Software
See your system the way your customers experience it
The software tool “Understand your organisation as a system” helps you study demand and flow, built on the Vanguard Method. It shows your people the real problems your customers have, and what in your system stands in the way.
“Hi, what's happening with my claim?”
It is the third time the customer has called. The call is in no report, and yet it may be the most important signal your organisation gets today. Every day your customers tell you how your system really performs. Most organisations simply have nowhere to put that knowledge.
The tool is that place.
What the tool does
Capture demand in the customers' own words
Your own people capture the contacts as they work. Is it value demand, what you are there to serve? Or is it failure demand, because something has not been done or not been done right, from the customer's point of view? Many are surprised when they see how much of the work is of the second kind.
Understand what matters to customers
Behind every contact lies a problem from the customer's own life. The tool helps you find it, and measure how well you deliver on what matters.
Hear the voice of the system
KPIs and averages do not tell you what your system can do. Capability charts do. They show what the system predictably delivers, and whether a change is real or just variation.
Follow every case end to end
Follow the case through the organisation, every step and every hand-off. See where value is created, where failure work arises, and where cases get stuck or drop out.
Find the system conditions behind it
Failure demand has causes, and they rarely lie with the individual worker. They lie in the system: in rules, IT, targets and the way the work is divided up. The tool helps you find the system conditions, prioritise them and see how much capacity you free up when you change them.
Anyone can be an enabler
When a system condition needs removing, anyone can take the role of enabler, whatever their title. The tool keeps track of what is under way, and shows whether the change actually works.
What you get out of it
- A picture of your system from the outside in, built on valid information rather than assumptions.
- An overview of how much of your capacity goes on failure work, and how much you can free up.
- Measures of what matters to customers, rather than what is easy to count.
- People who see the problems for themselves and learn the method by using it. It becomes your own, not a consultant's report.
- A learning system: an organisation that knows its own purpose, sees its own demand and changes in the light of what it sees.
Built in a different order
Most software is built the same way as the organisation: a system for each function, a report for each target. The tool is built around purpose, value and what matters to customers.
“If you understand the problem, the solution follows, and if you understand the solution, the software follows. In that order.”
The tool works alongside the systems you already have, so you do not need to replace anything. You start with the work as it happens and expand the parameters as the team learns. Short films inside the tool explain each concept where you need it. The AI question comes last, once you have understood your system.
See it in use
The tool is already in use. A British financial services company uses it to study its demand and follow cases end to end.
Get in touch
Book a demo
We will show you the tool on an example that looks like your own everyday work. Choose the way that suits you.