SharePoint: How Can Companies Kill the Things that Kill Productivity? – Part 1: Doing the Same Thing Over and Over

Guest Author: Steve Russell
Global 360 Inc.

For this first topic in the Kill the Things that Kill Productivity series, I’m going to talk about a trend in how work is performed in a growing number of organizations. For years, business processes were segmented into discrete steps and carried out in a specific sequence with different specialists performing each step. Today leading companies are applying LEAN and Six Sigma methodologies to their processes and eliminating or automating the busy work. More importantly, they are merging multiple job responsibilities into single roles to be performed by generalists rather than specialists*.

In order to accomplish this transformation, companies have successfully overcome one of the most pervasive things that can kill productivity – repetitive work. By automating the mundane, reoccurring activities within a process, workers not only have more time to focus on value-added work (i.e., serving customers, analyzing information and making decisions), they also do not need to be trained in all the specialized minutia required to perform those mundane tasks. In other words, they can truly function as generalists.

The work required to fulfill one’s responsibilities consists of different activities varying in nature from operational to intellectual work often with a degree of repetition from one customer, transaction, or event to another. Productivity can be greatly enhanced by offloading repetitive work activities to a process management-enabled engine and concentrating users’ efforts on the unique aspects of each transaction. Many operational work activities can be easily automated with standard SharePoint integration tooling such as Business Connectivity Services and workflow, while intellectual work may require more sophisticated technologies such as knowledge sharing, business rules engines and scoring models. The important point is that automation opportunities exist for both types of work.

Operational work is typically the type of work that can be easily automated – if not eliminated entirely. For instance, when a life insurance underwriter receives a new application she must first order lab work, request medical records, and setup an applicant file. With a SharePoint case-oriented solution, both the lab order and the medical records can be requested automatically, and a workflow can automatically match the associated documents with the appropriate electronic applicant folder (the case) in SharePoint – eliminating the need to manually create a paper file. Since the file is now electronic, distributing it, tracking it, and letting multiple people access it simultaneously, all add up to productivity gains.
 
With BCS (or other integration technologies) you can enable legacy systems to publish data and transactions into SharePoint so they can be used within SharePoint-hosted applications. This preserves the transactionality and corporate governance of the legacy system while enabling that same application to be enhanced through the productivity tools provided by SharePoint. By removing legacy systems, and replacing them with a task-based application that gives users access to all of the information and steps needed to complete their work, you have removed most of what makes people specialists. By eliminating the need to navigate legacy systems and delivering the application through SharePoint, users can be provided with a more intuitive interface that includes SharePoint productivity tools such as discussions, tasks, document management, announcements or other SharePoint features that enhance users’ productivity.

How to get started? As archaic as it seems, something as simple as time-motion monitoring of people while they work is a great way to understand where to focus. A simple three step process involves:

1. Identifying the processes that people participate in.
2. Map out the task flows they perform in each of those processes.
3. Identify for each activity within the task flows, the activities that are repetitive, don’t require decision making or otherwise add little value.

You don’t have to study everyone. A small cross-section of users is sufficient to surface the non-value add work that everyone has to do in order to complete their work. There are other (and certainly more sophisticated) process improvement methodologies out there. But the point here is not to re-engineer your business processes (we’ll cover that in a later article), but rather make the ones you have more productive. By keeping it simple you can identify and incrementally automate the high return activities. It is this repetitive work that once automated can significantly enhance productivity.

What we have found is that by doing this, the task flows that used to have 30 user performed tasks might now have 5 or 10. And simpler task flows enable more people to perform them. This is how organizations transform people from transactional specialists into customer-facing generalists. Using SharePoint to simplify and empower how users get their jobs done is an excellent way to kill one of the biggest productivity killers – - repetitive, low value work.

In the next article I plan to explore the productivity costs in missing and incomplete information. Playing the Waiting Game looks at how to link processes, people and information to make sure everyone has what they need and when they need it.

*Le Clair, C., Moore, C. (2009). Dynamic Case Management – An Old Idea Catches New Fire. Forrester Research.

Guest Author: Steve Russell
Global 360 Inc.

Steve Russell is the SVP of Research and Development and CTO for Global 360 Inc., based in Dallas Texas. He has over 25 years of experience as a technologist developing enterprise process and document management software platforms. Steve has extensive experience with large, mission critical systems development and deployment within Fortune 2000 companies.