« Waiting for the knowledge bus | Main | Hyper-productivity »

Regular readers of this blog will know of my view that the next significant step in both IT and management is to improve the way that people do collaborative knowledge work (what I call "interaction work"). You can find all sorts of evidence for this view on the Human Interaction Management Web site. However, most people know from their own experience that action is needed, and the sooner the better. In particular, working hours are getting out of control, a trend that is not helped by the current expectation that everyone is "always on" via their mobile phone.

A typical factor in people's inability to control their workload is the necessity to use inefficient workplace software, the main culprit being email. Across the board in industry there are major problems resulting from use of email. It is not at all clear when emails should be sent, what they should contain, who should be included, the validity of requesting actions from people, who has committed to do what, the correlation between different email streams, the accuracy of data included, etc. Almost daily, this lack of clarity causes material problems in organizations of every kind.

Problems such as email usage are complex to resolve, relating as they do to process awareness, new approaches to management, new forms of software, and more. Hence solutions for such problems can be expensive to implement in large organizations. How can one justify the expense? In other words, what is the basis of a business case for the introduction of more efficient human collaboration?

It is necessary to find a quantitative means of evaluating the impact. One can list ad nauseam aspects of organizational life that will be improved by rationalizing the way people work together, but the board have a duty to consider the bottom line in any major decisions they make. However swayed they may be personally - e.g., from experience of mobile phone calls at ungodly hours - they will not be acting with due diligence if they approve a programme that has no means to demonstrate Return On Investment (ROI). So it is necessary to find a metric that is applicable to human collaboration.

This is non-trivial, since there is a difference between efficiency and effectiveness.

When measuring the impact of process improvement in mechanistic areas such as transaction handling or manufacturing, the outputs of the process are probably going to remain similar after the changes have been implemented. The aim is simply to produce these outputs quicker and cheaper. In other words, one is aiming for increased efficiency.

The same is not at all true for human collaboration. Free people up by helping them work better, and they will deliver more value to the organization. Once people are not struggling to keep afloat, they can help steer. In other words, improving interaction work delivers increased effectiveness. However, in advance one cannot always predict what form the increase will take. Take sales, for example. One might expect a salesperson who works better to make more sales, but it is quite possible that the actual improvement will be customer relationships that are longer-lasting, something that cannot be measured until enough time has passed.

So what metric should one use when proposing a programme to improve human collaboration in the organization?

TAKE AWAY

The simplest metric for human collaboration is very simple indeed. Work out how much you pay people per hour. Then count how many hours they are spending at work, taking care to include work done out of the office. If your staff start taking less time to do their work, you are getting better value for money.

This applies even if you don't pay people overtime. There is a huge hidden cost to working long hours. Tiredness and stress not only make people miserable, but reduce their contribution to the organization and increase "churn" (the frequency at which staff leave the organization altogether). These negative impacts are at least partially offset by paying people decent overtime - and if you don't pay people overtime directly, you can be sure that your organization is paying the price somehow.

So a first step for a programme to improve interaction work in your organization is to find out how much time in each day people are taking to do their work. Cost this time based on salaries, and aim to reduce the total by a specific amount - say 1 hour per day per person. This effectively gives you a budget for the interaction work improvement programme - spend any less than this in total, and you will have delivered ROI.

Of course, this is using the narrowest of measures - a measure that takes no account of the significant improvements you can expect in effectiveness, which as discussed above will be the main benefit of the programme. However, the aim here is simply to get the programme approved by the board. Once you get going, material impacts of all kinds will become evident. It will be much easier to get approval for your second interaction work improvement programme than for your first!

Posted by keithhb in Business Process Management |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us