Service Delivery Dillemas

On Saturday and Sunday mornings my wife loves to read the local newspaper with her coffee. No paper (or no coffee) and she's not the wonderfully pleasant breakfast companion that I've come to rely on. I say rely on because her mood effects my mood. If she's happy at the morning breakfast table then there is a higher likelihood that I will start off my day happy too. If she's less than happy... well, let's just say that I prefer it when she is happy.

Recently, we've had a heck of a time getting our paper delivered on Sunday mornings. Not delivered late... just plain not delivered. Everything is fine on Saturdays, but when we get up on Sunday mornings and step out onto the porch, we would often see papers on everyone's lawn but ours. This was Most Disturbing, and we had to make several phone calls and send several irate emails before finally getting the problem resolved (at least for now). As it turned out, it was all because the local delivery person was relying on a subcontractor on Sundays (apparently the delivery person likes to party on Saturday nights). The subcontractor was using the list of "deliver every day" subscribers rather than the list of "deliver on weekends" subscribers. Mystery solved.

My wife and I could short-circuit this chain of nested dependencies by walking down the street to get our paper from the neighborhood "Quickie Mart", but that's not the service that we want... so our routine is doomed to rely on hidden chains of underlying service providers.

Our personal Sunday-morning-paper-trauma points out some of the pitfalls of dealing with external Service Providers. My wife and I rely on the Publisher of the newspaper to deliver a paper to us on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The Publisher relies on a Delivery Person to transport the paper from the Printer to our door. The Primary Delivery Person relies on a Delivery Subcontractor to fulfill their obligation on Sunday mornings (and perhaps on other mornings during the week). A mess up in the Subcontractor's service delivery screwed up our Sunday morning routine.

At the root of the Delivery Subcontractor's problem was a mistake in his conceptual model for the service that he was providing. He believed that the process that he should follow was something like the following:

Pretty simple. Get a list of the Subscriber Addresses, and then every morning get a stack of papers from the printer and deliver them to those addresses. The mistake was simple, the list of Subscriber Addresses is not constant. The list changes on the weekends.

A better conceptual view of the process is more like the following:

Every day the list of Subscriber Addresses may change, so the delivery process must deal with a potentially changing list.

The second process is less efficient than the first, and that might be what caused the mixup. Relatively few subscribers opt to get their papers only on the weekends, so the list of addresses are always "almost" the same. It seems like a waste of time to get a new list of addresses every single day... so we should probably do some tweaking and tuning.

The real trick in designing a good process is to come up with a simple-yet-accurate conceptual model, and to make sure that everyone involved shares that conceptual model. The process itself can be tweaked and tuned for optimization as necessary, and all is well as long as the tweaked-and-tuned process still corresponds to the shared conceptual model.

This morning, my paper was on my doorstep, just as it should be... but I do wonder if it was delivered because the process was explained to the Delivery Subcontractor, or if the Primary Delivery Person decided to stop partying on Saturday nights. As the Service Consumer I really shouldn't care, but I'd like to think the process was improved... If not, it's probably just a matter of time until we face another Sunday morning without our paper.