How We Work
The organizational structure at Enabling Technologies has undergone significant changes in order to better serve our customers. The resulting horizontal and vertical compression tore down silos and made for a more flexible and elastic workforce. The creation of Customer Focused Teams, or CFTs for short, has been a revelation to both our employees and customers alike.
Silos of the Past
In 2002, Enabling Technologies began its evolution from a functional organizational structure to a more cellular structure. These changes reduced organizational layers and implementation times while increasing support cases resolved within service level agreement guidelines along with customer satisfaction.
Under the functional organizational structure, each resource was responsible for only a fraction of the process. With the closed silos, Enabling Technologies employees had little visibility into the parts other people played in the process much less the process as a whole.
Process Progress
Enabling Technologies did not just shift resources around, we reformed the process as a whole. With Customer Focused Teams, we were able to optimize the process, align the goals, and provide ongoing improvement for groups of employees with very specialized but very diverse skill sets.
There is no longer just one contact and funnel point for our customers. Small, functional teams handle every aspect of the customer experience from end-to-end, from implementation to customizations to support. Instead of issues being referred to other departments, other silos, there are programmers, spec writers, engineers, product specialists, and others all sitting and working together with one goal in mind: to help our customers win each and every day.
With measurable and visible goals to help our customers win, each member of the CFTs is also accountable to the other members of the team. Each member has to contribute to the common goal in order to reach their own professional targets.
Permeation Permutation
The open, collaborative environment has permeated all of Enabling Technologies, extending to our Development group, which creates temporary teams in order to accomplish very specific goals. For each release of our software, a new team is formed to handle the process from end-to-end. Now the people writing requirements and specs, programming, and testing those programs all sit together with a common goal – quickly and efficiently producing quality software for our customers.
Results, Pure & Simple
Enabling Technologies began implementing CFTs in 2002. When comparing several metrics from 2004 to the pre-CFT days, the numbers are astounding:
- We increased Customer Count by 95%, but that was offset by an Implementation Throughput Increase of 119%
- At the same time we reduced time targets in our Service Level Guidelines (internal timelines by which HelpDesk issues must be resolved), we also reduced Exceptions to Service Level Guidelines by 69%
- Through all of this, the Support Satisfaction Rate as of January 2005 was 98%