Here’s an extract from my new book The Cisco Way.

Explore the media coverage at http://www.theciscoway.com

Repeatability
San Jose, California, Cisco Campus, Building 17
As we accelerated into our new (fiscal) year, one of the
first and important priorities was to assemble the various
advanced-services virtual teams (ASVTs) to review
their previous year’s progress and performance. This
was an annual ritual. The members of the various virtual
teams joined this meeting (virtually) from across
the globe as the San Jose–based team members met
here in person that year.
There were twenty-one advanced-services virtual
teams that year, each focused on different technologies
ranging from MPLS to Carrier Ethernet to campus
switching. The purpose of these teams was to
capture, disseminate, and promote the use of global
best practices to make the deployment and support
of these technologies (and solutions) quick, easy, and
robust. The sponsor managers for each of the twelve core
virtual teams were allocated five minutes each to
present their scorecards for the last fiscal year. Their presentation focused on the key statistics and performance on leading practices or ICs (intellectual
content) as they were called. We measured and rated
them on three categories: capture (IC creation or new
content), share (content shared across the global virtual
team), and reuse (content downloads). Individual
and (virtual) team awards in each of those categories
crowned the meeting. The recognized teams went
back with a renewed enthusiasm to repeat their performance
that year. The others left motivated with a
vigor to do more to make it to the winners’ stand the
following year.
The leading practices became the foundation for
building self-healing capabilities into the network and
automation of incident-management processes. This
was a very simple and yet powerful mechanism to harness
the power of the global intellectual capacity of
the services business (and people) at Cisco to drive
repeatability of proven leading practices.

This is the third of, what I call, the
three operational levers to stake out a profitability
leadership position.

Learn more about the three operational levers and strategies to deploy them for higher profits in my new book “The Cisco Way”.  http://www.theciscoway.com