"We’ve driven some quite spectacular improvements" - interview with Peter Evans of Virgin Media

Introduction

Peter Evans is Acting Quality Director at Virgin Media where he leads a small team of Lean Sigma professionals driving Lean Sigma techniques across the consumer business. In a short period of time, the team have achieved some spectacular results in some unusual areas like Tele-Sales and Service Installation.

A Master Black Belt and Quality Leader, Peter was certified by GE and has worked in various industries and sectors since then, including defence, wholesale and leasing in Cost & Management Accounting, Credit & Risk Management, as well as his work in telecoms.

Peter lives in Sussex, UK with his wife Amanda and two Boxer dogs Sam & Fergie.

onesixsigma.com: What’s your personal Process Improvement history?

Peter Evans: My background is financial; credit and risk. I worked for Avis Fleet, ran their group credit and risk. They were in a bit of a crisis in their payables division and they asked me to quit chasing people for money and start paying people.

What happened was the business was a merger of three other businesses in a complete new start-up in Manchester. They asked me to fix the payables processes by going in and running the department. In six months we went from 40,000 invoice backlog to paying on time with half the work force and completely new set of processes. That got me the reputation of being good with processes and I was asked to move out of there and lead for the UK a system implementation for what was called the European Leasing System. One of the things I did was design the payables part of that for Europe. We were purchased by GE Capital in 1992.

I was then given the role as Head of quality, drove ISO 9000 implementation and ended up on a pan-European project for operational processes. That was in 1995, and in ’96 Six Sigma started.

How did you get involved in Six Sigma?

I was in the office one day on a Friday afternoon and the boss at the time popped his head round the door and said: “what are you doing on Monday?” I didn’t have any meetings booked and he said there was a big meeting in Connecticut about quality and he wanted me to go to it.

So I went and there was a video of Jack Welch, who had just come out of hospital after his bypass operation, and he was standing by a desk saying: “Hello, I’m better now. I’m going to tell you about the future…” and it was Six Sigma. I knew nothing about it, didn’t know why I was at the meeting and ended up on a Black Belt course! I was on the first wave of European Black Belts, went on to become a Master Black Belt, and eventually left Avis and went to work for GE Capital Aviation Services as their quality leader in Ireland and then in the States.

I came back to the UK and worked at Vodafone for five years in a number of roles eventually owning Six Sigma for the Consumer area before moving Cable and Wireless and eventually into Virgin Media.

Is the programme at Virgin Media a pure Six Sigma programme?

It’s a process excellence and improvement programme based very strongly at the moment on Lean. It’s a brand new programme; I started last January, and I was recruited to bring in Six Sigma. However, after I had a look, it was obvious to me that it was too early for this approach because we had processes that were fundamentally broken and we had to start somewhere low down, and Lean for me was the answer. We decided to concentrate on the framework, getting the basics right first.

Is the plan then to use Lean initially and bring in Six Sigma gradually?

Yes. We’re using Lean extensively at the moment, going through the operational process chain bit by bit, creating what we’re calling ‘model Lean offices’. We’re doing it out in the field too with our installation engineers. It’s really exciting stuff, we’re making big changes to the organisation as we go to create a framework and ground base from which we can improve things. There’s a lot of simple things we can do to get ourselves where we can see the process and then do what is required to improve it.

What is Virgin Media?

The consumer piece of Virgin Media is about the sale and provision of television, telephone and broadband cable services to the public. Our cable passes about half the homes in Britain, so that’s our audience. We have an off-net product as well, but on-net that’s our target.

The cable industry has been notoriously bad at delivering what it does. Everyone has a horror story to tell about previous incumbents, and we’re working really hard to improve our customers experience.

We’ve got a fantastic product; the best and the fastest broadband there is, bar none, as agreed by most authoritative voices , so from that point of view it ought to sell.

About eighteen months ago we created a process book we’re calling the customer journey. There are six journeys and there are a couple that are really problematic to us and our customers: the Join journey – how you sign up for and get our services – and the Get Help journey, for when something goes wrong. Basically we’re working on a plan along the Join journey from the point of sales and order entry, through to installation and 30 days post-installation. We’re working hard on that to drive improvement and quality, doing some basic fundamental things, such as helping managers, making the process visible, making it ok to talk about process failure and do something about it.

