Process Management: Stairway To Success

My company, Defense Group, recently received orders to provide integrated systems for two clients--a longtime customer that happened to be our largest, and a brand-new customer we had been trying to land for some time. Both orders are large and complex, involving multiple types of PC-platform upgrades and peripherals.

Normally, getting such large orders is a happy occasion, but the timing and technical requirements around these created the perfect storm for potential disaster.

It was the last month of the federal fiscal year--the peak of the buying season--and we were busy shipping orders to clients that had to commit to Homeland Security grants before month's end. Both clients had given us aggressive turnaround times, as one order was to support the war effort and the other was based on a contract that expired at the end of the month. One client complicated matters by ordering Alienware laptops, which meant we had to establish a new vendor relationship. Finally, I had a series of meetings with another client, as we were part of a team of systems integrators demonstrating a large computer-aided dispatch system around the country.

Ours is a small business, so everyone at Defense Group wears many hats. Whether dealing with large or small orders, it's important to have a process in place to manage every step of contract fulfillment. There are several best practices available--Six Sigma, Total Quality Management and Business Process Improvement, to name a few--but we drew from a playbook that's used by the nation's first-responder community (the majority of our clientele): the Incident Command System, or ICS.

This is a management system designed to enable effective and efficient domestic-incident management by integrating a combination of facilities, equipment, personnel, procedures and communications that operate within a common organizational structure. ICS establishes roles and responsibilities, from the senior commander to the tactical responder.

We established our own version of ICS by treating large orders as "incidents" that need to be anticipated and managed. ICS helps us by establishing milestones for all steps in the process so that we can communicate expectations to our internal staff, vendor suppliers and clients.

Days can seem like weeks to a client that has an anxious Department of Defense staffer or Homeland Security official breathing down its neck for an update on order status. Informing him that you'll have their order in 60 to 90 days simply won't fly, especially when the order is critical to the war or to counterterrorism efforts.

You must provide the end user with firm dates or milestones and tell them what actions are being taken to meet the project objectives. When you have a contract officer or project manager that's representing senior leadership, you can never provide too much information.

Enforcement of these expectations requires diligence. For instance, at our company, sales reps are compensated for completed orders, which means they have a stake in every part of the delivery process. Holding vendors to expectations is a matter of market forces; if they don't heed agreed-upon milestones, they risk losing our business. Fortunately, both our staff and our suppliers understand the realities of today's government market and work with us to ensure customer satisfaction.

Once an order is shipped, we conduct a "hot wash"--a postmortem with all internal parties involved in order to review how everyone managed the "incident" and see what areas went smoothly and where improvements need to be made.

Is ICS for everyone? Not necessarily. But which framework is used doesn't really matter, as long as a process is established, and as long as everyone knows their role and executes effectively. No one order is exactly the same as another, but process management, as we have discovered, is the key to successful customer engagements.

Neil Cohen is the director of business development at the CoBRA Division of Defense Group, a government solution provider based in Falls Church, Va.