A few years ago, I put one of my subordinates in charge of a cross-departmental project to improve the user experience. It was one of the company’s most important strategic initiatives that year and was crucial to both the organization’s performance and my own. So I gave the project manager an ultimatum: failure was not an option.
He was diligent and took the assignment very seriously. Yet after nearly two months, the project had made little visible progress. One day, I called him in to find out why. It turned out that the problem lay with the Finance Department.
To improve customer satisfaction, we needed to adjust some of our after-sales policies — for example, by extending the period for unconditional returns and exchanges and issuing coupons to dissatisfied customers.
Naturally, such measures would improve the project’s performance indicators. But they would also increase costs, which could hurt the company’s year-end financial results — and keeping those results on target was one of the Finance Department’s most important priorities that year.
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