NDS white paper on best practices in delivering excellence in everyday routines.

1. Excellence by Design
Maximizing Performance by Striving for Excellence
White Paper
Lars Ray
Consultant, Network Data Systems

3. Excellence by Design: Maximizing Performance by Striving for Excellence
Table of Contents
Maximizing Performance by Striving for Excellence ..................................................................................... 0
Executive Overview....................................................................................................................................... 1
Defining Excellence....................................................................................................................................... 2
The Excellence Journey ................................................................................................................................ 3
Excellence is an Amplifier ............................................................................................................................. 4
Excellence by Design .................................................................................................................................... 5
About the Author ........................................................................................................................................... 6
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................................... 6
Author Statement
This document contains the views of the author and should not be considered as the views of Network Data Systems. It provides an
overall discussion of practical steps for adding value to clients, organizations, and personal careers. This White Paper reflects the
author’s views based on his experience and knowledge of the subject matter.
© 2011 Lars Ray i

4. Excellence by Design: Maximizing Performance by Striving for Excellence
© 2011 Lars Ray ii

5. Excellence by Design: Maximizing Performance by Striving for Excellence
Executive Overview
The purpose of any business is to meet stakeholders’ needs. Everyone plays a role in the success of the
business whether they are executive leaders, business or product managers, team leaders, team
members or functional support providers. In any of these roles the individuals guide or help guide
strategies and carry them out to achieve business results.
The quality of the performance of tasks while carrying out these strategies is what determines the overall
quality of the service delivery to the customer. It’s not enough to just deliver the service to the customer. It
must be delivered with a focus on effective collaboration, efficiency, and expedience across all
organizations, while at the same time reducing or avoiding cost. Each interaction, whether it’s between
internal organizations or with customer entities, is a touch point demanding quality in receivables.
As the speed of business continues to increase, more than profitability is at stake. How a company
delivers is as important to investors and customers as what the company delivers. Themes like flawless
execution, management excellence, quality first and zero-tolerance have become mainstream
methodologies to achieve perfection in delivering the service. However, flawless execution, for example,
is not about doing one’s job perfectly – it’s about the ability to overcome problems, hurdles, roadblocks,
setbacks, and other issues which are standing in the way of delivering results on time, on budget, and on
target.
In the IT and Enterprise Service industry, the meaning of flawless execution is broadened to include error
free performance and zero down time (unplanned outage) during network activity and deployments. It is
the baseline expectation. As a result of flawless execution and zero-tolerance adaptations, many a
technician has lost his job because of a network outage, and the stakes are getting higher. Network
service companies can also lose their service contracts because of an outage. So how do we achieve
perfection in performing flawless execution while delivering the service?
I believe the answer lies in striving for excellence in upstream service performance rather than relying
only on perfection in executing service deployment. I believe that achieving perfect service deliveries is a
result of many roles striving for excellence, not a target for an organization to hit. Let’s say I’m right, how
do we strive for excellence in service delivery, and what does it look like?
This white paper explores how to strive for excellence in performing our tasks while delivering the service
at the individual level, and leverage that effort across the organization to deliver the business. It touches
on the various differentiators between good performance and top talent, and how to maximize individual
effort while minimizing task overload.
Key Points:
• It is not enough to just deliver a service.
• How a company delivers is as important to investors and customers as what the company
delivers.
• Perfect service delivery is a result of upstream service excellence.
• Flawless execution is about the ability to overcome problems, hurdles, roadblocks, setbacks, and
other issues which are standing in the way of delivering results on time, on budget, and on target.
• Striving for service excellence is an individual effort, a team effort, an organizational effort, and a
company effort.
© 2011 Lars Ray -1-

