The Redeployment Charter
A regional auto insurer's claims unit processes 4,200 claims a month with 22 FTE. The VP sponsor wants the charter signed this week with the goal stated as: "Cut average cycle time 40% and redeploy 6 FTE by the end of Q3." The process owner says most of the delay is a three-day wait for medical records from external providers; the Black Belt's stratified data confirms 62% of cycle time sits in that wait and another 18% in re-keying data between two systems. The team has four months, one part-time analyst, and no IT budget. Two of the six named FTE are the only staff trained on the legacy re-keying screen. Baseline cycle time is 11.4 days; if the records wait were removed entirely, cycle time would fall to about 4.3 days.
1. Critique the sponsor's goal statement and rewrite it so it is usable as a charter goal. Show the arithmetic that supports your target.
Read the worked answer
What is wrong with the statement
- Not measurable as written - "cycle time" has no start and stop point. Define it: first customer contact to claim decision released.
- Two goals in one - cycle-time reduction and headcount reduction are different outcomes with different owners. Headcount is a business result, not a process metric the team controls.
- Not achievable within scope - the arithmetic below shows 40% is outside the team's reach.
- No baseline ownership - 11.4 days is stated as a fact but the team has not validated the data source.
The arithmetic
- Total baseline: 11.4 days.
- Out of scope (external records wait): 62% × 11.4 = 7.07 days.
- In scope: 11.4 − 7.07 = 4.33 days, of which re-keying is 18% × 11.4 = 2.05 days.
- A 40% cut is 4.56 days. The entire in-scope content of the process is only 4.33 days, so the target cannot be met even if the team eliminated all internal work.
- Realistic in-scope target: halve re-keying (2.05 → 1.03) and remove one internal handoff day → 11.4 − 1.02 − 1.0 ≈ 9.4 days, an 18% reduction.
Rewrite "Reduce mean claim cycle time (first contact to decision released) from a validated baseline of 11.4 days to 9.4 days or less by [date], for claims in the [named] segment, without increasing rework rate or complaint volume. The external records wait (7.1 days of the total) is a dependent issue owned by [name], with a separate action plan."
Why this version works: single primary metric, operational definition, validated baseline, a target the team can actually influence, and a named constraint that prevents gaming.
2. The team cannot influence the external records wait. How should that portion of the process be handled in the charter - and what is the risk if it is simply declared out of scope?
Read the worked answer
Do not silently exclude it. The wait is 62% of total cycle time, so any metric the team reports will be dominated by something it does not control. Options, in order of preference:
- Carve it out as a linked workstream. Keep the primary metric in-scope, but charter a parallel action with a named sponsor-level owner, a date, and its own metric (average days awaiting records). The team supplies the data and the analysis; someone else acts.
- Change the metric denominator. Report "internal processing time" alongside total cycle time so improvement is visible even when the external wait drifts.
- Negotiate a service-level agreement with the provider interface (e.g., chase at day 1 and day 2) if the process owner owns that interface.
Risks of a clean exclusion
- The team improves 2 days, the external wait grows by 3 days, total cycle time worsens, and the project is judged a failure.
- The improvement is invisible to the customer and to the sponsor, eroding support before the Control phase.
- Declaring the biggest driver "not our problem" signals the team is optimizing its own boundary rather than the process.
Rule to apply: scope defines what the team changes, not what it measures or reports. You can exclude a cause from your action list; you cannot exclude it from your problem statement.
3. Before signing, what must be negotiated and documented with the sponsor? Give the specific items and the risk each one mitigates.
Read the worked answer
| Item to settle | Why it matters / risk avoided |
|---|---|
| The target number | Prevents a target that is arithmetically impossible in scope; the 4.56-day vs 4.33-day calculation is the lever. |
| What "redeploy 6 FTE" actually means | Is it attrition-only? Which roles? Will displaced staff be retrained? Two of the six are the only legacy-portal-trained staff - cutting them first breaks the process you are trying to fix. Reframe as "release 6 FTE of capacity," realized through attrition. |
| Data access and validation | The analyst is part-time and 11.4 days is unverified. Secure read access to the workflow system and time to validate before the Measure gate. |
| Decision rights on the legacy portal | No IT budget means any fix is a workaround (screen redesign, double-entry elimination, batch upload). Confirm the team may change procedure without a change request. |
| Owner for the records wait | Converts the biggest driver into someone's accountable action rather than a footnote. |
| Definition of project success at close-out | Agree now whether success is the target, a statistically significant improvement, or a sustained one; ambiguity here is what turns green projects red at audit. |
Judgement point: the sponsor is asking for a signature this week. Signing an unachievable charter to preserve the relationship trades a short-term comfort for four months of misaligned work. The professional move is to bring the arithmetic to the signing meeting, not after it.