Executive Summary: Group #2, Sleepers, came across a problem with the communication system at Hudson, Montgomery, and Kalivoda. Calls received by the firm�s receptionist were taking too much time to transfer to their intended party, mainly because the intended party was difficult to locate when they weren�t in their office. Sleepers decide to try and improve the communication between office employees, specifically secretaries, in order to decrease the amount of time and the number of steps it took to transfer calls. As a result, we installed an in/out board in the secretaries� offices at Hudson, Montgomery, and Kalivoda, and observed and analyzed the results.

The Problem:

Elizabeth Libby, a member of our project group, works as a receptionist for Hudson, Montgomery and Kalivoda, a three-member law firm that employees three secretaries, two law clerks, one paralegal, and one other associate-in-training who is fresh out of law school. Elizabeth�s job as receptionist is to, of course, receive. Elizabeth�s job tasks include answering all incoming telephone calls, taking messages, transferring calls to the attorneys� secretaries and the other employees, and greeting clients. As stated before, one of Elizabeth�s primary job tasks is to receive all incoming calls and transfer the call to the proper individuals. Usually this individual is a secretary of one of the three associates, and usually this transfer is very rapid and the client is connected. However, there are times when Elizabeth cannot reach the intended secretary, and that�s where all the fun begins. As our flowchart shows, Elizabeth might have to take as many as six steps to locate a secretary, and this is very time-consuming because with each step Elizabeth must wait a few seconds to see if the call is picked up by someone before transferring it onto another location. Some calls can take as long as two minutes to transfer. Two minutes?! A two-minute wait on a phone call might not seem like a long time, but it is, especially to a client who has important business to attend to. Elizabeth presented her problem to our group, and so we sat down to figure out the underlying problem with the process, brainstorm solutions to improve the process, come up with one main solution, implement that solution, and analyze the results. We decided, using various analytical tools like the flowchart and the fishbone diagram, that the problem lied in a breakdown of communication between each secretary and the others in the office. In essence, a secretary would go on break, go on lunch, make some copies, etc. without letting anybody, especially Elizabeth, know where she was. We set out to improve the communication process between the secretaries in order to eliminate those instances where clients are put on hold for long periods of time. We believed that if we came up with a solution that would help Elizabeth more efficiently locate secretaries, we would see a reduction in the number of calls that take more than one minute to transfer.

The solution:

Elizabeth collected some data for three days while she worked as a receptionist. Her data, which covered a three four-hour shifts, consisted of the time the call was received, the intended party, the secretary of the intended party ( when the call was for an attorney ), the time elapsed between reception and transfer to intended party, whether or not the the intended party was found, and the number of transfers by Elizabeth. Her results showed us that while most calls took only one or two transfers to reach the intended party, there were numerous instances where calls would be transferred four or more times. A closer look at the data reveals that for the three days total, 48 of 136 (35%) calls took longer than one minute to be transferred to the intended receiver. For an average shift, it breaks down into 16 "long" calls per 46 calls, which means that 35% of HMK�s callers are put on hold for more than one minute. Due to the nature of the problem and the time constraints we faced, we decided that our solution would have to be extremely cheap, easy to set up within the law office, and also easy to observe the results produced. The most obvious solution became our best one: an in-out board. At first, the board was going to consist of a listing of all the office employees, including the firm�s attorneys, and then a listing by each name of the possible locations the person could be in (in, out, copy room, library). We soon realized that this might be too much for one board, and not convenient for people in the office who weren�t located on the same floor as the board, so the board couldn�t be for everybody. After looking at the pre-data again, we realized that the majority of the calls were placed to attorneys, whose calls go through their secretaries. Voila! The board would be for the secretaries and the attorneys ?!. Nope. We figured the attorneys would not use the board as often as intended, and the consequences of the board being wrong, showing an attorney in the wrong place, could be disastrous. Finally, it was decided that the board would have only the three secretaries names and their possible locations. The bord would hang on the third floor of the office in a place where all the secretaries could see it and refer to it if asked by Elizabeth. Each secretary would place a tack on a card next to their names, and by doing that, would designate their present location. If a secretary was out of her office, another secretary could refer to the board and tell Elizabeth where to transfer the call. We were set, the board was hung in the office. Now we needed to see the results.

The results

Time was getting short, so the post-data was only going to cover a one-day period. Elizabeth once again collected data while working one of her four hour shifts. This time, the results were different. Of the 46 calls that Elizabeth received on her shift, only 7 of those calls were transferred 3 or more times before reaching the intended party, and only one of these calls were transferred 4 times. Of the 22 calls that went to secretaries, only 4 of those calls took more than 2 transfers. Most important to us, not one call took longer than one minute to reach the person it was intended for. In fact, most calls took less than 30 seconds to be delivered. Since we had set as our goal to reduce the number of calls that took more than one minute to transfer, we decided that the board must have helped improve the communication between the secretaries in the office.

Conclusion

Even if only for one day, it seemed the board was helpful and very useful in HMK�s office. Obviously the board, if left up for a long period of time, and if several days worth of data were collected, might not produce results as phenomenal as the ones produced for that one day. We do conclude, however, that an in/out board such as the one we placed in HMK�s office, would simplify the process it takes for Elizabeth to transfer calls to others in the office. Now if we just had enough time and money to buy everyone beepers . . .