Marie's Story

Marie is the correspondence manager at a large government office.

Marie's Past -- Flying By The Seat of Your Pants

Marie was the manager of the agency's Correspondence Unit, responsible for processing the hundreds of items of mail flowing in and out of the agency every day. A year ago, Marie knew they were in serious trouble: Still using the same manual, paper-based methods they had used for more 20 years, their processes were stretched to the breaking point by the relentless growth of the volume of correspondence year after year.

The stress was showing everywhere and the problems were compounding each other:

All of the agents took on more files than they could effectively manage.
The backlog lengthened the time it took to get through the process which generated more queries from people inside and outside the agency looking for the status of their request or response. And more time spent trying to find out the status of items meant even less time to actually process the items.
Files would go missing on someone's desk for days, sometimes leading to panic searches after an executive suddenly called looking for information from a missing file. (Not to mention the ugly scenario when an overworked agent decided to take some files home to work on them over the weekend, ended up in the hospital after a car accident, and nobody knew where the files had gone.)
Under the incessant pressure to keep files flowing, people often cut corners on the process - work got done but didn't get put into the logs, files got sent to outside legal counsel without a backup copy being made, and so on and so on. Marie not only had less workload measurement data for planning and budgeting, but by the time she got some reports, they were weeks old.
And all of this took its relentless toll on the people - job satisfaction was low, absenteeism was climbing, and if some key experienced agents were to leave, having to train new people would put them even further behind.

Marie was constantly in reaction mode - fighting to stamp out one fire as a new one appeared somewhere else. In contradiction to her preferred management style, Marie found herself "flying by the seat of her pants" with neither the time nor the valid data to make the case for doing something different.

The final straw was pending new legislation that would boost the correspondence volume by 15-20% overnight. Even if the agency budget had been increased to handle the extra work (it hadn't), Marie feared that just adding more people to an obsolete system would only worsen the situation instead of making it better.

Marie knew that being a leader meant that she had to work on the system itself, and not just try to manage more efficiently within in the existing system.

A Ray of Hope - A chance meeting that changed everything

Then Marie had a chance hallway meeting with a former colleague who now had a role similar to hers at another agency. The colleague recounted their success using ccmMercury, correspondence management software from a Canadian company - WorkDynamics Technologies.

ccmMercury is workflow tracking software that helps organizations manage how correspondence and paperwork is processed. It streamlines operations by automatically assigning schedules, routing documents to the next person, and sending email notifications of impending or missed deadlines. Proactive managers can use the instant status information and historical trends from ccmMercury for identifying bottlenecks and doing capacity planning.

Marie had thought a more automated solution was needed, but her only experience had been with huge comprehensive document management systems that cost millions of dollars, took years to implement and seemed like overkill for her size of problems.

Initial calls to WorkDynamics gave her hope - the software didn't cost millions, it could be implemented in a few months, and it had been designed specifically to solve her type of problem. Even better, she didn't have to educate the WorkDynamics analysts she spoke with - they had implemented dozens of systems for large and small organizations and knew all about the issues and how to solve them. They even pointed out some time and cost savings that she hadn't thought of herself.

They asked her what would make her manager's life easier, to which Marie sheepishly admitted that she didn't know. The analysts offered to work with Marie to create a business case that would highlight how ccmMercury's features could address their problems and the benefits it offered for all of the stakeholders in the process, including Marie's manager.

Making the Case

The next few months had been an exhilarating swirl of activity and progress - verification from IT that the software would integrate into their network environment, building the business case, creating the requirements document, pitching the proposal to her managers, winning approval of her plan, and finally working with the WorkDynamics analyst to implement the software, tailor it to their process and train all of the agents on how to use it.

The key to the project had been getting all of the right constituents to the table, understanding their needs and translating those needs into specific requirements that were either mandatory, highly desirable, or desirable. If the software couldn't adapt to their needs, it would become just another obstacle in their way, instead of simplifying and accelerating the flow of correspondence.

Management Reporting Requirements

As Marie began to engage her managers in the requirements dialog, she realized that most of their needs revolved around avoiding surprises.

Standard template-driven reports that provided the basic management reports summarizing the correspondence unit's metrics and illustrating trends that could fundamentally change the operation.
Ad hoc reporting that allows managers to mine the history for insights and experiment with "what if" scenarios for changes.
Exception reporting that highlighted overdue items that could flare up into a crisis.
Marie herself needed reporting that could "slice and dice" the unit's metrics by group, by type of workload, by operator and so on.

Reporting is always an ongoing and evolving requirement, and so perhaps the most essential capability ccmMercury provided, in addition to handling all of these defined reporting needs, was the flexibility to provide answers to the questions yet to be asked.

Business Process Requirements

For Marie, the easiest part of the requirements to define was the business process - the software capabilities needed to enhance the flow of correspondence through the unit.

The ability to track every item of correspondence (physical letters, scanned letters, emails, phone records, etc.) from the moment it was received by the unit until it was completely processed.
The ability to create an electronic correspondence folder that would keep everything to do with an item of correspondence in one place - the electronic version of the item, all versions of replies, other supporting documents, people's comments, and so on. The folder had to be able to be stored both in the database and in the records management repository, and information had to be exportable to external files as well.
Once an item was created, users needed to be able to assign and track a set of tasks defining the processing needed to handle that item of correspondence. This needed to include workflows that assigned an entire sequence of tasks to be done and a schedule for their completion, as well as ad hoc assignment of tasks that could adapt to any special situations that arose during the processing.
The ability to define how to highlight and escalate items of correspondence that were about to miss their assigned deadlines or were already late.
The solution needed the ability to capture and display notes and comments from each user as they processed the item.
All of the various users of the system needed to be able to search both the current open items and all past items using different criteria, and searches needed to be able to be saved so that they could easily be repeated over and over again.
The ability to produce standard responses (e.g., form letters) in response to common types of correspondence.

After all she had learned about WorkDynamics' expertise, Marie was not at all surprised that ccmMercury easily met all of these fundamental correspondence management requirements.

Marie Now - Back in Control

Six months after she first heard about ccmMercury, the difference for Marie was like night and day:

She now felt in control of the workload - she knew exactly how many correspondence items were in each stage of the process, and they had already streamlined a couple of the processes to eliminate bottlenecks.
She now had the metrics she needed to support her capacity planning and the corresponding budget needed to implement the plan.
Her manager now had reports that showed their turnaround performance and overall throughput against their targets, with trends showing whether it was getting better or not.
The number of ugly surprises had diminished dramatically - the built-in notification mechanism gave Marie and the supervisors lots of warning about impending deadlines that may be in danger of being missed.
Without having to constantly fight fires, Marie was able to devote much more of her time and attention to evaluating and planning for the future. The first challenge had been handling the influx of correspondence from the new legislation, and now they were looking to handle correspondence coming through the website.

Yes, they had come a long way!