e book kill the things that kill productivity

8/13/2019 e Book Kill the Things That Kill Productivity

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Kill the Things that Kill Productivity?Steve Russell

SVP of Research and Development and CTO, Global 360

Copyright 2010 EndUserSharePoint.com


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Kill the Things That Kill Productivity

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About the Author

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.

Global 360 is an independent provider of process and document management

solutions. For more than 20 years Global 360 has helped more than 2,000

customers in 70 countries reduce paper, automate processes, and empower

individuals to deliver increased productivity, service levels, and business

performance while reducing operational costs.

About EndUserSharePoint.com

EndUserSharePoint.com is a community of SharePoint authors dedicated to

providing support and encouragement for the SharePoint End User. The site

receives 50,000 unique page views a week, has a Weekly Newsletter subscription

base of 13,500 readers and handles hundreds of questions weekly through the

Stump the Panel: SharePoint Q&A Forum.


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Forward by Mark Miller, Founder and Editor of EndUserSharePoint.com

As the SharePoint product has matured, so has the SharePoint End User. We all

worked together when SharePoint 2007 came out. We coalesced as a communitywith the need to share information on how to ride this unwieldy beast.

Maturity within the SharePoint market means moving to the next level, working

through business problems, not just standing up SharePoint sites to act as

document repositories and simple collaboration environments.

When Steve Russell approached me about writing a series of business articles for

EndUserSharePoint.com, my initial response was Hell yeah! What Steve does

here is echo the basic business principles, the thought processes needed forimproving existing systems.

Read these six articles and think about what it means to your own business

processes. Most of us will recognize ourselves in just about every one of these.

Use the articles as a roadmap, working through each one-by-one to generate in-

house conversation about what your team can do to make your work life better.

Your business will be better for it.

Mark MillerFounder and Editor, EndUserSharePoint.com


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ContentsAbout the Author .................................................................................................... 3

About EndUserSharePoint.com .............................................................................. 3

Forward by Mark Miller, Founder and Editor of EndUserSharePoint.com ........... 4

Introduction ................................................................................................................ 6

Part 1: Doing the Same Thing Over and Over ........................................................... 9

Part 2: Playing the Waiting Game ...........................................................................12

Part 3: Thats Not What We Do (Anymore) ............................................................14

Part 4: Did You See That? .......................................................................................16

Part 5: Something Went Wrong ...............................................................................19

Part 6: A Little Help Here! ...................................................................................22

Thank You ................................................................................................................24


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Introduction

When the financial markets fell apart, the party ended almost

overnight. Companies slashed payrolls and those who remainedwere left to deal with the balance of the work. Doing more with less

(i.e. improving productivity) is the only answer we had. And, infact, productivity has increased 6.3 percent over the past four

quarters, the biggest 12-month increase since 1962. Yet, the productivity increasein the last quarter was the smallest in a year, showing companies are reaching the

limits on efficiency. *Is your company reaching its limits on efficiency? Perhaps itseems that waybut what if you are still not efficient enough? I try to answer this

question by looking at how to use SharePoint to Kill the Things the KillProductivity in your company.

Through a series of postings, I will present a set of productivity killers and

strategies for leveraging SharePoint to address them. There are two commonthemes underlying these strategies. The first is adoption of SharePoint as

something much more than a platform for collaboration and knowledge sharingwith enterprise documents. While collaboration and document sharing has been

central to the growth of SharePoint, SharePoint is quickly becoming a platform for

core business applications. This isnt to say that all business applications should be

re-implemented on SharePoint. That may make sense in some situations but most

of the productivity killers inherent in business applications today can be addressedby integrating existing business applications with SharePoint.

The second theme is that when looking at productivity killers, it is important totake a process approach to analyzing and addressing the problem. Adopting a

process-centric view of your business is essential for evaluating productivity issuesin the right perspective. Through a process lens, you can see redundancies,

bottlenecks, gaps, mistakes, and other inefficiencies in business processes.

Solutions for these opportunities can then be assimilated into the design and

implementation of your SharePoint applications. SharePoint 2010 offers improved

workflow capabilities for basic, procedural types of activities, and it integrates wellwith SharePoint-friendly BPM platforms for more complex business processautomation.


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I will build on these themes in the productivity killer posts and explore key

productivity challenges and ways to address them. Below are the posts that I amplanning.

1. Repetitious WorkDoing the Same Thing Over and Over: From onecustomer, transaction, or event to another, automating the operational stepsin your processes enhances productivity.

