Other department negatively impacting mine

[flipent]

I am really struggling to get a positive resolution to an issue which has been going on for about a year now.

One of the departments in the business seems to operate to a completely different level of urgency or consequence to the rest of us and it is getting really frustrating. Most of the complaints for my team (manage a small team) and from collages in other departments are linked to the behavior and attitude of this one department.

I have discussed with the department head a number of times but nothing seems to change. I do not want to go to the MD with what feels like school yard complaints but this is impacting moral across the business. I've exhausted all of the tools I would usually use to try and resolve this but feel like I'm banging my head against a brick wall!

The main complaints are :

• Certain team members (some worse than others) take zero accountability for errors and do not learn from their mistakes.
• They create additional work for everyone else (are frequently described as lazy)
• Seem incapable of following simple business processes and appear confused by processes which are documented and clear to everyone else.

They are not unpleasant people - just do not come across as very capable and it is having a negative impact.

Would welcome any ideas you may have for trying to get them on the same page as the rest of the business!

You collate data to depersonalise it.
X complaints received this month, 90% of them regarding y team, 80% about poor service etc. Some pie charts are always fun. Circulate this to other Line managers including layer above to show root cause analysis.

This.

Make it data based. Highlight the issue. Document causes fairly and clearly. Where possible suggest solutions (ensuring x process is followed would reduce complaints).

Yes, agree that data is the best way to tackle it - my concern is that there is no data collated currently.

So I can collate the issues, but doesn't that make it look like I'm on a witch hunt?

So how are you receiving complaints?

Surely you can put together at least, in Jan we had x emails of complaint from department x etc. Reviewing the complaints we found x% to be related to y.

If you don't have the data to hand, you need to create it or start logging it.

Also, if this is an area of business concern that the business needs to focus on, and currently they don't collate data in this area to evaluate performance, then you need to and you need to highlight why they ought to monitor this going forward.

When I say complaints, I mean internal grumblings about this department.

So for example, they are one stage in a process. It always seems to be the section they are responsible for that doesn't follow the process or isn't done properly. So my team will have to go back and get them to make the changes.

To track it, I would have to set something up specifically to monitor each process and how many errors were made at each point. While I am capable of doing this, I look after one department in the chain and I'm concerned it will look like I'm stepping out of my lane.

The errors are impacting internal departments, not any clients - so there isn't significant concern from the business other than the individuals who are having to pick up on the issues.

Having raised it with the department head, I would have hoped they would have started tracking and managing the problems but this hasn't been the case.

So the head hasn't taken action, can you ask them when the issues will be resolved?

is it a charity by any chance??

No, not a Charity.
I am starting to feel like it sounds like I have a vendetta against some of the team, but they are just not performing to the same standard as everyone else.

I naïvely thought I wouldn't have to keep hounding a senior manager for improvements to their department performance.