Getting everybody onboard is a win-win situation. That was very important indeed. Our work began with a session where the whole team was present. We had promise, essence, and flame red. Something funny happened. We had the promise priorities as determined by the owner. But the rest of the team decided the agility in decision-making time criterion was crucial. The team urged us to act on that area as they felt it should be a service delivery priority. So act on it we did and worked to spell out which decisions were operational, those taken by hotel managers, and which decisions were strategic, those taken by head office. We spotted hold-ups in making the promise happen and what blockages existed in order to answer the nine questions properly. We jointly unveiled every problem, since making every group member take an active part puts in place an operational culture of trust and transparency. I had a list of 64 elements of which 10 blockages had the greatest impact. My promise criteria and their wait for the promise prioritization were; overall service margin, one, agility in decision-making, one, new ideas for daily services, two, service provision, four, reliability, two. The blockage is spelled from more to less points were; one, fear of change, skepticism, two, need to update the playing field, infrastructures, and attitude, three, means, infrastructures, four, slow decision-making if the answer must come from head office, five, above average F&B, six, blockages in experiences and feelings, seven, slow communications, eight, we are unaware of client's expectations, nine, lack of time and stress stop us being friendly, 10, decision-making time is blocked by a certain absence of autonomy. We then settled on seven projects which we would work on for seven months. One, decision-making. Two, updating processors' knowledge. Three, organizational structure. Four, F&B: client experience. Five, reset operations: service design. Six, methodology for efficiency. Seven, client archetypes. We got the job done and derived all the results. What lessons can we take away here? I'll step in here if you don't mind. I believe that what I have learned could apply equally to all four of us. But before I say anything else, my main thrust would be perseverance and following-up are two constants in making things happen. To help out with that, having a method to guide us has been really crucial. Now we are convinced that knowledge is the mainstay of efficiency. Using this method, lean actions may be consolidated, efficiency improved, and every agent gets to grow. Our think different or think outside the box approach is crucial when it comes to turning blocking factors into value added. You need to establish self-checking, which spawns learning and improvement. Then industrialize as much as possible. Inefficiency irritates brainpower. For us, specifying the service has been critical. Banish the lack of quality concept and turn it into fulfilling, comprehensible, and measurable specifications. We have now thus derived eight principles which are as follows. One, act five minutes ahead. Set up a forum for sharing lessons learned from the implementation process in order to forestall problems and share positive as well as negative experiences. Two, active learning. Polish the methodology using lessons learned and by industrializing knowledge. Three, use the analysis performed in order to call all of its potential. Spot inefficiency, industrialize wherever possible, and spot five tasks when performing the task analysis. Four, look for benchmarks. Whoever personifies best-practice. Five, mental model. Absorbing the method is the result of incorporating the way to go while using the good results obtained. Six, out of the box. Encourage creativity by sharing with a colleague from another area. This is the technique of looking through different eyeglasses at problems i.e. from a different angle in order to call hitherto unimaginable solutions. Seven, authorities. The authority to act must be earned from best-practice. Eight, proactive querying. Push for proactive querying. Query everything. Be unsettled and curious. Spark improvement. I would like to add to those lessons something that has been mind-blowing for us. Analyzing individual consumption and spotting primaries and secondaries. The phrase I haven't time has been totally banished. Unlocking capacity and understanding what time is wasted on adds huge value for brain force. We wanted to come up with a wake-up call to rethink the company's way of operating while impacting the end customer. Not only that, but we had the extended enterprise follow suit. We had to question the whole service, the end-to-end, and open up horizons for everybody all along the customer journey. We worked on existing hold ups from the start in order to stick to the promise. In parallel, we also worked on the difficulties entailed in the nine questions. We worked in a spirit of agreement between areas, while HR was critical in driving home key concepts like occupancy and use of knowledge. The work's overall tone was one of rapid intervention to get short-term results. We might say that we underwent a small conceptual revolution. Some disruptive measures that arose had an implementation distance with a longer-time horizon. They will change working conditions and we are working on them. I would like to stress the need for common vocabulary and to setup operational rules so that people do not work by what they are often pleased to call common sense, which as we have said, does not exist. Use brainpower to contribute value added and work on engaging everybody. Using the nine questions, like Hephaestus, Artemis or Achilles has helped us to spot blockages and come up with proposals for improvement. That comes along with the implementation distance in order to spot knowledge gaps. We had to cut service delivery times, so we focused on a whole cluster of actions that needed to be taken for time compression. We used the no hire, no fire approach. We uncovered 244 blockages that following the promises criteria were subsumed into three projects, details of which appear below. One, simplifying processes act on those parts of trural, causing inefficiencies while pursuing gradual implementation of initiatives so as to improve our operations. Two, project to define targets and responsibilities, seek efficiency and operational decision making, and align the whole of Pegasus with the strategic and operational targets. Three, extended enterprise project, clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and guidelines for relations in the ecosystem. Groups were set up, each with its own chief. Choosing the group chief was based on spotting people that came from areas that could look at the situation with fresh eyes. Using the same, think different approach as Achilles. Our processes area took overall charge of coordinating the project, we introduced systematic support for every team with a representative from processes to take minutes, follow up, and help out wherever needed. Now, this might all seem buy the buy but is in fact crucial. The logistics of getting 60 people organized is no mean feat. In addition, we wanted our brains to concentrate on solving the problems we wanted to solve, no time was to be consumed on other issues. The teams met weekly for 11 months, talks were held with department heads, to unlock capacity for each team's components. They could fit the project in with their daily workload, we made an overall appeal to the whole company in order to explain how important the project was as time compression was critical when it came to achieving the results the company needed. Every employee was paid a seven percent salary bonus when the project met with success. The KISS operational culture was embedded in the project as was total transparency, win-win, he who does knows, and the extended enterprise was engaged. The groups could subcontract measures to each other according to the differential knowledge each one had. Thus very close collaboration came about, as did engagement among all the participants. A very important issue in the project was exhaustively following up the KPIs for target times that had been fixed as a goal. Initiatives were reported on in the workgroups, monthly follow-ups, depending on their status from Analysis, no movement to implementation, ongoing well. After the project had been up and running for a year, 50 percent of the initiatives were implemented, while 25 percent were readopted to other initiatives, and the remaining 25 percent left on standby. The subsequent action plan was grouped under five headings, see below. The aim was for actions to be independent of the groups' personalities, and make them consistent as a whole. One, process re-engineering, simplifying processes by getting rid of bottlenecks, and adopting redesign measures focused on enabling operations. Two, industrialization, initiatives geared to simplifying work operations mainly by cutting administrative workloads, dealing with tasks in advance, eliminating reprocessed, and ordering activities. Three, transparency and best-practice, set of measures due to clarifying requirements in executing operations while incorporating experiences that constitute an optimal baseline when it comes to delivery. Four, operations configuration, define and design how services must be executed, the infrastructure to support them, and detailed specifications for their delivery. Five, operations culture, make sure every Pegasus Department is aware of how important it is to perform tasks in the least possible time. We met the deadline for finishing our time compression project. Consistency is essential in such situations, given that participants had to fit their daily work in with the project and that required great personal effort. Showing that the commitment to compress time is fulfilled is crucial, it ensures reliability that every participant understands that a beginning and an end are a vital importance when meeting targets.
