It’s important for tribes to prioritize and implement strategic operational objectives that realize the highest return on investment with minimal resources.
The ROI can be immediate by assessing the benefit and feasibility to execute within the given business constraints, according to John Meacham, the vice president of marketing at Cache Creek Casino Resort in Northern California.
It helps people through a business methodology and can change the way people think and give them something of value that they can implement the next day.
Jeff Gray, CEO of Lean Revisions and a Raving Partner of business optimization, said every organization has pain points and those issues can be identified and prioritized.
“You can’t fix everything at once,” Gray said. “We have to prioritize what we can knock out in one week, two weeks or a month and what that ROI is going to be and help identify what resources to allocate and start seeing some instant ROI on the things you’re trying to tackle.”
Meacham said one of the difficulties for operation leaders in a casino is getting alignment because everyone wants to focus on their own idea.
Decide Which Tasks to Tackle
A decision has to be made whether to tackle the most difficult tasks that can take months to realize benefits or the easiest ones, which can help generate momentum, Gray said.
“You can go after low-hanging fruit and expand people’s understanding of the methodology and see some results getting that momentum,” Gray said. “That way you are continuously improving.”
The questions need to ask how much time do you have, what your resources and what is your KPI, a quantifiable measurement of performance over time.
“All of these you might want to begin to think about,” Gray said. “Something might be a huge problem, but it might take you six months to fix. Do we tackle that first and put all of our resources into it? Does it align with our business strategy?”
Gathering and Prioritizing List
It starts with gathering a list of issues to address and prioritizing the importance.
Communication tends to be a big issue that people want to address – an issue that means something different to all of us. If that becomes a priority, is feasible and ties in to KPI, it’s important to work on that, Gray said.
“We want to know how things impact our business and customers, our workforce and strategic objectives of the organization,” Gray said.
How It Works
Gray uses an impact and feasibility matrix – an Excel spreadsheet that takes a number of potential projects and potential problems.
It could look at training a workforce and its impact on gaming revenue, the customer experience and retaining workers – the three areas casinos want to focus on. A template would say if the property worked on a training program, would that have a low, medium or high impact on increasing gaming revenue.
It would look at if training a workforce would improve the customer experience. It would be the same scenario of assigning a weight from low-to-high.
“It will plot potential projects on a grid and tell you what is more feasible and the biggest bang you are going to get for your buck to start executing these projects,” Gray said. “You know the resources and what the issues are. You put your team together and start seeing some ROI.”
For example, implementing workforce training to increase gaming revenue would be viewed as having a medium impact. Doing that training for improving the customer experience would be plotted as high. The training would be viewed as high for retaining a highly skilled workforce. It would also see a ranking of retaining the workforce impacts gaming revenue and the customer experience, which would be viewed as high.
The template can be used to look at a variety of issues from time management to streamlining a program launch and many other impacts.
To make it feasible, there needs to be rapid completion of the project of less than three months, Gray said.
“We want to have a rapid realization of benefits, whether that’s revenue or something else to customize,” Gray said. “You have to ask if the process is easy to change. If it’s too complex, it will take longer and need more resources.”
Gray said it takes every potential project and plots the impact to the business and feasibility of completing it promptly.
It needs to be done as a group so everyone has buy in and there can be a focus on a common vision, Gray said.
“You can say work on this one first and see some rapid execution and results,” Gray said. “Don’t throw all your eggs in one basket and don’t throw all of your resources in one basket.”
