[The following article appears in the October, 1994 edition of _Public_Sector_Quality_Report_, pages 1-3.] PSQR PROFILE DIRECTOR DRIVES CHANGE AT ARLINGTON, TX, PARKS & REC Playing the part of the customer, Jim Spengler stands to address a workshop audience during the National League of Cities' recent "Innovators at Work Conference" in Hampton, VA. Spengler invites those in attendance to create an airplane out of an 8-1/2"x 11" piece of paper. The customer's only expectation: That the aircraft be capable of flying 15 feet. For several minutes, attendees hunch forward in their chairs, struggling to recall the folding and bending techniques they once used as kids. Finally, Spengler calls for a test flight. A few planes soar toward the front of the room. Others pitch and tumble at their designers' feet or against nearby walls. After the "skies" clear, Spengler takes his turn. He crumples his paper into a ball and tosses it toward the back of the room. Message of the exercise: Challenge assumptions. The way you've always done things might not be the best, most effective way. In his striped, neatly pressed shirt and power tie, Spengler is a challenge to assumptions in his own right. A first-time observer might peg Spengler as a Fortune 500 management analyst material, and that observer would not be entirely wrong. What he is mostly, though, is director of Parks and Recreation for the city of Arlington, TX. But he goes about that job with a "challenge assumptions" management style, and as a student of management and service theories who borrows heavily from the private sector. Spengler came to Arlington in 1991 after similar jobs in Virginia and California. At each stop he tried, in his words, "to apply private sector service and management practices to government." He admits his early efforts to deliver more-effective service were limited to "front counter, Tom Peters, excellence" sorts of strategies. "Everybody smiled," is how Spengler describes it now, "but it didn't exactly impact how we delivered services." Then, in California, he found himself sitting in an operational management course taught by a man who also worked as an executive at Bechtel, the multinational construction firm. "It was a like a lightning bolt hit me," Spengler recalls. "When you look at these folks--Schonberger, Deming, Juran--their principle is to have the totality of the organization optimized for the customer, not just the service counter." In other words, the lightning bolt was "systems" thinking. As Spengler explained in his handout for workshop attendees: "Customer service is not an isolated event in an organization. It is the result of policies, procedures, and practices. Management is responsible for this system. All employees work in the system created by management. To improve customer service management must improve the system. New employees will not do it. Smile training will not do it. The only tool is planned, purposeful change." Now Spengler is the one triggering lightning bolts in students. Since arriving in Arlington, he's taken on much of the task of training Parks and Rec employees in new ways of thinking about work, borrowing concepts from TQM, total productive maintenance, service quality, and service marketing. Spengler says he cobbled together his training effort in the first few years for next to nothing, spending $3,000-$4,000 on video rentals, and sending staff people off to the occasional seminar or American Management Association breakfast to hear speakers from the private sector talk about service quality. "Ours is pretty simple training, really," Spengler says. "There's just a ton of really good videos out there. So we'd show a video. Ask 'what do you guys think of it?' Structure a little group exercise. Start people thinking in the same direction as you introduce change. There's a mind-set in some organizations that anything you do, in terms of hiring a consultant or training, starts at $80,000. Gosh, if I had $80,000, I could do training for 20 years." But doesn't Spengler's approach assume a lot of input on the senior executive's part? "I don't think it happens unless you have that," he says. "Total organizational efforts don't happen unless the top person is fully involved and engaged." More recently, as process improvements began to drive significant cost savings in the department, Spengler has funneled those dollars into two activities: capital maintenance and a training/development budget (about $50,000 annually). Each employee now has a personalized training/development plan, which includes not only skill specific training, but also learning that will broaden an employee's perspective on customers, service, and quality. Following are a few more examples of the changes Spengler and his employees are pursuing: -- Challenge assumptions. Upon arriving in Arlington, Spengler questioned why managers were spending as much as a week each quarter hastily assembling a 15-page report for the city manager and council, a report filled with sometimes questionable financial and performance indicators. Spengler suggested they change the process. Now the report is down to three pages, produced quickly by a single secretary. Similarly, Spengler wondered why it took as long as a week to transcribe and produce