Problems Never End

Each morning I met with the operation teams for my company. These are fashioned after stand-ups that are used in Scrum.

In these short meetings, we talked about what happened the day before, what were the plans for the day ahead to identify and issues or concerns that might create challenges.

By having these conversation, new ideas around improving our processes inveriable emerge. My job, as a leader, was to validate those ideas and to help them quickly be implemented - striving to achieve the Speed of Now.

What I had come to recognize that no sooner have you addressed one problem, often another one was created. At least that is what happened one day.

We were struggling with managing the amount of service calls. They were expensive, as many of the residents with our wireless services live in remote rural locations.

So, in the previous year, we implemented a new concept of training our field techs built around the Agile experience. We called this process Agile Training.

Our service calls then dropped down to half the number from a year before.

Which had created a new problem. When we were doing our stand-up, we found that the dispatch schedule was so light that we were struggling to figure out what to do with the techs. If this pattern continued, it raised a long-term issue about how these techs will be used in the future.

After training them well, we hardly wanted the reward to be that we began firing people. But what else could they do?

Another problem to solve.