2. Missing/Incomplete InformationPlaying the Waiting Game: Everyonein an organization is connected through business processes, and the

information dependencies between processes link your productivity together.

3. Dated Processes and ProceduresThats Not What We Do (Anymore):Subtle, continuous change creates extra steps and work-arounds that canonly be managed when users have the ability to maintain and enhance theirwork environments.

4. Low MoraleDid You See That?: Outstanding performance needs to berecognized and rewarded in order to motivate everyone to do their best. Low

morale and lack of motivation drain productivity.

5. Rework/Poor Quality WorkSomething Went Wrong: When mistakes aremade, the additional effort to fix things multiplies the work effort by two to

three times. Getting the job done right the first time, and avoiding repeated

mistakes are essential to improved productivity.6. Lack of ExpertiseA Little Help Here!: You cant know everything all

of the time, and when the odd situation comes up, you need to know where to

get answers. Collaborating with your peers and knowing who the expertsare avoids the productivity pitfall of getting stuck.

7. I will be posting on each of these over the coming days. Let me know yourthoughts throughout this series of postings. Im interested in hearingabout

your experiences, and other ideas, thoughts, comments as to what impactsproductivity in your organizations and how SharePoint can be the platformfor business applications.


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*Chandra,Shobhana andHoman,Timothy R. (2010). U.S. Economy:Productivity Holds Up, Claims Decrease (Update1). Retrieved 11 May 2010 from

Bloomberg Businessweek:http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/u-s-

economy-productivity-holds-up-claims-decrease-update1-.html

Original Article with Community Comments

http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-how-can-companies-

kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity/
http://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/shobhana_chandra.htmlhttp://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/shobhana_chandra.htmlhttp://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/timothy_r__homan.htmlhttp://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/timothy_r__homan.htmlhttp://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/timothy_r__homan.htmlhttp://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/u-s-economy-productivity-holds-up-claims-decrease-update1-.htmlhttp://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/u-s-economy-productivity-holds-up-claims-decrease-update1-.htmlhttp://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/u-s-economy-productivity-holds-up-claims-decrease-update1-.htmlhttp://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/u-s-economy-productivity-holds-up-claims-decrease-update1-.htmlhttp://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity/http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity/http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity/http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity/http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity/http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/u-s-economy-productivity-holds-up-claims-decrease-update1-.htmlhttp://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/u-s-economy-productivity-holds-up-claims-decrease-update1-.htmlhttp://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/timothy_r__homan.htmlhttp://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/shobhana_chandra.html


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Part 1: Doing the Same Thing Over and Over

For this first topic in theKill the Things that Kill Productivity

series,Im going to talk about a trend in how work is performed ina growing number of organizations. For years, business processes

were segmented into discrete steps and carried out in a specificsequence with different specialists performing each step. Today

leading companies are applying LEAN and Six Sigma methodologies to theirprocesses and eliminating or automating the busy work. More importantly, they are

merging multiple job responsibilities into single roles to be performed bygeneralists rather than specialists*.

In order to accomplish this transformation, companies have successfully overcome

one of the most pervasive things that can kill productivityrepetitive work. Byautomating the mundane, reoccurring activities within a process, workers not only

have more time to focus on value-added work (i.e., serving customers, analyzinginformation 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, theycan truly function as generalists.

The work required to fulfill ones responsibilities consists of different activities

varying in nature from operational to intellectual work often with a degree ofrepetition 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 withstandard SharePoint integration tooling such as Business Connectivity Services and

workflow, while intellectual work may require more sophisticated technologiessuch as knowledge sharing, business rules engines and scoring models. Theimportant point is that automation opportunities exist for both types of work.

Operational work is typically the type of work that can be easily automatedif not

eliminated entirely. For instance, when a life insurance underwriter receives a newapplication she must first order lab work, request medical records, and setup anapplicant file. With a SharePoint case-oriented solution, both the lab order and the

medical records can be requested automatically, and a workflow can automatically
http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity/http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity/http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity/http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity/http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity/http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity/


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match the associated documents with the appropriate electronic applicant folder

(the case) in SharePointeliminating 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 topublish data and transactions into SharePoint so they can be used within

SharePoint-hosted applications. This preserves the transactionality and corporategovernance 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 usersaccess 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, userscan be provided with a more intuitive interface that includes SharePointproductivity 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, dont require decision making or otherwise add little value.

