From Getting It Right First Time to Right Every Time

Richard Farrell at Netcall explores how organisations can reduce process variation and keep operations aligned with how work actually happens.

The gap between design and reality

“Getting it right first time” has long been treated as the goal of operational excellence. It assumes stability, predictability and control.

But most organisations don’t operate in that world.

Work is shaped by exceptions, local adaptation and constant change. The result is a widening gap between designed processes and how work is actually performed.

In ‘There’s Got To Be A Better Way’, a book written by Nelson Repenning, a business school professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Donald Kieffer, a former operations executive at Harley-Davidson and MIT lecturer, the instruction to managers is simple: “Go and see how things actually work. And if you aren’t embarrassed by what you find, you probably aren’t looking closely enough.”

That gap is where most transformation risk accumulates.

Why Optimisation Often Misses The Point

Most organisations already have defined processes. The problem is they no longer reflect reality.

Teams adapt. Systems constrain. Workarounds emerge. Individually, these are rational decisions. Collectively, they introduce variation that becomes invisible at a management level – which is why performance can look stable in reporting while frontline experience tells a different story.

Process mining and task mining have improved visibility, but they only capture what systems record. They miss informal decisions, workarounds and the human context behind exceptions. Organisations risk optimising a model of the process, not the process itself.

Variation is The Real Cost Driver

Inefficiency rarely comes from complexity alone. It comes from variation in execution. When the same service is delivered differently across teams or locations, outcomes become inconsistent and costs unpredictable.

Reduce variation and you increase stability. Increase stability and you reduce risk. Yet most organisations still lack continuous mechanisms to manage it.

Why Transformation Doesn’t Stick

Traditional transformation follows a familiar pattern: define a best way, implement it, document it and move on. The problem is what happens next.

Without continuous reinforcement, processes drift, documentation degrades and variation returns. Transformation is delivered – but not sustained.

The NHS GIRFT (Getting It Right First Time) programme illustrates this well. It has done significant work identifying best practice across clinical specialties – but as those close to the programme note, identifying best practice and sustaining its implementation are two very different things. Findings get received, acknowledged and then lost in the noise of day-to-day operations.

From Fixed Processes to Self-Healing Organisations

A more resilient model treats the organisation as something that continuously adapts, rather than periodically resets – detecting issues closer to the point of work, enabling local correction and reducing reliance on large-scale intervention.

The goal is not perfection. It is responsiveness: moving from fixing problems after they scale, to correcting them while they are still small.

Consider what continuous adaptation actually looks like in practice. At a global pet food brand, formulation specialists are responsible for ensuring recipes meet food safety regulations across every country where their products are sold – a constantly shifting compliance challenge.

The team described gathering every Monday to review the week’s regulatory changes and walking through documented processes to assess impact.

If something needed updating, it was updated then and there. When the next transformation programme arrived, their processes were current and their teams ready – no extensive discovery required. That is what distinguishes organisations that absorb change from those disrupted by it.

Connecting Process, Experience and Execution

One of the biggest barriers to improvement is fragmentation – customer experience, process design and operational systems disconnected from each other.

When these are joined up, feedback becomes immediate and actionable. This is where platforms, like Netcall’s Liberty, becomes relevant as the connective layer between experience, workflow and execution.

Tools can give organisations a continuous signal about where drift is occurring, before it becomes a problem.

From Static Design to Living Systems

The shift is from static processes to living systems that continuously reflect operational reality. That requires a different mindset: Processes are behaviours, not documents; variation is signal, not noise; improvement is an operating model, not a project.

The organisations that succeed will not be those that transform once. They will be those that continuously stay aligned with how work actually happens.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Netcall – View the Original Article

For more information about Netcall - visit the Netcall Website

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: Netcall
Reviewed by: Robyn Coppell