SharePoint: How Can Companies Kill the Things that Kill Productivity? – Part 4: Did You See That?

Guest Author: Steve Russell
Global 360 Inc.

"Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it." – Lou Holtz

For the fourth topic in the Kill the Things that Kill Productivity series, I’m going to discuss how to motivate people and help them maintain a positive attitude about their work because without it, there is no way they will be highly productive.

Let’s assume you hire people with the ability to do the jobs you intend for them to do. Now how do you inspire them and make sure they show up with a positive attitude day in and day out? For many companies it starts with the corporate culture and creating a sense of purpose throughout the organization. But beyond that – at an individual level – what gets people out of bed in the morning? For the majority of people, it comes down to financial incentive, recognition for a job well done and the opportunity for advancement.

The training, systems, and policies put in place to improve productivity are all concentrated on making participants in a business process more efficient at performing their work and increasing their output. At the same time, companies must also motivate those participants and understand the attitudes they have toward their work. At risk is a low morale work environment that will always result in lagging productivity and under performance. 

High-performing, high-capacity individuals – the kind that all organizations seek to hire – look for opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities and excel in their careers. When an organization is unable to differentiate and reward the performance of its best workers, their motivation is suppressed. Over time, an individual’s output settles to the organization’s prevailing acceptable level, which is based on the under-performance of an unmotivated team.
 
By focusing on user feedback and goal management, companies can disrupt this cycle and get more productivity out of their people and organizations. In order to do this information needs to be collected from applications and business processes. Simple indicators around how much work is getting done tends to be numbers of transactions a user performs, relative difficulty of these transactions, how much idle time a user is consuming, etc. While most process management and workflow systems provide some mechanism to capture and report on this data, not all processes are automated with a process management system. And those that do don’t always capture everything that is relevant to a user or a team.

We advocate using a separate set of tracking tables that multiple applications can pump data into. For example, by capturing an event when a user starts a business transaction (e.g. open a new account) and another event when the user completes it, you now have a rudimentary set of events that can show work completed, how long it took to get it done, who did it and when they did it. This can quickly grow as more complex reporting and work patterns need to be reflected. But the key is that by having a simple event format and an easy way for applications to create those events, most of the data needed for good reporting and goal management can be captured.

Next is where SharePoint (with a little help from SQLServer) starts to shine. With metrics by user and team on work backlogs, processing time, work completed, etc. very simple dashboards can be delivered via standard web parts that keep users informed of how they are doing, how their team is doing, how much work is outstanding and how they are performing against their service level goals.

This is hugely motivational and focusing for people. Knowing what’s going on and how you are doing is a simple but valuable way to keep productivity high.

SharePoint also provides some very sophisticated capabilities for dashboarding, reporting and analysis via Excel Services and PerformancePoint. Coupled with a rich base of data, and sometimes using SQLServer Analysis Services, everyone can view information that they need to keep them most informed about their business operations. SharePoint 2010 does a lot to advance these capabilities and makes it easier than ever to get this information out to users.

In my last posting, I talked about giving users control over the tools necessary to adapt to change on their own without heavy IT involvement. Reporting and information is probably the most common example of this need. Someone with good excel skills can easily create views of data and publish them out to users without a lot of IT assistance or development skills.

This is a pretty big topic and this post only covers one aspect of the opportunity here. Giving users real-time views into their performance is one way to focus and motivate people. This combined with other tools such as just in time training can make for a user and workplace experience that can greatly contribute to productivity.

The next article in the series is entitled Rework/Poor Work and discusses the cost and opportunities associated with catching mistakes early and figuring out how to make sure that they don’t happen again.

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.