Transforming telecom with quality improvements

This month, we continue our focus on quality and look further into how telecom ensures quality in its products and services, key projects, and staff. What are you doing that reflects your commitment to quality in your department? Does your hospital see telecom as synonymous with quality?

Let us know what you think? Contact us at marketing@vericom.net.

Quality Counts in Telecom
By Mike Mitchell

You’ve heard the slogans: “Quality is Job One,” and “Quality Goes In Before the Name Goes On.” These slogans imply high quality products and services. But “quality” is a relative term. It can be high or low. What slogan would best describe the quality of products and services your department provides?

Let’s examine three areas where quality counts:

• Products
• Services and projects
• Personnel

Products
What level of quality are the products your department provides to your customers? Everyone is searching for the highest quality products, but frequently high quality is sacrificed due to budget constraints. From patient room telephones to printers, customer satisfaction is inherently tied to the perceived quality of the products installed, and the telecom department is often judged by the equipment supplied to the end user.

Befriend your hospital purchasing manager. My experience has been that if you establish a good working relationship with him, he will work with you to the best of his ability to buy the best value products (unless you’re tied to a specific product by contract).

Services and Projects
As a manager, this is an area where you can have total control. Your department can really shine or fall short. If you have service level agreements (SLAs) with the user departments, how do they rate the quality of service? Are projects on time and within budget? At my hospital, the CIO emailed a survey to the department heads annually. The objective was to measure the quality of our projects and services. My department was rated in several areas including: response time, accuracy of repair, and professionalism of staff.

I recommend you create your own survey to evaluate your customer’s satisfaction with the quality of projects and services. It might show areas that need improvement as well as identify those services that rate at the highest quality level.

Personnel
If you’re as fortunate as I was to have a great technical staff with very good people skills, quality will be no problem. If not, this can be the most challenging area for increasing quality. Some technicians and analysts have developed wonderful interpersonal skills as their technical skills have increased. Others have not.

I recommend you ask for guidance from Human Resources or your performance improvement staff. They may have a customer service or communication skills course already in place for clinicians that can also be used for your technical staff. A technical person can benefit by understanding that quality involves both technical and interpersonal training. It can also be positive reinforcement for your staff members who do understand the importance of people skills.

- Mike

Dear Mike: I'm a Telecom Analyst, and like my job, but I'm getting bored and somewhat complacent. What can I do to take the next steps in my career?

Mike's Answer:I have a friend who was an Analyst who wanted to go to the next level. He enrolled in an Oracle Certification course at the local technical college. After completing the course, he was offered a rewarding position as a DBA at twice his previous salary.

Although not everyone will experience this kind of career success, here are some recommendations. If you have good communication skills and enjoy working with people, think about pursuing management. Good technical managers are hard to find. Take some leadership, personnel, and finance courses at your local college. You may also want to look into a project management certification course or boot camp. Other possibilities are email or database administration.

If communication is not a particularly strong suit of yours, look into the operations or programming areas. There is still team work and employee interaction but almost always on a technical level. If you prefer to focus on your technical abilities, get the training you need to move into a network analyst or network administrator position. Learning a programming language or two might allow you to use your creativity and apply it "technically."

Have a question for Mike? Email him at mike@telexcellence.com.

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