Could do better!

Building suppliers at loggerheads, endless site visits, and a hapless customer left to carry the can. Richard Horton reflects on the inevitable consequences of dysfunctional processes.

I was in a position recently where I wanted to get a very specific task done as part of a larger building project, and the experience was at times excruciating. It made me muse on how a poorly designed process can make life both painful for the customer and inefficient for the supplier. Here are some of the highlights, or should I say lowlights.

First, there are two suppliers concerned who need to work together. I’m the customer but it falls to me to work with both of them and line up their diaries to do the work in tandem. This takes hours on the phone. I’m the least qualified person involved in the associated building work to do this. We are set up to fail before we have started. 

When I talk to the main supplier they turn up to look at the job and tell me I should have got someone else to come out to look at it. They didn’t tell me someone else was involved when I made my request. A waste of their time and mine which surely would have been avoided with some basic questions up front. I now arrange for the right person to come out. 

The assessor talks to one of the building team about what is required and goes away. I now have to sign off that I (or rather the builder) will adhere to certain requirements. The builder assures me that all is understood, but when finally the supplier turns up to do the work, there has been a misunderstanding and more preparation work needs to be done. Was the original instruction clear enough? Well, it wasn’t passed on correctly so it didn’t achieve its objective. So the job now has to be rescheduled. 

The next time they turn up there is another rescheduling involved. This time it’s a difference in interpretation. My builder has followed the instructions literally, but the supplier’s man sees it as a health and safety risk. More preparation work required. We are now up to two additional visits by my builder’s supplier, and the builder is fuming.

It doesn’t help that on one of these visits the supplier doesn’t actually condescend to tell me what is wrong. They just turn up, decide it’s not ready and go away. No phone call despite me giving them my number. So I end up hanging around waiting for them, and the next person, synchronised to follow on, turns up to do work that isn’t ready for them. Frustration all round and apologies from the supplier for not following the process. 

The final tweak, however, proves to be enough. Imagine my relief when I ask tentatively “Is that OK” and the reply is “That’s perfect”. The first part of the job is finally done, and the second proves routine. However I have had four site visits from one supplier, three from the other, and my builder has had four stages of preparation with two visits from their supplier. There have been hours of hanging around and the work was not completed when it should have been. Everyone ended up a bit frazzled. It didn’t have to be like this. 

At various points I was asked to provide my feedback on something that had just been done. Usually those were the straightforward bits. I’m not interested in providing feedback as to whether they seemed to work. I want to know if the whole job was completed effectively and efficiently before I offer my congratulations. Ask me about the whole job and I can give plenty of feedback, but funnily no one has. 

In this case there were problems through information not being passed on adequately which were, as far as I can tell, largely due to the person receiving the message not having enough knowledge about what was being talked about. They did their best but it wasn’t precise enough. Also the information given to me for signing off was too generic and so didn’t help. I was left having to rely on an assurance based on an undocumented conversation on site. There was something too about interpretation of apparently unambiguous instructions. My builder sent me a photo of the offending area with a tape measure to demonstrate he had done what was asked. But if the supplier raises health and safety concerns, that’s it. 

In theory someone from the supplier should have come and checked the job was ready before the day, and my experience demonstrates why this would have been a good idea. They didn’t do this  because of a staff shortage, which is a bit ironic as they ended up wasting staff time because they hadn’t done it. 

So, a number of things went wrong and contributed to the whole experience being time-consuming and wasteful. But from my point of view we were set up to fail because the person charged with integrating the services involved, the customer, was not qualified to do the job. Even if the service companies had worked together better, I as the customer end up having to manage the service provision. That’s despite my lack of the required technical knowledge and the fact that I’ve never done this before. Why?

I hope we do better than this on the services we design and implement.