The Digital Workplace: The Need for Good Practices in a Complex Work Environment

Today's workforce has a growing number of tools at their disposal to communicate, collaborate and get work done. But there is a concurrent increase in workflow complexity, which, left unmanaged, results in time lost and inefficiencies. It's time to bridge the gap between the two.

For easily repeatable tasks, the process has often been defined and implemented in the systems you are using, such as an ERP system. In knowledge-intense and highly dynamic and collaborative work environments, processes are often barely repeatable (check out Thingamy for more on the concept of barely repeatable processes).

This means that knowledge workers who participate in a task have to design or redesign the process each time it is executed. Much more is required from those who participate in a barely repeatable process than an easily repeatable. Instead of simply following instructions created by a process engineer, you have to be a process engineer yourself and design the process on the fly as you execute it.

Efficient Practices Lead to Results

In such a work environment, it is very important to have efficient practices — ways to perform common individual tasks — that allow you to execute the job in an efficient way. You also need to have those practices in common with the other people who will be involved, otherwise you will have to revert to “whatever works” practices, using the most convenient but not necessarily most suitable tools and methods to collaborate, such as email and ad hoc physical meetings.

Here’s my key point: how efficiently tasks and processes are executed is very much dependent on the practices and tools used. For example, there can be extreme differences in efficiency between a scenario where you co-author content by emailing documents back and forth and a scenario where you can co-author the content directly using a tool like Google Docs or the co-authoring capabilities of SharePoint 2010 in Word.

First Identify the Problem

When I talk to people they often recognize the symptoms of bad practices, but they often lack the insight and awareness of what causes the symptoms and why, which of course makes it harder to treat and cure the “disease." Many of the underlying problems can be fixed by developing better practices using new tools. 

You hear people complaining about too many emails and information overload and when they hear about new tools or new ways of working, they often react negatively, saying they can’t handle more tools or information. What you really need to do is to help them get an understanding of why their situation looks like it does and that it is related to how they currently work with information and communicate and collaborate with each other.

It all starts with asking questions:

• How do you overcome geographical and time differences, i.e. how do you handle a task that involves several people but all people cannot be physically present at the same time to execute the task?
• How do you overcome organizational barriers, .i.e. how do you involve external parties in the execution of a task or process? How do you exchange information with external parties in secure and efficient ways?
• How and where is information created, stored, organized, shared and accessed for each task?
• How and where is information created for one task made available for other tasks performed later by the same or other people?
• How and where are tasks that are inter-dependent coordinated? How do you get notified about the need to execute a certain task, and how do you signal current status to the people you collaborate with — that it has been executed, delayed, interrupted or stopped?
• How and where is information shared in an efficient way to stakeholders that need, or could need, the information?
• How are generic, frequently performed tasks carried out, .e.g.
  • Find information
  • Find a person
  • Co-create information
  • Update information
  • Review information
  • Collect feedback

The Solution Often Already Exists

When questions such as the ones above have been asked and answered, we need to ask ourselves how existing — and new — technologies can be leveraged to work smarter and be used to develop better practices, in particular for tasks that require collaboration and interaction between several people from different organizations, locations and time zones. 

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Customer Experience: A Cost Benefit Analysis of Simplicity

Simplicity for the customer causes complexity for the organization.

When Manish Chandra was launching Poshmark, a shopping party app, one of the design decisions he faced related to the payment system. It was relatively easy to plug PayPal in. However, Chandra was focused on making everything really easy for the customer. So, instead of using PayPal, his developers spent two months developing a system where payments could be made in two clicks.

The result of Chandra's relentless pursuit of simplicity for the customer was a mobile app that has been a big hit.

Very few organizations have the tools to develop a business case for simplicity. There are no models that I've come across that articulate the return on investment on making something easy to do. This is a huge gap in management metrics.

We know the costs of making things simple; Two extra months of developer time. But we rarely know the value that will accrue. So, in most organizations the pressure is there not to spend those two months.

Making it simple for the customer causes many challenges for the organization.

Customer simplicity is internally disruptive. I once worked with a bank that had an online mortgage application form that requested 14 separate pieces of information from the potential customer. This application perfectly integrated with the bank's internal systems. The problem was that they were getting 2 enquiries a week through the form.

A new manager arrived and demanded improvements.

The web team radically simplified the form, requesting only three pieces of information. The organization was shocked. Internally, everyone hated the form. It's incomplete, they complained. It won't integrate with our systems, they complained. We'll keep getting stupid enquiries from Mickey Mouse, they complained.

The manager decided to give it a try.

In the first week they got 180 enquiries. And yes they did get stupid enquiries from Mickey Mouse and the likes. But in the first three months with the simple form they did 20 times more revenue than in the previous three months with the older, more complex form.

Making life easier for the customer makes life more complex for the organization. Staff who are customer-centric are often seen as troublesome by their colleagues because they are always putting the customers' needs first. There is a very strong internal force to make life as easy, as smooth, as possible.

Many organizations find it very hard to measure outcomes. It's a much simpler job to measure whether you have a payment system than to measure how easy it is to use your payment system.

I see the same organization-centric thinking around content. The focus becomes on producing the content itself because that's a relatively easy thing to do. To focus on what the content helps the customer to do is much harder. But that's where the value lies.

Measuring the content or the app is the old model. Because of the Web we can now measure much better how things are used. Let's focus less on what we produce and more on the use.

About the Author

Gerry McGovern, a content management author and consultant, has spoken, written and consulted extensively on writing for the web and web content management issues since 1994. His latest book is titled The Stranger's Long Neck: How to Deliver What Your Customers Really Want Online.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com