Arrows and loops – the evolution of our management system
As an organization develops its ability to identify and solve problems and becomes more mature in its understanding of lean thinking, it is natural for its management system – and the visual management that supports it – to evolve as well. This has been our experience at Dreamplace hotels and resorts.
Our week begins with what we call the “newscast”, a weekly meeting aimed at ensuring that our seven hotels run properly. Representatives from each department give the team a brief update on events and problems in their area, and any “red” (problem) that is highlighted is then assigned to an ad-hoc team that must solve it by a given date. This is the tool we use to make sure things flow smoothly between departments, from sales to IT and maintenance.
The great advantage of this management tool is that it gives us an overview of what is happening in the organization, at group level, without going into too much detail about each corrective action. That is why we call it the newscast. It is a great tool, but it falls short when it comes to knowing what is going on in each specific hotel. That is why we need to zoom in on each of the sections of the value stream (we call it the “arrow” or “pointer”) to dig deeper into each area of the business and the problems they face. For example, in the sales department, we have our own “arrow” that allows us to distribute all the information and ensure that no problem goes unnoticed (this also prevents cherry-picking which sales problems to solve).
Alongside the group arrow, we have another huge – and somewhat intimidating – board that we call the Hotel Tube. It seeks to bring together two realities: the group's macro-KPIs and the individual hotels' micro-KPIs. Each row corresponds to a hotel, while the columns represent cross-functional work areas covering each stage of the guest journey. In other words, the Hotel Tube follows the guest journey through our process. It generates great conversations and an enormous amount of very useful data, but – again – it is not good for getting a specific view or for obtaining direction on countermeasures. When you have such a large board to look at and so many problems popping up everywhere, it can be difficult to focus on what really matters. That is where the next iteration of our management system came from.
Problem solving is a two-way street
With the Hotel Tube, we discovered that there was a major disconnect between the group arrow and the hotels' arrow, and we realized that we needed a management tool that would bring these two worlds together. That is how the loops (“bucles”, in Spanish) came about, aiming to enable real interaction between the group and the individual hotels for joint problem solving (mainly in the short and medium term).
We are still in a phase of experimentation, trial and error, and, for now, we have activated only six loops – sales, investments, safety and maintenance, time management, IT and people development. Our goal is to make the circuits increasingly agile, to be faster at tackling the “reds” and to gradually streamline the Hotel Tube (which they are eventually intended to replace). What makes the loops so effective is that they recognize that everything revolves around conversations: the guest journey, mapped in the Hotel Tube, is always at the center of our discussions, of course, but the loops allow us to stay focused on the actions we need to take to generate the value our guests expect.
Let me share some examples of how the loops work: first, let's look at the investments loop. As a group, we obviously have an investment plan, but previously there was no visibility in the different hotels about when each investment was planned and, therefore, no real structure for deploying the investment. With the loops, we not only have clear information about the structured investment plans that are shared quarterly with all hotels, but also a way of communicating with them to ensure that the investment is made as efficiently as possible. Imagine that one of our hotels asks the group for a certain investment – “we need new mattresses in 50 of our rooms”. With the loops, we can approve that investment and ask the hotel to lay the groundwork – for example, “we are going to replace the 50 mattresses, but I need you to block those rooms for two days”. Another example is the IT loop, which has proven very useful for prioritizing tickets and better managing IT work in the hotels (Wi-Fi is a constant problem in some of them). This minimizes the cost of analyzing the problem and the “communication noise” generated by the flood of calls and e-mails we used to rely on to agree on an action plan.
Every week, the hotel directors collect all the data from their hotels (sometimes we help them, because we measure many KPIs centrally) on the problems that occurred, open tickets and information from their area managers. For each problem, a corrective task is launched within the conversation in the loop – to ensure that communication remains a two-way street. We are investing heavily in digitalization to support data collection and analysis – not with the aim of replacing our visual management boards, but of feeding them.
Currently, the newscast and the department “arrow” meetings take place on Monday – to start the week with a clear idea of the situation –, and the subgroups in charge of solving the problems take the rest of the week to do so. If we can be more dynamic in capturing and analyzing data and ensure smoother interaction between the group and the hotels, we can shorten this improvement cycle and become more agile at problem solving as an organization. Ultimately, that is the idea behind the loops.
