Successful organizations understand that the key to keeping their contracts long term is to maintain exceptional performance levels. With competition on the rise, it is more important than ever to focus on constant improvement and innovation and to avoid stagnation. With that in mind, we designed this custom service offering that is tailored to provide independent, unbiased assessment of contract performance, identify future improvement opportunities, and offer a fresh perspective on innovation.
We structured our independent program review to focus on discovering strengths and continuous improvement and innovation opportunities rather than using the process to uncover deficiencies. Yes, the process sometimes identifies performance issues that clients need to take seriously, but in our experience, these have been in the minority of cases.
We designed our structured, broad, and thought-provoking questionnaire to tease out performance feedback from different perspectives. We conduct this interactive review process via interviews (based on the questionnaire) with both the internal program leadership/management team and external customers. The interactive nature of the interviews enables us to go deeper on each topic and ask on-the-spot follow-on questions designed to get more details and quickly arrive at root causes.
The first step in the process is to conduct a set of interviews with the internal program leadership team starting at the top (typically with the Program Manager) and extending to the Supervisor/Manager/Team Lead level. Each one-on-one interview typically lasts about an hour and can be done via a teleconference or videoconference at the participant’s convenience. Our third-party, independent, friendly interviewers quickly make the interviewee at ease, leading to openly shared, candid feedback.
The second step is to conduct similar 1-hour interviews with each key customer in charge of various aspects of the program. During our interviews with leadership, we develop a comprehensive list of customers representing various perspectives. We use our structured questionnaires to carefully plan the customer interviews.
In our experience, customers are happy to meet with us and tend to be open with their feedback due to the independent nature of our roles. They view this effort as the company making an investment into the program’s continuous improvement and are very appreciative and forthcoming.
Once we complete the assessments, we develop a summary of hot buttons, desires, wishes, risks, and issues. We analyze the data based on the sources and place heavier emphasis on feedback received from multiple participants. The end result is a set of actionable recommendations for improvement initiatives in a set of briefing slides, which the company is also able to share with their customer. We also deliver all of our detailed interview notes with the final deliverable package as backup data.