by Ted Eytan, on 16 Feb 2007 05:54 am
The Journey
Getting in the car (or bus, or train…)
My stories tend to be about little victories that come from a change in philosophy. Each victory is a victory nonetheless…
Earlier this week my team was wrestling with a problem that was discovered in one of our systems by users at one of our medical centers. We received messages reporting the problem and worked to reproduce it to understand it better. We were having difficulty doing this based on written descriptions.
So, I called up a partner and I said, “Got time for a drive?” He did, and off we went, to the nearest medical center experiencing the issue. We were welcomed by staff who were in the middle of a busy day taking care of patients. After obtaining appropriate consent, we were allowed to observe a patient visit and talk directly with one of our providers. We observed not only the problem we came to see, but another one that was also emerging.
30 minutes later, we were back at headquarters, having replicated the problem, not only with accuracy this time, but also with understanding of what this meant for our members and care teams.
One of my mentors who had leadership responsibility that covered a statewide region once told the story of how he reacted to a problem by being at the desk of the person involved within 2 hours of notification. I like that story - it shows that when we think we can do something, we’re right.
That’s not a quote from me, but this is: Our customers don’t expect us to be perfect, they expect us to recognize our imperfections quickly.