True Tales from the Trenches

To pull together the key elements of performance improvement efforts at the Workplace/ Organization Level, 

we share two true tales and their results.

Horizontal and Vertical Alignment . The revenue accounting group in a large, 130-year-old

railroad purchased an automated revenue accounting system to replace their manual process. The

critical business issue: the railroad had tens of millions of dollars of uncollected revenue outstanding, 

much of it over ninety days old. Fragmentation of the manual accounts tracking process allowed

overdue bills to float for months. This drove the decision to automate the revenue accounting process.

The railroad hired a small consulting firm to develop training for the new system. The consultants

helped their clients see that training alone would not result in successful implementation.

The software was built on assumptions about workflow that would require massive changes:

workflows, procedures and processes, employees’ roles, and the way people and the organization 

were managed. Because it was a collective bargaining environment, the risk of contention was also high.

The consultants worked collaboratively with members of the client organization to map and

re-engineer work flows, change fragmented specialty jobs into customer-focused work teams,

and build a team-based organization with completely different work policies and practices. The

physical workplace was reconfigured and the new workflow and procedures were simulated and

tested, allowing employees and managers to learn their new roles and interactions in advance of

the change.

Results: The managers, employees, and the bargaining unit enthusiastically supported the

changes. Uncollected revenues more than ninety days old were reduced by 75 percent, and cash flow 

increased by $40 million U.S.

Horizontal Alignment and Goal Versus Action Misalignment . The U.S. sales division of a large

computer hardware-manufacturing firm asked a performance consultant to create a visual map of their 

business development process. The presenting problem: sales teams didn’t understand the business 

development process. The business issue: inconsistent practices between sales teams were resulting 

in customer dissatisfaction and a slow sales cycle, affecting both cash flow and cost of sales. The client wanted a 

clear illustration of the business development process to  create consistency in how the process was followed.

As the project unfolded, it became clear that each region had a different process, and even within

regions there was little consistency. It also became clear that not only were sales involved, but that

business development was a cross-functional process. The consultant and her client established a 

cross-functional task force to define, refine, and implement a process that all key stakeholders agreed on. The task force 

identified and eliminated many process steps that didn’t contribute to sales, and even identified some irrelevant jobs.

Results: The organization fixed and aligned the sales process and cut the average sales lead

time by weeks. Because managers with large numbers of employees had greater prestige in the

organization’s culture, the irrelevant jobs were preserved. The job classification system also assigned higher compensation levels and perks to managers with greater numbers of employees. This remained an example of practices being out of alignment with goals and strategies, to the detriment of organizational results.

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