Efficiency – Page 11 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

September 16, 2020

Software error

It turns out that yesterday’s AWOL veg box wasn’t down to a new driver, but to a problem with the navigation software.

The driver did a great job of sorting things out. He bought a new phone, double-checked his route and corrected the mistakes. He took responsibility and did what needed to be done to really keep us happy.

Meanwhile head office was offering refunds.

Technology is brilliant, but you need a systematic way of identifying when it’s broken, as quickly as possible. Analogue visual indicators work well for this e.g.the address label on the box, a line marked on a bottle that used every day.

You also need a fall-back manual process for when the software breaks. That way, things may take a little longer, but nobody is taken by surprise, and nobody is let down. And you don’t have to compensate unnecessarily.

Do you check your phones are working every morning? Do you have backup phones? Do you keep an up-to-date back-up (maybe even hard copy) of your contacts? Do you have a process for learning from mistakes and accidents?

I’d be surprised if you do.

August 20, 2020

One size fits no-one

Standardisation is useful. Standard shoe and clothing sizes enabled manufacture at scale, which in turn meant that more people could afford decent clothes and shoes than ever before. Standard sizes are worked out by taking averages of the actual population.

Standardised clothing works for two reasons. First because sizes are based on at most two or three dimensions. This means that any given individual is more likely to fall within an average range for a given size. There will be exceptions (I can never find gloves to fit), but they will be rare. The other reason is that clothes are soft, they have give. People can easily adjust the standard to suit themselves. You can belt a baggy shirt, or wear extra socks inside too-big shoes. A slightly too-tight dress will stretch a little. You can at least be comfortable, if not always elegant.

Averaging over multiple dimensions, especially for something rigid, like a building, an office, or a cockpit is far less successful – even dangerous. Nobody fits this kind of average, so everyone becomes uncomfortable and inefficient.

The same goes for business processes. No two businesses do things in quite the same way – not even when they are doing the same job. So forcing your way of doing things into a generic off-the-shelf pattern squeezes out diffentiation, turning you into a commodity. It also makes the people running the process both uncomfortable and inefficient.

Those are the last things you or your customers want.

The alternative isn’t to tailor everything from scratch every time.

If you’ve been in business for a few years, you will have your own set of patterns for ‘the way we do things round here’.

Identify them, create templates from them. Then use them to build processes that are fully adjustable by the people who will actually use them.

Adjustable gives far better results than the average.

July 17, 2020

Flipping

This week, the problem with my broadband connection was finally sorted. After 4 months.

On the first visit the engineer ran some tests and did something with the connection at the bottom of the pole. He also checked the socket in my house and gave our arrangement the thumbs up. The speed went up again, but the fix only lasted a day. Whenever anyone called on the landline, it went down again.

On the second visit a new engineer ran some tests and did something else with the connection at the bottom of the pole. He also replaced the socket in my house with a new one. He explained that the reason why the fix didn’t last was because the system is set up to reduce the speed to keep the connection stable. Fair enough. The speed went up again, but only lasted a day. Whenever anyone called on the landline, it went down again.

On the third visit another engineer tinkered with the connection at the bottom of the pole. He ran some more tests, which determined that the fault was somewhere between the top of the telegraph pole and the outside of my house. Nothing changed. Terrible speed, and the line kept dropping.

On the fourth visit a different engineer tested the line from my end, inside the house. He then went to the cabinet half a mile away and tested the line from there. He identified that the fault was somewhere between the top of the telegraph pole and the outside of my house. So he looked for a likely location, got his ladder out and looked at the box that connects the line to the outside of my house, near the roof.

Bingo! The box was full of water. He changed the box, replaced the connectors, and everything was fine. And stayed fine.

I am delighted of course, and have nothing to complain of regarding any of the individuals involved either from my provider or from Openreach.

But I can’t help thinking that the process could be better.

I get that in a network, you have to be systematic in your search for a fault. I’ve done it myself.

Usually, you test the connection at one end, then the other, starting with the extremes. In this case, the exchange, and my socket. Then you repeat the test, working inwards through pairs of connecting nodes until you’ve narrowed down the location of the fault to a single length of wire.

But I wonder if the application of experience could shorten the process?