You dont have to study everyone. A small cross-section of users is sufficient tosurface the non-value add work that everyone has to do in order to complete their

work. There are other (and certainly more sophisticated) process improvementmethodologies out there. But the point here is not to re-engineer your business

processes (well cover that in a later article), but rather make the ones you have

more productive. By keeping it simple you can identify and incrementallyautomate the high return activities. It is this repetitive work that once automatedcan significantly enhance productivity.


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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 morepeople 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 oneof the biggest productivity killers- repetitive, low value work.

In the next article I plan to explore the productivity costs in missing andincomplete information.Playing the Waiting Gamelooks at how to link processes,

people and information to make sure everyone has what they need and when theyneed it.

*Le Clair, C., Moore, C. (2009). Dynamic Case ManagementAn Old Idea

Catches New Fire. Forrester Research.


http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/17/sharepoint-how-can-companies-

kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-1-doing-the-same-thing-over-and-over/
http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/17/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-1-doing-the-same-thing-over-and-over/http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/17/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-1-doing-the-same-thing-over-and-over/http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/17/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-1-doing-the-same-thing-over-and-over/http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/17/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-1-doing-the-same-thing-over-and-over/http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/17/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-1-doing-the-same-thing-over-and-over/


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Part 2: Playing the Waiting Game

For this second topic in theKill the Things that Kill Productivity

series,Im going to address one of the more subtle productivityinhibitorswaiting around for work. Its equally pervasive as the

issue of repetitive work, yet I think its harder to identify at anindividual worker level.

One of the frustrating things about working in a large organization is that

oftentimes the right hand doesnt know (or really care) what the left hand is doing.Evidence of this is very clear in business processes when workers have no real idea

why they do what they do, or what anyone else does for that matter. When workershave only a minimal understanding of the big picture, its almost a sure bet that

productivity is being affected. SharePoint can help with this by highlighting forworkers the importance of their work and where they fit in the big picture.

People in an organization perform work in business processes that connect, relate,

and overlap with one another. The inputs and outputs of each persons workrepresent information dependencies between the activities in these processes. As

each step in a process is completed, information flows to the next step untilfinished.

When these information dependencies are interrupted, productivity is negatively

affected. In many cases, problems are widespread and systemic due to a lack ofvisibility and communication. People often do not know or understand the

importance of their work, and the relevance they have to other downstream

processes. When information is incomplete, not in the expected format, or missing,

downstream workers are either forced to wait for the missing input, or do extrawork and go without it.

For instance, an expense report submitted by an employee and approved by a

manager may be forwarded to Accounts Payable for payment. But if the employee

does not use the right spreadsheet, AP will not be able to load the informationautomatically into the financial accounting system, plus if a receipt or two ismissing AP will have to notify the employee and hold the expense report until the

employee furnishes the missing documentation. In either event, extra work is


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created for AP because the employee and manager were not paying attention whenthe expense report was submitted.

Productivity can be improved with SharePoint and process automation by ensuring

that work activities are performed on time, as expected, and that inter-processconnections are well defined. SharePoint tasks, actions and alerts are handy tools

that when fed to users can help them see important tasks, follow-up on

outstanding work, and monitor its status. Larger business processes may require amore sophisticated process management system which looks at work processing

across multiple activities and departments, prioritize work according to servicelevels or dynamically modify business processes to achieve a system definedbusiness goal.

Once a process and the associated tasks are automated, SharePoints businessintelligence can also enhance monitoring and predictions to make sure work is

performed on a timely basis. This includes KPIs and alerts. Due dates, processrules, and service level expectations for different types of work can be managed,

prioritized, escalated and kept in front of users. Forms, documents, and otherartifacts produced at each stage of a process can be validated, and notifications can

be issued when exceptions occur. All of these capabilities ensure that theinformation flowing through a business process enables users to receive the inputsthey need to perform their work.

In the next article we are going to look at the productivity costs incurred whensystems no longer reflect the business processes in which they are used. We dont

do that Anymorelooks at how SharePoint applications can be more responsive andcontinually add value to business users when used to automate volatileapplications.

Original Article with Community Commentshttp://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/23/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-2-playing-the-waiting-game/
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Part 3: Thats Not What We Do (Anymore)

In this third posting on how toKill the Things that Kill

Productivity series,I thought it would be helpful to take a look atchange and agilityprobably one of the most commonly heard

marketing drum beats in enterprise software for the last few years.Everyone in enterprise software wants to enable agility in one way

or another, and to read some of their literature you would think business was in aconstant state of upheaval, but I dont really think thats the case.