6. Excellence by Design: Maximizing Performance by Striving for Excellence
Defining Excellence
Like so many words in the English language today, excellence is a word that is often hijacked in corporate
settings to be synonymous with a desired outcome, like perfection for example. It’s true, excellence in its
simplest of meanings is related to perfection, but it is certainly not synonymous. Here’s why.
Perfection is anything that is free from fault or defect, flawless. Regarding perfection, Psychology Today
states perfectionism may be the ultimate self-defeating behavior. It turns people into slaves of success—
but keeps them focused on failure, dooming them to a lifetime of doubt and depression. It also winds up
undermining achievement in the modern world.
Intentionally or not, when company executives seek or demand excellence in their business, it is very
often interpreted by the ranks as perfection. One reason for this misinterpretation lies in the abundance of
PowerPoint presentations explaining what is expected in reaching excellence, but rarely how. Excellence
is shown only as the quality of an outcome and a target to hit repeatedly, and it’s left up to the ranks to
figure out how.
Excellence, by contrast, is something of distinction that gives especial worth and value, such as a
standard of performance. Excellence is something to continuously strive for, and often acknowledged with
various awards, such as the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for …wait for
it…performance excellence.
Where perfection is static - it’s both flawless and free from fault or defect or it’s not, excellence is a
journey and more dynamic in nature. Excellence can be defined and measured in terms of what and how,
and by whom, giving it baselines for minimum expectations, yet rendering it free for creative
implementation.
Without listing excellence as a core operating value, the IT and Enterprise professional services company
Network Data Systems (NDS) successfully leverages excellence as a competitive advantage. NDS
President and CEO Al Siders states “We don’t start the job until we know what success looks like.”
Statements like this can seem obvious to the point of “duh!”, but by exploring deeper, it sets the stage in
defining the critical aspects of performance excellence in the relationship between company and client.
When engaged with a client, NDS partners with them to define what the client wants, which will do what
and by when, what resources are required by either party to accomplish the tasks, and what the outcome
should look like. These are all elements of defining the what. To the level of quality NDS delivers the
service is the how, and how well NDS performs the service defines for itself and its clients the level of
excellence it attains. This too is a part of defining what success looks like.
Although criteria for excellence can be defined by executives and organizations, it can never be achieved
until it is personalized and executed by the employee.
© 2011 Lars Ray -2-

7. Excellence by Design: Maximizing Performance by Striving for Excellence
The Excellence Journey
The day I determined to begin a true journey of excellence in my own work was the result of the worst day
in my professional career. As a manager of 25 engineers working on new product introduction teams, I
found myself being dressed down verbally by a very angry Product Manager. In his frustration with my
management style and my [perceived] limited concern for his business needs, he flat out told me in front
of my team that I was a costly bottleneck to the development and success of the project.
Needless to say, we worked out our differences, but that was the most honest, unsolicited, career-
shaking and well deserved feedback I had ever received. As a result, I have strived for performance
excellence ever since. I knew what the performance expectations were for my role, and not being a bottle
neck to others was not among them. I was at a loss as to how to reach a level of excellence when I didn’t
know what it looked like at my working level.
Defining Personalized Performance Standards
Generally speaking, performance standards need to be:
• Observable, specific indicators of success
• Meaningful, reasonable and attainable
• Describe "fully satisfactory" performance once trained
• Expressed in terms of Quantity, Quality, Timeliness, Cost, Safety, or Outcomes
Creating the criteria for personalized performance excellence then becomes a matter of asking and
answering questions from concentric perspectives; my role, then that of stakeholders, peers,
management, vendors, and customers. Some of the questions could look like these:
• What do bottlenecks look like while doing my job?
• What does a good job look like?
• How many or how much is needed?
• How long should it take?
• When are the results needed?
• How accurate or how good is acceptable?
• Are there behaviors that are expected in your department to promote teamwork, leadership,
creativity, customer service?
• What results would be considered satisfactory?
• What condition will exist when the duty is well performed?
• What is the difference between good and poor performance?
Doing these things once or twice does not attain excellence. It’s when these become the standards by
which one operates consistently that excellence is attained.
© 2011 Lars Ray -3-

