesigned system, respond by doing the value work (i.e.: things that directly relate to purpose: ‘resolve my problem’) from the customer’s point of view, and only that. Measures that relate to the customer’s purpose, ‘resolve my problem’, and demonstrate what matters to the customer ‘help me quickly’ were captured for each demand that the team worked on. These were noted on a flipchart as the team’s IT system did not capture this data. At the end of each day, an average elapsed time (from the customer’s perspective) was calculated and keyed into an Excel spreadsheet, which was imported into CapChart.
Transfer of data from Excel to CapChart

For more information about the thinking that changed to make these stepped improvements, see Chapter 5, The ‘break-fix’ archetype, in Freedom from Command and Control.