Capacity Creation – Build a “Stop Doing” List

Do you practice capacity creation? Or do you layer on?

Without managing workload you simply can’t prove commitment. Layering ‘customer work’ on top of the already full plates of operational leaders and teams is the recipe for customer focus abandonment. Yet that is what I encounter with every client as we do this work.

“Do you have a ‘stop doing list?’ is met with nervous laughter. Exhausted employees will agree with the importance, but the ‘can’t get there from here’ perception will impede the work.

Build an intelligent “stop doing” list.

Use your Customer Journey framework that you established in Competency Two (Align Around Experience) to inventory all of the current projects, organized by the stage of the experience they impact.

This exercise identifies duplicate projects pecking away at the same problem but initiated from multiple silos. It identifies how narrow or broadly it solves a customer issue or improves an experience. Silo based projects may have good intentions for customers, but their narrow scope may not improve the customer experience in total.

CEOs and leadership teams get a false positive when annual planning or reviews are done because they are presented with these multitudes of projects with ‘customer’ in their title. Don’t mistake activity for one-company focus.

• Use the customer journey framework to inventory projects and make the hard decisions as you create capacity at the beginning of this work.
• Continue its use to give you a comprehensive view of workload, capacity and commitment required to enable future work.

The use of your customer journey framework keeps on enforcing the work of the organization to deliver a one-company experience. And that must start with capacity creation.