Business processes do change. Occasionally, they change in dramatic ways due to

corporate events such as a restructuring or a change in strategy, new productlaunches, and regulatory changes. More often however, they change in subtle ways

due to a new step in a procedure, an extra field to be coded, or another spreadsheetto reference. Individually, each change is hardly noteworthy, yet their cumulativeeffect is real and eventually very costly.

Dealing with the problem requires a move away from big IT support in favor ofincremental user updates that are implemented as quickly as possible. Let users

have control of the tools they need to keep their applications relevant. This hasbeen a big part of the success of SharePoint. The business has more control over

the solution and new applications and changes to existing applications do notrequire full IT change management cycles. By enabling users to have more control

over their applications and the tools used to define them, technology can be moreresponsive to business needs.

Im not advocating that IT close their doors and that end users (or more accurately,

end power-users) should manage and maintain everything having to do with corebusiness applications. IT plays a very important role in ensuring that company

policies and governance is implemented, systems continuity is maintained and ahost of other extremely important functions. My point is that when all application

maintenance is owned by IT, small incremental changes to how business gets done

is rarely reflected in the systems that support the business.

With each business change, the existing applications and systems satisfy a

diminishing percentage of the business needs. Productivity slowly degrades as

workers accumulate additional manual or extra steps they are required to


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performsteps that are not supported by their legacy systems. SharePoint offers

the opportunity to immediately assimilate change into the application environment

and prevent this extra work from evolving. Once legacy systems are turned into

services providing data and transactions to SharePoint-based applications, the

strength of SharePoints flexibility can be highly leveraged. No longer do you haveto wait on IT to add new fields, reorganize screens or include relevant information.

Wikis, notes and other SharePoint productivity tools can help address this problem.Procedure manuals and sharing of tribal knowledge is not only facilitated, it can be

saved, indexed, reviewed and pushed to everyone. This doesnt require anycomputer system changes. All it takes is giving the people doing the work, thetools to let everyone benefit and adapt as business changes.

Businesses can further restore productivity by implementing a dynamic case-oriented solution leveraging the inherent agility of a business process management

platform to continuously maintain and update a process. Once enabled with abusiness process solution, organizations have an economically viable platform for

maintaining alignment between their current business processes and theirsupporting applications.

Let IT do what they do best; maintaining and delivering the core transaction

systems that underlie and support how companies do business. Let the user

community have access and control over tools to make those transaction systems

more dynamic and responsive to all of the little changes that vibrant organizationsface every day. By doing so, the automation that everyone depends on maintains itsrelevancy and organizational productivity is optimized.

In the next article we are going to look at the opportunity (and low cost) of

increasing user morale. Low Morale: Did you see that?looks at the benefits ofusing SharePoint to provide feedback and motivation to business users.

Original Article with Community Commentshttp://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/28/sharepoint-how-can-companies-

kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-3-that%e2%80%99s-not-what-we-do-anymore/
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Part 4: Did You See That?

"Ability is what youre capable ofdoing. Motivation determines what you do.

Attitude determines how well you do it."Lou Holtz

For the fourth topic in theKill the Things that Kill Productivity

series,Im 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.

Lets 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 positiveattitude day in and day out? For many companies it starts with the corporate

culture and creating a sense of purpose throughout the organization. But beyondthatat an individual levelwhat gets people out of bed in the morning? For the

majority of people, it comes down to financial incentive, recognition for a job welldone 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 towardtheir work. At risk is a low morale work environment that will always result inlagging productivity and under performance.

High-performing, high-capacity individualsthe kind that all organizations seek tohirelook for opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities and excel in their

careers. When an organization is unable to differentiate and reward theperformance of its best workers, their motivation is suppressed. Over time, an

individuals output settlesto the organizations 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 thiscycle and get more productivity out of their people and organizations. In order todo 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


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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 allprocesses are automated with a process management system. And those that dodont always capture everything that is relevant to a user or a team.

We advocate using a separate set of tracking tables that multiple applications canpump 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, howlong 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 isthat 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 isoutstanding and how they are performing against their service level goals.

This is hugely motivational and focusing for people. Knowing whats going on andhow 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 arich base of data, and sometimes using SQLServer Analysis Services, everyone can

view information that they need to keep them most informed about their businessoperations. 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 andinformation 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 userswithout a lot of IT assistance or development skills.


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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 andmotivate people. This combined with other tools such as just in time training can

make for a user and workplace experience that can greatly contribute toproductivity.