minutes of monthly Park Board meetings. "Again I just asked a dumb question. Why are we doing this? Is there a law in Texas that says we have to do it this way?" It so happens the only requirement was that meeting attendance and major board actions be documented. Today board minutes take about 15 minutes of clerical time each month. -- Process improvements. Process improvement teams are encouraged, and are left largely unencumbered, to solve problems and implement improvements. There's little paperwork or reporting that needs to happen for a team to form, analyze a problem, and devise a solution. When a secretary felt she could save time and improve safety by having an unusually high light switch lowered, so she wouldn't have to stand on a chair to reach it, she solved the situation herself--a one-person quality action team. When a team at the North Maintenance District garage got together to create a better system for organizing the equipment yard, they came up with a method that will save a projected 1,200 work hours per year. Since October 1991, department employees have done more than 110 improvement projects, saving more than 43,400 hours, or some $510,000 in annual, recurring savings. -- A satisfaction guarantee. In studying the leading thinkers on service quality, as well as private sector service leaders, Spengler says it became clear that: "You're worth nothing until you have a service guarantee." Unlike organizations where customer complaints and refund requests get passed up through a chain of supervisors, Arlington's front-line Park and Rec people are empowered to evaluate and respond to customers complaints directly. ______________________________________________________________ Arlington, TX, Parks and Recreation Satisfaction Guarantee We back our product! If you are not happy with an activity, please let staff know immediately. That will give us the opportunity to rectify the situation or credit your account for an activity at a later date. We value you as a customer! _______________________________________________________________ -- Flattening the organization. As middle managers leave the department (which has happened at least three times during Spengler's time) they are not replaced. The focus now is on organizing around the smallest business unit that can deliver full service to the customer. For example, at the city's new tennis center, there won't be one person managing program activity and another running building maintenance. There will be one manager for the entire complex. The long-term vision displayed on a flip chart in Spengler's office calls for no more than three management levels: business unit managers, managers over a portfolio of business units, and the senior manager. -- Service-oriented hiring. An organization which depends heavily on young, part-time workers to deliver front-line service would be wise to pay extra attention to the types of people it hires. The department has adopted "behavioral interviewing" (a concept discovered on one of many private-sector benchmarking visits, this one to Lockheed). Behavioral interviewing essentially means posing to an interviewee questions that will indicate whether that person has demonstrated skills and behaviors in the past that will serve him or her well in the new job. Explains Spengler: "Instead of just asking about background and hobbies, we ask questions like: 'Give me some specific examples in your work or education experience where you exhibited good traits of customer service. Can you give an example where you went above and beyond what your boss told you was necessary in order to make sure someone was satisfied? How have you handled angry customers in the past?' The theory being that past work performance is the best predictor of future work performance." -- Closing service gaps. Borrowing from the "service gap" concept advanced by Zeithamal, Parasuraman and Berry (Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations, 1990, The Free Press), Spengler's department has developed a set of techniques it calls PARDner, which gives business units a tool for identifying customer expectations (through surveys, focus groups, etc.), developing service plans and procedures to meet those expectations, and then measuring to see if the service is indeed meeting customer demands. When a service "gap" exists, such as when golfers complained about the dearth of cold water on the city's course, employees use PARDner techniques to address the shortcoming. In this case, by installing refrigerated fountains. "We thought we were providing cold water by placing jugs around the course," says Spengler. "But as the ice melted and the algae grew, we weren't really meeting the service standard customers said they'd like to have." ________________________________________ Organizational Snapshot Parks and Recreation Department Arlington, TX Employees: 127 full-time, 680 part-time Budget: $11 million ________________________________________ CONTACT: Jim Spengler, director, Parks and Recreation Department, Arlington, TX, (817) 459-6140. [For further information about PSQR or to subscribe, contact: Public Sector Quality Report 17733 Kingsway Path Lakeville, MN 55044-5209 Phone: (612) 898-5058 Fax: (612) 892-7710 e-mail: 74363.3644@compuserve.com]