A post by our guest editor, John Worthington.
Confessions of an assessor turned rebel
We were doing an assessment for a health care provider when the reality began to sink in. Suddenly the conference room was full of huge spider graphs, while we frantically filled out questionnaires.
There was just NO WAY this client would ever be able to self-assess their organization, and perhaps that was just the point. After all, I had mouths to feed, and the more things we can assess, the more work we had.
But it always troubled me that these engagements were simply never going to succeed. Improving the capability and maturity of even a handful of processes, let alone guiding principles, governance, a service value system, continual improvement, and 34 practice areas was just not do-able.
Even for experience assessors, in an age where so many things are changing so rapidly this is virtually impossible. It’s what led one employee to look at me and my co-assessor and say, “ you guys look like Bob & Bob” from the movie Office Space.
There’s a twisted beauty of USM that it kicks capability models like these--- the ones that had you measuring the perfection of your little dance steps regardless of whether anyone was watching or cared--- right in the teeth.
USM says, and loudly, that maturity isn’t about how perfectly you perform some predefined drill; it's about the value you blast out for the customer. And value is not some internal metric dreamt up in a windowless office; value is determined by the observer, the customer, in the glorious, messy interaction between you two.
It's about doing the right things for them, consistently and controllably, because ultimately, that's the only reason you exist.
The USM Service Management System itself is not some mystical black box; it’s a coherent set of resources that pump out routinesfor hitting the organization's goals. It's built on a universal process architecture.
While doesn’t explicitly chatter about "embedded feedback loops" woven into the fabric of these routines for self-assessment in precisely that terminology, the spirit of the USM Value Maturity Model is inherently geared towards constant self-evaluation through the unforgiving lens of customer value creation.
The model describes growth through phases like Technology-driven, System-driven, Service-driven, Customer-driven, and Business-driven, with the central focus always on the added valuein the customer relationship. This stands in stark contrast to models that demand external priests to pronounce judgment, offering no self-assessment capability.
By forcing you to look at your operations through the customer's eyes and gauge your progress based on their business outcomes, USM's value-centric approach naturally pushes you to continually assess your own effectiveness in generating that crucial value.
It's less about hitting a predefined destination of "Level 5" and more about the direction– constantly striving to deliver more and more value, becoming Customer-driven (Level 4) and ultimately a Business-driven partner (Level 5).
The method, with its emphasis on achieving goals through controlled routines and measuring success by customer value, lays the groundwork for an organization to bake continuous self-reflection and improvement right into its operational DNA, always asking:
"Are we doing the right things for our customer and are we doing them well enough to deliver demonstrable, sustainable value?"
And that's the real ticket – strapping yourself to the rocket of customer value and leaving those shrieking spider graphs choking on irrelevant criteria dust in the rearview mirror… because when you're focused on the customer's vitality and doing the right things for them, the perfection of your internal dance is just noise.
==/==
If you enjoyed John's post and it made you think about improving your own organization, please check out his USM Professional profile and his personal website, or better: contact John for a free consultation.
John has posted this blog earlier in his USM method News LinkedIN newsletter. If you want to read his posts when they're published - subscribe to John's channel.