Background
Work teams or front-line teams (to distinguish them from project
teams) are responsible for executing the day-to-day transactions of the
organisation and are usually found at the lowest level of the organisation
chart but at the front line of service delivery. Work teams are the bedrock on which business processes are built and as processes
are “the how” by which value is created and delivered to stakeholders, the operational
capabilities of these teams to a) manage their work effectively and efficiently
and b) collaborate across end-to-end processes, will determine the operational performance
of the function/department they are in and ultimately, the whole business/organisation.
If you ask them, the feedback from staff
will be that there are systemically low levels of effectiveness and efficiency
in their organisation.
Root Cause #1:
Identify the Important Reasons Why Managers Should
Bother?
The solutions to poor effectiveness and efficiency in S&KWO
are reasonably well known but not easy to implement given the complexity of
these organisations. The ROI on improving these metrics is substantial as the
global evidence indicates that 80% of S&KWO work is nonvalue-added and
hence, the poor levels of effectiveness and efficiency. What’s more, frontier
firms or best practice firms are 50% more productive than those who fail to
adopt best practices (see graphic above). The evidence available to S&KWO from
staff feedback and the Expertivity programmes support these findings and
therefore, one of the most important issues for S&KWO to resolve is, are
there sufficiently strong motives in place at all levels in S&KWO to bother
overcoming the barriers and make the investments in time and effort required to dramatically and then continuously improve these key metrics.
The most common reason cited as to why organisations don’t
bother, despite the very high ROI and overall benefits available, is that it’s
not possible to easily measure and/or make any big improvements in these metrics due to the complexity of the organisations
and the problems they are trying to solve. One of the reasons why we like doing
pilot programmes is to demonstrate that this is not true, and this is validated
by the differences in productivity found between frontier (best practice) and
laggard firms. However, systemically addressing these problems does require the
serious commitment of the senior leadership and management teams to address the
root causes of these issues.
This is the domain of the Senior Leadership Team
Root Cause #2:
Deploying a Structured and Integrated System
for Managing Day to Day Work
Most S&KWO remain trapped in old style, craft worker
time bubbles with each person doing things in their own way. Had those work
practices been maintained in other sectors, we’d still be buying hand-built
cars and furniture made by master craftsmen. While there is a place for such
craftmanship, it doesn’t work for activities where high productivity is
necessary to make them economically viable and/or competitive. The pilot programmes
we use in Expertivity are part of a suite of programmes that together constitute
a structured and integrated system for managing day to day work and optimising
a team’s effectives and efficiency. The evidence from these programmes alone
shows that a 20 – 40% improvement in productivity can easily be achieved in
most teams. However the sustainment of these achievements will be poor unless
root cause number 1 is addressed.
This is the domain of the Team Manager/ Team Leader.
Root Cause #3:
Deploying a System and Culture of Continuous
and Discontinuous Improvement
The very complexity that people use as a reason for not
solving the service productivity problems lies at the heart of why S&KWO
organisations need to develop a system and culture of ongoing improvement. It’s
generally accepted that the modern world is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous
(VUCA). Because traditional management methods were designed for an older, more
stable world where certainty was greater and volatility temporary, modern
managers have found that traditional management methods are no longer fit for
purpose. Unfortunately this has led to the abandonment rather than the adaption
of some management methods such as planning, scheduling, forecasting,
optimising, improving etc. This leads to weary sighs of resignation from
managers that “it takes what it takes to get things done”, a misunderstanding
that high effort equates to high performance, a tolerance for low performance because
it’s not properly measured, ad-hoc interventions, a reactive style of management
and a firefighting/heroic approach to problem solving.
This is the domain of Senior Management
Root Cause #4:
Prioritising Horizontal (E2E Processes)
Performance Over Vertical Performance
Addressing root cause 2 will address most of the team-based poor
effectiveness and efficiency but by far the bigger and more systemic issues
impacting effectiveness and efficiency arise from how well or poorly
organisations manage the inter-team hand-offs required to make end-to-end processes
work well. To address this issue, organisations need to invest in developing
the team-based capabilities mentioned in root cause 2 and deploy process
ownership, management, and improvement structures.
This is the domain of both Senior Managers (Process
Ownership and Management) and Mid-Level Managers (Process Improvement)
Summary
Addressing any one of these issues can improve performance
in the short term but all four need to be in place to develop and integrated
system of management that differentiates the frontier/best practice firms from
their laggard competitors. Even internal services, that do not compete openly in the
market, will always be vulnerable to the challenges of 3rd party
service providers when there is an unhealthy lack of commercial
awareness in their organisation.
What’s your experience? Compare notes with other members in the forum.
Discuss this with members