The action signal: an indicator to help decision-making

By Mathieu Boisvert

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 a action signalIn other words, to act. In this case, slow down to respect the speed limit and avoid a ticket.

Based on this example, I sometimes wonder:

Are my team's management indicators primarily used to measure, inform or facilitate decision-making? Which indicators would benefit from becoming action signals?

Putting it into practice

Here's a case in point. When I'm coaching service teams working in operations mode, I like to use a graph tracking processing time (lead time).

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 is 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 also enables us to check whether our improvement actions are having a positive impact on processing times. But these are reactive actions analyzing the past.

To use the graph as an action signal, we can establish a team rule such as to launch 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 goes smoothly, as expected.
More than 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.
More than 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 prevent it from happening again.

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

How can I transform this indicator so that it becomes a more useful action signal for 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, changing the color of the board according to the measure of lead time :

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 longer than 21 days. If this is a repeat case, a cause/root analysis should be carried out to avoid a recurrence.

This example shows how we have succeeded in setting up an action signal to help us offer a 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