Maybe the answer would be to start with the shortest length of wire – between my socket and the connection at the top of my house – and work outwards from there? After all these are the parts most exposed to the elements, and most likely to fail.

It would be just as systematic and in the worst case take no longer than working from the outside in. But it could well be better for the customer as well as being quicker and cheaper for Openreach.

Or perhaps it would be even quicker and cheaper just to replace that external box every time, because it’s the weakest point in the chain and also the most accessible? That way you’re renewing the network as you go, for pence.

I don’t know. I’m not a telephone engineer. Just a process geek, who happens to be a customer.

July 10, 2020

“What would happen if we removed all Managers?”

Lisa Haggar started a lively discussion on this topic on LinkedIn today:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lisa-haggar-540a68117_whatnomanager-selfmanagement-timesarechanging-activity-6687251785352024065-esUl

Of course I had to join in.

Why not join in too? I’d love to know what you think.

July 9, 2020

Presenteeism

As many have discovered during lockdown, being in the office where you can be seen, isn’t necessary for getting results.

But for a long time, in a corporate environment, sitting at your desk was a proxy for working, with predictable effects. Some people stayed late, to look like they were working hard. Some used being present to cover for getting very little done.

At one place I worked, this was really easy to do, because everyone worked in their own Dilbert-style cubicle. Nobody could see whether you were working or sleeping – especially through the fog of cigarette smoke that hovered constantly over every cubicle.

The cubicles hid more than a hangover snooze. This was also the place where if you left your cubicle for half an hour, someone cannibalised your computer for spares while you were gone. So you couldn’t get anything done even if you wanted to.

But the worst case of presenteeism I came across was as part of a youth employment scheme back in the early 80s. It was interesting work. A small team of us researched and wrote papers for schools to use as additional resources for lessons. We wrote about local history, local firms and local places of interest.

We had a boss, but we were left pretty much to our own devices, which suited us fine, because the boss did nothing. Literally nothing. He sat in a different office, at his desk, staring into space and smoking. All day.

At the time we thought this was scandalous, but looking back I think it was actually marvellous. We managed ourselves. We worked in our own shared room. We chose our own projects, did our own research, collaborated with each other to produce, illustrate, print and in at least one case publish our papers. We believed in what we were doing, we had fun, and we produced good work. What’s more, we learned how to do it again. We didn’t need to be watched over.

The only downside was for the organisation that employed us all – they could have saved themselves some overhead, and employed a couple more researchers instead.

We have managers, because we don’t believe people will work unless they’re made to, then surveilled to make sure they are.

But is that really true? We know it doesn’t work for some people, and for the rest it isn’t needed.

There is a better way. And I think it looks like this:

Backed up by a clear Promise, and an empowering Score.

July 2, 2020

Amnesia

We’ve all suffered from it. Corporate amnesia. You call a company you’ve done business with for years, and give them your name, address, and inside leg measurement 3 of 4 times before you get to the point of the call.

A more insidious form of corporate amnesia forces a team member to recall the process before they perform a task, instead of having the system remember it for them.

This kind of amnesia results in variation over time and between team members. Sometimes the variations will be improvements, but most often they are an ever-worsening copy of a long-forgotten original, void of life or meaning. Any improvements are forgotten, because the organisation has no way to capture them or remember them.

This isn’t just amnesia, its also akrasia – doing one thing when you should be doing another.

Because if you’re too busy remembering what’s supposed to happen, you aren’t making it happen.

June 29, 2020

The Big Picture

When you’re new to a place the kind of map that’s useful isn’t all that detailed. All you need is something that can tell you where you are in relation to landmarks you’ll easily find and recognise, so you can see where to head next.

This kind of ‘big picture’ never happens by accident. It’s not an aggregation of local details. It’s designed, top-down, on purpose as a guide for strangers.

If your business is your Utopia, why not make a map of it? Big picture enough to let people navigate safely by themselves, or easily enlist help from a passing stranger if they go astray.

You might find you get fewer pinch points, and less people stuck down blind alleys.

June 3, 2020

My workflow problem

I’ve long had a problem with ‘workflow’. It’s taken me a while, but I think I’ve finally worked out why.