8. Excellence by Design: Maximizing Performance by Striving for Excellence
Excellence is an Amplifier
When practicing excellence in the course of one’s duties, it serves as an amplifier to the team, the
department, the organization, the company, and ultimately the customer. As stated earlier, the choice to
perform with excellence is an intentional one – a change in one’s mindset and behaviors. Many a
customer would gladly trade down some of the quality of what is delivered if it meant the quality of how it
is delivered would rise.
From my personal experience, when I made the effort to perform with excellence, it influenced my team to
do so as well. This resulted in others within the department to take notice and perform similarly. It wasn’t
long after that I went from being a bottleneck to a manager of a team in which “the PMO cannot do
without”.
How did this occur? Let’s break it down. First, what were some of the observable, specific indicators of
success? Surprisingly, they were not hard deliverables. Rather, they were:
• Effective Collaboration
• Open and timely communication
• Accountability between teams
• Trust between organizations
• Reduced operational costs
• Reduced working stress
Second, were these success indicators meaningful, reasonable, and attainable? Absolutely!
Next, describe what “fully satisfactory” performance looks like to achieve success. In our case, it was a
series of things done to meet the needs of stakeholders that included:
• Returning voice messages within 24 hours of receiving them
• Replying to emails timely and thoughtfully
• Answering questions before they were asked in status reports
• Being proactive with communicating…even the bad news
• Developing a discipline of accountability
• Knowing the stakeholders needs and acting on them
Finally, we expressed our performance in the following manner:
• Quality: improved relationships between cross functional teams, improved deliverables, improved
employee morale, improved job satisfaction
• Quantity: more work produced through effective collaboration leading to greater project results
• Timeliness: the project delivered on schedule
• Cost: overall operational costs were reduced through improved communications, effective
collaboration, and accountability for outcomes.
• Outcomes: our individual performance excellence was amplified as a delivery team during the
deployment of our new product into customer’s networks.
Like a radio tower amplifying a transmission signal, our team soon became a ‘go to” team, an antenna
within our organization and to our customers.
© 2011 Lars Ray -4-

9. Excellence by Design: Maximizing Performance by Striving for Excellence
Excellence by Design
Excellence by design is an intentional endeavor to pursue. It is executed through choices and behaviors.
It doesn't afford an option of when to give 100 percent, but demands that we give our very best, everyday,
in everything we do. This doesn’t mean there is not room for perfection, but it should remain a natural
outcome of excellent work rather than a target to achieve. There still may very well be process errors and
mistakes made, but the chances of achieving flawless execution is more likely to occur than not when
everyone works from an excellence mindset.
Excellence by design can be a mandated value established by executive leadership and integrated as a
differentiating business strategy, but it takes personal commitment to step up and act on it. It extends
beyond our primary job. It must include the manner in which we interact with stakeholders, the way we
conduct and carry ourselves, and the quality of work we put into every single thing we do.
Excellence can be thought of as the tactic that drives how we operate. It is the development of a passion
for continuous improvement. Whenever we walk into our workplace, or log on to a customer’s network, we
simply must do our best. Everyone contributes and every discipline matters.
Businesses in all sectors today are undergoing a transformation of one kind or another. Business
transformation today is more often a series of smaller steps, gradually and in a controlled way, leading to
a new desired state. A key initiative to achieving that new desired state is by embracing a commitment to
continuous improvement, and excellence by design is the first step towards that commitment.
Network Data Systems is an example as to what committed to continuous improvement looks like. Is it
perfect? That depends on who you ask. But you do not get a client list that includes Third Fifth Bank, US
Cellular, AT&T, and Verizon without integrating excellence by design into the business model. At NDS,
neither Excellence nor Commitment to Continuous Improvement is listed as one of their core operating
values. It is instead embraced at the employee level and leveraged as the primary means of delivering
the business with flawless execution.
As implied earlier, flawless execution is the end result of doing many things very well. Things like
providing an environment that promotes full engagement; alignment and cascading of the plan; ensuring
clear expectations and accountability; continuously communicating with and involving the team; providing
necessary system and skills support; and gathering and acting on meaningful real-time metrics are the
big ticket items. But it also includes the smaller elements like how one handles email; stakeholder
engagement; owning a task until you must hand off; and providing feedback when warranted.
Doing these things very well every time is excellence by design.
© 2011 Lars Ray -5-

10. Excellence by Design: Maximizing Performance by Striving for Excellence
About the Author
Lars Ray is a contract consultant for Network Data Systems, specializing in project management for Tier
1 mobility clients. Lars has authored two other White Papers; “Strategic Program Management – A Case
for Increased Efficiencies”, and “Dynamic Value – The Art & Science of Added Value”. Along with a
successful career in the telecommunications industry, Lars holds a master’s certificate in Crucial
Conversations, and is a featured contributor in “Everyone Communicates, Few Connect” by leadership
expert and author Dr. John Maxwell.
Acknowledgements
Cover Design: Fractal Image “Creation Shapes 1” © 2002 Synaptic Junctions – MARS. Used by
permission.
© 2011 Lars Ray -6-