We’ve been very successful. We’ve had some help from OEE, a Lean consultancy, without them we wouldn’t be anywhere close to where we have reached today.

Have you done some external benchmarking?

We’ve done a bit. The reason we’re with OEE is because they have done some spectacular stuff with Financial institutions. They’ve got the framework, we’re working together on a Lean/Sigma Academy, all of that stuff and it’s very positive.

Via OEE we’ve talked to Royal Bank of Scotland, who have been down to see us, we have exchanged visits and best practices with Lloyds TSB. There’s some potential to do some stuff with Jaguar, Scottish Power and Rolls Royce later this year.

One of the big interests for me with i&i [a private community of practice for forward-thinking organisations engaging in improvement and innovation] is the ability to start networking but also to broaden the base knowledge of the people in our organisation, who have mostly worked in a fairly narrow industry. I want them to think broader get the depth of experience, which is easier to get from the outside.

So you see i&i as facilitating the speeding up of the learning process?

Yes, it’s creating a knowledge base quickly. I want to give our colleagues lots of different avenues to get information and challenge their thinking, giving people challenging objectives: go and find out something new and bring it back to our next meeting. I’ve always had an interest in finding out about new things and bringing them back and I want to make it easy for my team and I to do that.

How do you see the programme progressing?

The team will be expanding: we are taking on three extra people, one of whom will be deployment leader, and two more MBB level practitioners. They will own parts of the business, groups of Lean coaches and Black Belts and drive through the improvements. We’re forming our own Lean Sigma academy which launched in June. It’s a virtual organisation. And we’ve been doing some very low-level Green Belt training which is sparking the interest in the rest of the programme. Some of the managers have done that and are now our sponsors and champions for Lean Model Office implementation in their areas because they’ve seen how good it can be and how far away they are.

Do you have strong management buy-in?

We have buy-in. Basically I’m moving them from the nice words to active involvement but that’s a slow process. Simultaneously, I’ve got to find some willing pilots... or victims! We’ve driven some quite spectacular improvement in telesales and scheduling, which has created a group of advocates at senior management/director level which is helping to drive the message through. The beautiful thing about Lean is that it goes right down to the shop floor, and you just need to keep it going. In our telesales centres we’ve trained managers in Gemba management and its working. And now they’ve seen it working, they want to see the rest of it.

We’re at a tipping point now. This time next year it will be a much more formal programme. At the moment it has been a bit more of a terrorist activity: get into the areas, run a couple of pilots, get it to the point where the manager wants to have this implemented, and be indispensable.

Where do you see Six Sigma/Process Improvement going in the next few years?

I think there will still be pockets of pure Sigma, pure Lean. I think in my world, and it’s something I’ve always driven, is bringing the tools together. Is it Lean Sigma? I’m not even sure that’s a good label for it. It’s operational improvement, it’s operational excellence and I see that as the driver. In a cash-restrained, resource-restrained world, how do you get to optimise what you do? And that’s a combination of those great toolkits. It’s a mixture of methodologies: the statistical stuff from Six Sigma, the great operational management from Lean, good project management from things like Prince2, and all that stuff coming together into an improvement programme. There will always be a need for that.

The constant battle in business is between the solution-based idea of “let’s put a system in” and the idea of “let’s improve what we’ve got and then look for a system after”. There will always be those tensions, but I see them coming closer together, more good change management and process streamlining, along with the solution-based things so you don’t have to go in and fix it again.

You have to implement it in the right way, and show people that what they are doing may not be all they can do. When we went into our telesales department, they said “look at this, we’re really good at what we do, we’re the best we can be, we don’t get any complaints” but they do, they’re just weren’t listening, because they’re on sales conversion objectives. We’ve worked with them and given them a new picture, they’ve embraced it, and they like it.

People like it for different reasons though… our head of centre in Dudley likes it because her centre’s now really tidy! You just have to find the right levers.