Services connexes

By Mathieu Boisvert – January 2025

What is an action signal?

When I drive my car, I have a dial that tells me how fast I’m going and a sign that indicates the speed limit. So I have everything I need to respect the speed limit at all times. Although I must remain attentive and my driving experience enables me to deduce the appropriate speed in certain situations, I may fail to notice a sign indicating a change in the limit. In this case, I run the risk of breaking the law until the next sign. These two elements are examples of indicators that measure and inform.

With my navigation app, I have another tool: an indicator that compares my speed to the speed limit. If I exceed the limit, a red signal alerts me immediately.

This is a fine example of an action signal, i.e. one that prompts action. In this case, slow down to respect the speed limit and avoid a ticket.

Based on this example, I sometimes wonder:

Are the management indicators of my team primarily used to take action, inform, or facilitate decision-making? Which indicators could be improved to serve as action signals?

Putting it into practice

Here’s a case in point. When I coach service teams working in operations mode, I like to use alead time graph.

It’s a graph that lets a team know its current capacity to help define a service agreement. For example, with the previous graph, a team can state with respect to its capacity that their customers can expect a request resolution time of less than 21 days in 95% of cases.

Once the service agreement has been established, what else can we use this graph for? It can be used to track lead times over time, to check that the service agreement is being respected. It can also be used to check whether our improvement actions are having a positive impact on processing times. But these are reactive actions that allow us to analyze the past.

To use the graph as an action signal, we can establish a team rule such as launching an investigation whenever the age of an item exceeds a certain threshold. For example, for items whose age is :

Between 0-17 days : no action. Everything is going well, as expected.
Over 17 days: the team should pay attention to this item, because it’s a possible candidate for exceeding our 21-day service agreement. It’s time to think about how we can avoid this drift.
After 21 days : it’s too late to prevent the situation. We can discuss whether this was an exceptional case over which we had no control, or one that merits an action plan to avoid repetition.

This new team rule now calls for action. However, the visual form of the lead time report is probably not the best for my team members. Which leads me to wonder:

How can this indicator be transformed into an action signal that is more useful to my team members?

Since my team uses a Kanban board to track the flow of their work, it would be interesting to integrate the indicator into their work tool. For example, change the color of the board according to the lead time measurement:

Nothing : for tickets aged 17 days and under. No special follow-up.
Yellow: for tickets longer than 17 days. We need to pay close attention to this request to prevent it from getting out of hand.
Red : for tickets over 21 days old. If this is a repeat case, a cause/root analysis should be carried out to avoid a recurrence.

This example shows how we have successfully implemented an incentive indicator to help us offer reliable service and fuel continuous improvement, on two levels:

An indicator for the team, to proactively ensure good customer service
An indicator for the manager, to check compliance with the service agreement and support continuous improvement