Workflow is the application of a pin factory model to service businesses, to professions. It breaks a process into tiny, individually repetitive steps that can be done faster and faster over time, making the whole process more efficient.

This is great for pins, and was a leap forward when Adam Smith wrote about it in 1776. Back then, “See a pin, pick it up, then all day you’ll have good luck.” made sense. A pin was valuable. You were lucky to find one for free.

Nowadays, we don’t have a shortage of pins, or of other simple things that can be efficiently made using the factory method. We have made enough garments to clothe the next 4 generations of the entire human race.

We do have a shortage of what’s needed to thrive in the face of enormous and challenging complexities: empathy, creativity, imagination, judgement and flair.

You can’t make any of those in a pin factory.

May 29, 2020

Bleak House – a never-ending story

The young engineer was sitting, legs dangling into the inspection chamber, looking disgruntled.

“What are you up to?” I asked him.

“Installing fibre-optic cabling.”

“Ooooh! Does that mean we’ll be able to get fibre to the home?”

“Yes, eventually. But I don’t know how long that will be. There are just so many blockages.”

“Well, it’s old wiring round here isn’t it.” I was thinking metaphorical blockages.

“It’s not that, it’s literally soil, blocking up the conduits. A pressure washer would clear it, or maybe they’ll have to dig. I just want to install it, and I can’t.”

Half an hour later, he and his mate have gone, leaving nothing changed apart from a few more spray marks on the ground.

This is at least the second time the installation engineers have been in our street this month. Each time they’ve been unable to achieve anything, because the process of upgrading the network has been divided up like Adam Smith’s pin factory. Only where the pin factory contained the whole process, each step involved in this one has been outsourced to a different specialist company, so nobody sees, let alone owns the whole process.

In the old days, you used to see a gang of workmen round a single hole, some of them idle. Now I know why. Some of them were there to deal with the unforseen complications that might turn up once the surface was broken. If a conduit needed clearing, they were there to do it. And because they all worked for the same company they knew they could do take that responsibility. That’s called slack, leeway, resilience. It’s how you keep a complex process on track.

But what we’ve replaced that with is far more wasteful. At least all the workmen got paid, even if they didn’t get the satisfaction of doing their job. I wouldn’t be surprised to find those two young men have earned nothing from their work this morning. They’ll be on piece-work, paid on completion.

Add to that the fact that each specialist company has to make a profit, and allocates its resources to maximise that, who knows when the next favourable conjunction of BT, Openreach and Instalcom will come around? Our street is still waiting for the gas upgrade that we were told to expect 2 years ago.

Divvying up a coherent process into independent chunks may be profitable for some, but its not efficient.

Why am I reminded of Jarndyce v Jarndyce?

April 2, 2020

Variety

Many years ago I had a job interview for Booz Allen. Almost the first thing the interviewer said to me was “You’re a bit of a butterfly aren’t you?”

They were wrong. I was just following a normal pattern for someone with my appetite for change.

In work, I’m motivated by evolution rather than stability, and every 3-5 years or so I feel the need to make a big shift. I’m not unusual, that’s how most people like to operate at work.

My interviewer was possibly in a different camp. I asked them how long they’d been with Booz Allen. “20 years.” Clearly in the ‘I like things to stay the same over a long period of time’ preference. Or perhaps their motivational kicks came from working with an international consultancy firm – if the job involves the required level of variety, there’s no need to switch jobs to get it.

I’ve also met people at the other extreme, who are motivated by constant change and uncertainty, and who will pivot almost every year.

The point here is that even without a crisis, it’s worth understanding your own and other people’s appetite for change. People will be de-motivated, under-perform and eventually leave if they aren’t getting what they need from the job they are in.

In a time of crisis and uncertainty this is even more important. A few will thrive on it. Most will find it uncomfortable, unsettling, but bearable. A few will find it almost intolerable.

Bear this in mind as you shake down to remote working. Of course the priority is to get things working and keep going. But if this situation lasts, or you decide to change your way of working altogether it’s worth adjust things in line with these preferences.

It may well be that moving people into different roles will help them and you get through it better.

PS the man swapping hats with Charlie Chaplin is Harry Lauder, a music hall (variety) star in his day, and according to Gibbs family tradition, a relation of ours.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Efficiency