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Article: Aligning People and Process

Article written for Work Structuring Limited.
First appeared in the April 2008 edition of the Chartered Quality Institute’s Quality World magazine.

In a previous issue of QW, CQA’s Mike Debenham showed how Process Definition can be used to enable management teams to develop a clear picture of their processes. In analysing those processes, teams often also discover, says Michael Taite, that the boundaries between one major task and another, are not necessarily where everyone thought they were. Does this matter? Yes, he says: get your systems and people properly aligned with what you actually do, and dramatic gains can be made to efficiency, quality and job satisfaction.

Where do you add value?

At a recent workshop held for the UK R&D team of a major pharmaceutical corporation, the team was split into three and asked to map out exactly what their work involved, the points at which their creation of value reached a climax, and where the boundaries between each of the necessary steps leading up to, and following on from, those points, were.

Not only did all three groups come up with radically different answers as to where their ‘value creation peaks’ were (one group couldn’t identify any), but their answers as to where the boundaries lay also looked very different to their official process document. This, it turned out, was used occasionally as a retrospective compliance check, but never as a guide to day-to-day action.

What are the consequences of this? Well, to start with, you want your best people focussed on where you are adding maximum value. That is where the action is. It is where they will feel most motivated and will give of their best. But it is also where things move fast and people need to be flexible – perhaps not the best place for, say, someone who prefers a steadier, more controlled environment. Such a person would be much better off at the boundary, where one process – and one team – should hand over to another. This, where one major task has been completed and another is yet to start, is the place for tight control and formal records.

Job design

Focussing process and its boundaries on peaks in the creation of value (WSL calls them ‘basic transformations’) also facilitates good job design, bringing together responsibility and accountability in a way which employees find satisfying (because they have control) and managers find immensely valuable (because it is easy to see where something is going wrong, and who is responsible).

At a Dutch hospital, for example, the quality of ward cleaning improved dramatically after a WSL analysis revealed that the division of labour was dictated by the equipment required. Thus one person would go from ward to ward cleaning the surfaces and emptying waste bins, followed by another armed with a vacuum cleaner, followed by yet another to wipe down any ‘between patient’ beds. In each case the focus was on performing the task – “Have you vacuumed the floor?” – rather than the overall benefit required: “Do we have a clean ward?”.

Seeing this, the hospital team itself jumped to the obvious solution: give each cleaner responsibility, whilst he or she is on duty, for the cleanliness of a whole ward (or wards), performing all necessary tasks within it. This simple switch gave each member of the cleaning staff clear ‘ownership’ of one or more wards, providing the satisfaction of a proper job well done whilst removing the opportunity to blame anyone else for substandard work. It also gave them greater contact with the patients in each ward, making for mutually enjoyable social contact and increasing the desire to do a good job. The boundary of each cleaner’s task became the moment when he or she handed over to the next shift: with pride, if all was well, with apologies and embarrassment if not. Thus this simple measure improved productivity, lowered staff turnover and did a better job of delivering what all of that vacuuming, wiping and washing was about: clean wards.

Overall structure

Of course, sometimes, process analysis reveals more dramatic, systemic issues. At one large UK manufacturing plant, value and natural ‘handover points’ and staff satisfaction proved to be irrelevant to their management structure. Instead, originally small and perfectly logical production line teams had grown, piecemeal, over the years, becoming ever more unwieldy. As communication and coordination problems arose, so these, too, were dealt with on a piecemeal basis. The result was no fewer than five layers of management armed with a mass of rules, checks and support departments. Until things reached a crisis point, this just about kept a lid on the fact that almost no one in the plant had any real idea what, beyond their immediate focus, was going on. Frustrations were everywhere, with most managers only too aware that each fellow manager theoretically in a position to help, usually had a ‘valid excuse’ as to why his or her department could not deliver either – a common result of incorrect handover points. But the baffling structure and bureaucracy also meant that employees were unnecessarily demotivated by a system which, even though by accident rather than design, encouraged simply ‘going through the motions’.

Correcting this deeply embedded structure took some doing. Resistance to change, insecurities about individual empires and status, and the distractions of short-term ‘fire fighting’ (a direct consequence of a structure that fails to align people and process) all played an inhibiting role. Yet the company persisted and, with time and effort, achieved huge gains in productivity, reduced staff turnover and profitability. Better still, the changes lasted. WSL went there over a decade ago and the principles established then have continued to be applied ever since. Today, it is the current holder of the Works Management and Cranfield University Best Factory Award. By the same body it was also named Best Process Plant and, tellingly, given their People Management Award. It – Reckitt Benckiser Healthcare in Hull – provides compelling evidence that, by considering the topography of value creation, putting the right people in the right places and giving them a job which they can control and ‘own’, many of the other things we are all trying to do, especially maximise quality, become much, much easier.

Copyright: Work Structuring Limited

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