BOOK EXCERPT
MARCH 22, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 11
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6 USE DIGITAL TOOLS TO ELIMINATE SINGLE-TASK JOBS
An acquaintance of mine had an uncle who spent 25 years at an auto plant in Flint, Mich., tacking chrome strips and other finish parts onto automobiles. It was a good job in the years immediately after World War II, but it followed the classic Industrial Age approach: break a process into small, discrete tasks and assign each to one person who does it over and over "the one best way."
In the new organization, the worker is no longer a cog in the machine but is an intelligent part of the overall process. Having people focus on whole processes allows them to tackle more interesting, challenging work. A one-dimensional job (a task) can be eliminated, automated or rolled into a bigger process.
General Motors launched the Saturn Corp. back in 1985 to create not only a brand-new car from scratch but a brand-new way of building cars and empowering workers. Teams are tight, autonomous units. Each team has a specific function, such as building engines or doors, and each team member is trained to do approximately 30 different jobs in that area, so that people don't get stale from doing repetitive tasks. Through a Web interface, the worker can retrieve data from a database, automatically load the data into a spreadsheet and pivot through the data to analyze it by part and type of problem.
Give your workers more sophisticated jobs along with better tools, and you'll discover that your employees will become more responsible and bring more intelligence to their work. One-dimensional, repetitive work is exactly what computers, robots and other machines are best at--and what human workers are poorly suited to and almost uniformly despise. In the digital age, you need to make knowledge workers out of every employee possible.
7 CREATE A DIGITAL FEEDBACK LOOP
Since Michael Hammer and James Champy introduced the concept of reengineering in 1993, companies the world over have been re-examining their business processes. When I read their book, Reengineering the Corporation, three of their ideas really stood out for me. The first is that you need to step back periodically to take a hard look at your processes. Do they solve the right problems? Can they be simplified? The second is that if you cut a job into too many pieces and involve too many people, nobody can see the whole process and the work will bog down. The third, closely related to the second, is that too many hand-offs create too many likely points of failure.
Creating a new process is a major project. You should have a specific definition of success, a specific beginning and end in terms of time and tasks, intermediate milestones and a budget. The best projects are those in which people have the customer scenario clearly in mind. That's true of process projects too.
Digital technology makes it possible to develop much better processes instead of being stuck with variations on the old paper processes that give you only incremental improvements. You need to be flexible in the face of evolving requirements. You should have a crisp decision process to evaluate change, including a provision for re-evaluating your original project goals.
8 USE DIGITAL SYSTEMS TO ROUTE CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS IMMEDIATELY
Listening to customers means hearing their complaints about current product shortcomings. But getting bad news from customers passed all the way to the product design groups is surprisingly hard to do.
I recommend the following approach:
1. Focus on your most unhappy customers.
2. Use technology to gather rich information on their unhappy experiences with your product and to find out what they want you to put into the product.
3. Use technology to drive the news to the right people in a hurry.
If you do these three things, you'll turn those draining bad news experiences into an exhilarating process of improving your product or service. Unhappy customers are always a concern. They're also your greatest opportunity.
Companies that invest early in digital nervous systems to capture, analyze and capitalize on customer input will differentiate themselves from competition. You should examine customer complaints more often than company financials. And your digital systems should help you convert bad news to improved products and services.
9 USE DIGITAL COMMUNICATION TO REDEFINE THE BOUNDARIES
The internet allows a company to focus far more than in the past by changing which employees work within the walls and which work outside in an adjunct, consulting or partnering role.
For Microsoft, outsourcing has been a way to temper the expansion of our work force and reduce management overhead, but it hasn't stopped the growth of our work force. The Web work style, in which each contributor or company organizes itself optimally, enables us to extend our electronic web of partnerships and--I hope--keeps us from growing big in the wrong areas and becoming ineffective through too much overhead.
As a business manager, you need to take a hard look at your core competencies. Revisit the areas of your company that aren't directly involved in those competencies, and consider whether Web technologies can enable you to spin off those tasks. Let another company take over the management responsibilities for that work, and use modern communications technology to work closely with the people--now partners instead of employees--doing the work. In the Web work style, employees can push the freedom the Web provides to its limits.
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