The next article in the series is entitledRework/Poor Workand discusses the cost

and opportunities associated with catching mistakes early and figuring out how tomake sure that they dont happen again.


http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/07/02/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-4-did-you-see-that/
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Part 5: Something Went Wrong

About the only thing worse than doing work slowly is doing it over.

When work is done incorrectly the impact can range fromembarrassing to damaging, and it inhibits the productivity of other

downstream participants. The extra effort to fix mistakes oftenexceeds the initial work effort by two to three times as the

organization has to figure out where a mistake was made, redo it correctly, andthen 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 withinSharePoint. The opportunity is not just to automate something that is currently

done manually, but to improve how it is done through automation. Too often wefocus 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 thatwe 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 nothaving the best possible person performing the needed task. This sounds easy butin most business applications it is not.

There are three key considerations that can be helpful here. The first is to matchthe 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 complexsimply because no one has the time to figure it out for each task and thendetermine who to give the task to.


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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 wecapture 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 peopleperforming 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 ondifferent things. It may be the profitability of the transaction, the value of thecustomer, 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 cannow 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 isntenough 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 areneeded and how competent the person needs to be in each of the skills. The morevaluable 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 wasnt 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 outof 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 cannow make decisions about which tasks to give the most priority. If the current


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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 servicelevels 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 reallysuper-charge an organizations productivity.

Original Article and Community Comments

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Part 6: A Little Help Here!

In this last postingKill the Things that Kill Productivity series,

Im going to talk about collaboration, which is a long time sweetspot for SharePoint. Typically, when you hear about collaborative

business processes, most people think about creative efforts wheresomething is being designed or developed by a group of people.

However, theres another type of process Ill call real-time dynamic collaboration.This is where people come together on an ad hoc basis to exchange ideas,recommendations, expertise, and help one another on the spot.

Probably the most obvious cause of inefficiency is people not knowing what to do.Policies, procedures, and end-user application training give workers the essential

information they need to perform their responsibilities, yet inevitably situationsarise where the appropriate course of action is not clear. System errors, odd

customer requests, and little known transactions are examples of things that causeworkers to get stuck. Have you ever been on the phone with a call center whensomeone puts you on hold so they can consult with an expert or supervisor?

Workers normally rely on their peers and supervisors to provide assistance inworking through such issues. However, the quality and accuracy of the feedback

they receive can be hit-or-miss. Not all scenarios or outcomes can be documentedwithin a standard operating procedure, and a precedent may not exist. In other

cases, people may not feel comfortable raising questions and prefer to work in avacuum without exposing their uncertainties.

Dynamic collaboration is the key to improving productivity in this area and

SharePoint 2010 provides a load of features to enable this. The extended personalprofiling capabilities within SharePoint enable people to maintain personal profiles

with their interests, ratings, and roles allowing others to locate them when theyneed help. The Ask Me About feature allows people to apply expertise tags to

themselves making it easy for others to locate people with a needed expertise.

Similarly, subject matter experts (SMEs) can post newsfeeds to their sites withupdates on new policies, best practices, and other relevant knowledge sharing. Aspeople in an organization connect through My Site social relationships they build
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personal networks of SMEs that become invaluable when they need to dynamicallycollaborate with expert resources.

SharePoint is also integrated with Office Communications Server, which displays

everyones real-time presence. A person needing help can see the availability of allhis or her SMEs and reach out to them directly through instant messaging, email,

or phone.

Lastly, people can use their newsfeeds and presence indicators to broadcast their

personal work status and alert team members when they have a problem. Team-leads and designated SMEs can be notified of these situations and immediatelyengage to help them with their issues.

By providing users with a network of easily accessible experts and consultants, andby giving them the tools to interact with them, work is no longer held up whileissues are being researched or resolved. SharePoint and Office Communications

Server are well integrated and provide all of the building blocks necessary to createa real-time collaborative platform. By integrating these collaborative capabilities

into business applications, these collaborations can be contextual in that transaction

specific information can be shared and the collaboration itself can be linked orcopied into a system of record so audit trails are more complete and reconstructinghow decisions were made is easily enabled.

Original Article with Community Commentshttp://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/07/19/sharepoint-how-can-companies-kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-6-%e2%80%9ca-little-help-here%e2%80%9d/
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Thank You

Steve and I hope you found this series enlightening. We look forward to your

comments on the site and hope to personally meet you at one of your localSharePoint events.

Regards,

Mark MillerFounder and Editor, EndUserSharePoint.com

e book kill the things that kill productivity

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