Process vs Common Sense

The Party Is OverA good friend of mine, Michael, has just started a blog about his life experiences. He's an actor in musical theatre and is currently on tour with a show around the UK so he's spending a lot of time on the move.

His blog from today '"London" Luton Airport', highlights an interesting process issue.

What Michael is saying, basically, is that the airport owners have decided that they will charge people £1 to drop off (and park for ten minutes) in the area just outside the terminal building at "London" Luton Airport. (For those of you who don't understand the "London" part, Luton is situated quite a few miles North of London and is really misnamed as being a London airport. In reality the same could be applied to many 'out-of-town' airports which are a journey in themselves from the city they allegedly serve).

The problem with this new system is that it is encouraging people to use as much of the ten minutes as they feel they have paid for and, hence, causing tailbacks and queues at rush hours. In effect Michael had to be dropped off several hundred yards from the terminal in order to catch his flight. This behaviour is now being noticed and the airport is threatening to issue £80 fines for those dropping off outside the allocated £1 zone.

So in other words:

  • The airport has started charging for something that used to be free
  • The charging is affecting people's behaviour causing congestion
  • The congestion is affecting people's behaviour causing unexpected actions
  • The airport is trying to capitalise on this by charging fines for people reacting in a way caused by their initial change.


Does this sound familiar?

It's a typical badly thought through process change and one where common sense has been ignored.

Don't get me wrong, the charging is not, in itself, a bad change to the process. But the consequences have obviously not been thought through. This change has been put in, I would suggest, by management who are anxious to increase revenues but with very little thought to the customer impact this would have.

Again, "Sound Familiar?"

So what should they do?

How about having variable charge rates and times? In rush hour - when they traffic is heavy - reduce the cost but also reduce the time that someone can wait. Charge 50p but make it 2 minutes. This will increase the throughput of vehicles thus reducing the congestion.

Or maybe the airport is counting on the £80 fines to boost income and that's the reason for the change?

You may think that, I couldn't possibly comment....




Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project Second Edition' is now available. Don't miss the chance to get this valuable insight into how to make business processes work for you. Click this link and follow the instructions to get this book.


All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford
  See related info below

A review of the 'As Is'

To Be Or Not To BeA year or two back I wrote an article entitled 'As-is vs To-Be'. It attempted to identified specific reasons why it is important to perform an 'As-is' review prior to starting any work on the 'To-be' status.

Unfortunately not many people are willing to do this. They quote reasons such as 'If we're not going to be using the 'As-is' state in future then there's no reason to waste time actually documenting it. It's a zero-gain effort.

But as I stated in the original post:
In real life if you are using a satnav to navigate to a destination it always has to know where you are starting from in order to determine the best way to the destination. Granted, it can produce a number of different routes to get there, but they are all predicated on the fact that you know where you are starting from. No navigation system in the world can work effectively without knowing a starting and ending location.

What I actually found interesting is that I posed a question at the end of the post which was 'Can anyone think of a reason why an 'as-is' process would not be documented?' Nobody posted any responses with reasons why the 'As is' would not be documented.

So let me pose a different question 'How many of you are currently involved in projects where you feel that  documenting where you are is a waste of time?'
If so, why?


Reminder: 'The Perfect Process Project Second Edition' is now available. Don't miss the chance to get this valuable insight into how to make business processes work for you. Click this link and follow the instructions to get this book.



All information is Copyright (C) G Comerford
 See related info below