SharePoint: How Can Companies Kill the Things that Kill Productivity? – Part 5: Something Went Wrong

Guest Author: Steve Russell
Global 360 Inc.

About the only thing worse than doing work slowly is doing it over. When work is done incorrectly the impact can range from embarrassing to damaging, and it inhibits the productivity of other downstream participants. The extra effort to fix mistakes often exceeds the initial work effort by two to three times as the organization has to figure out where a mistake was made, redo it correctly, and then deal with the ramifications (customer service, financial reporting).

As organizations deploy business-critical applications onto SharePoint, a natural benefit is to use the collaborative and task management capabilities within SharePoint. The opportunity is not just to automate something that is currently done manually, but to improve how it is done through automation. Too often we focus on automating the current way of doing things without stepping back and asking if automation can open up other ways to get things done. One challenge that we constantly see is that people tend to automate processes based on how they are supposed to work, not necessarily how they do work. In manual environments, mistakes are made, work has to be redone and maybe as a result, a customer situation has to be cleaned up. By adding in some fairly simple work management concepts, SharePoint applications can not only automate the tasks people are expected to perform, but can help manage and avoid the pitfalls that create costly mistakes.

The focus is to design applications that ensure that the right person is working on the right task at the right time. Many mistakes and rework are simply a result of not having the best possible person performing the needed task. This sounds easy but in most business applications it is not.

There are three key considerations that can be helpful here. The first is to match the requirements of the task to the available people. In a manual environment, this tends to be pretty simplistic. There might be a team to handle a certain type of customer transaction, but it is challenging to make those qualifiers very complex simply because no one has the time to figure it out for each task and then determine who to give the task to.

For example, in a bank a loan underwriting team processes loan applications. That team may have smaller sub-teams that deal with different types of loans. But that is usually about as granular as it gets. But with an automated system, we can now tag work with more helpful pieces of information. For example, the size of the loan, foreign language skills required, expertise in the type of business that is requesting the loan, geographic location, etc. By expanding the amount of information that we capture about each loan request we now have more information to base our task selection on. And once that same set of information is used to describe the people performing the tasks, we now have a simple framework for matching tasks to people.

While this is a good start on getting work processed more effectively, we can do more. The second consideration has to do with matching the person to the value of the task. By value we mean value to the organization. Organizations place value on different things. It may be the profitability of the transaction, the value of the customer, or the value to their brand. Prioritizing tasks based on value gives another level of task management that is often overlooked. But by doing so, we can now match task based not just on the skills needed, but also the competency of the people performing the task and maybe even the policies under which the task is going to be performed. So for a highly valuable customer or transaction, it isn’t enough to have the right skills, we want people have the right skills and are highly competent in them. So for each skill, it is nice to have a competency rating for each person who has the skill. Simple rules can then be used to state which skills are needed and how competent the person needs to be in each of the skills. The more valuable the transaction, the higher the competency that the system requests.

And the third consideration is around prioritizing tasks. Many problems arise not because a mistake was made but rather an expectation wasn’t met. Knowing what work is most important to process helps avoid falling short of expectations. It is easy enough to place deadlines on tasks, SharePoint makes that available right out of the box; but if the workload is too great then no matter what tasks get performed, expectations will not be met. That is why it is important to differentiate between deadlines and service levels. Deadlines are placed on individual tasks. Service levels manage performance across all tasks. By incorporating service levels into the equation, we can now categorize work and track service level averages across all categories of tasks. By maintaining rolling averages, we can now make decisions about which tasks to give the most priority. If the current rolling average service level for a given category of work is exceeding the goal, then if other service levels are below goal, the tasks associated with those service levels can be given a higher priority.

Simple ways to categorize tasks and people can build a foundation for providing far more productive mechanisms for assigning tasks to people. You can build on that by incorporating competencies and service level monitoring and in turn really super-charge an organization’s productivity.

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.