As always, my to-do list stretches out somehwere into the middle distance at present, perhaps overwhelming me if I ever gave it some thought. My strategy for coping is to focus on one key task for the morning and one for the afternoon. I cannot pretend this actually increases productivity in any sense, but it does mean I have a clear idea of what I've failed to do when a day is done.
Yesterday afternoon my primary focus was simple:
To design an online form which would allow customers to submit repair requests online.Now this is fairly representative of the work I undertake on a day to day basis. It is something that almost every housing provider will have to do. It is a task which requires the input from a range of people (stakeholders, if you will). Most depressingly, it is a task which someone in my organisation has almost certainly done before. Maybe more than once.
What does this last point show us, aside from the futility of human endeavour?
That my time is potentially being wasted here. To explain : We used to have an old website. On this website, I seem to remember a form existing which allowed customers to submit repair requests on this website. So, in theory, I don't need to start this from scratch. Or so it seems. Things are rarely this straight-forward however.
But why? Well, what I'm going to come on to talk about is my organisations worst practices. From what I've identified elsehwere, I doubt we're alone so this is not to be seen as overly self-critical, simply to admit where something is not working as well as it might.
So, why didn't I simply use the old form? Well, to begin it is not clear where the old form is. It was hosted externally a long time ago. Someone in the organsisation might have it, but it's also just as likely that no-one has it, or that the person who had it has left, or deleted it. I know the form would take about two hours or so to develop. I had no idea how long it would take to find the form (if at all).
Our first piece of bad practice is thus :
1) Information is poorly organised in general. It is not properly appreciated that not being able to find information (sometimes quickly) means we may not as well have the information in the first place.
There's a point reached for all processes which you suspect you or someone else has done before. It's a point at which the x number of seconds, minutes, hours or days that it would take you to do the work from scratch overtakes the time taken to finding the old version, learning about it and evaluating it. If your information is in poor enough state, you'll often find it quicker to start something again.
But why wouldn't someone have saved the form? Why would someone have deleted it? Why wouldn't someone emailed everyone in the organisation with it to make sure it didn't get lost? Point two of bad practice.
2) Information is often seen as worthless or worse - a burden. And so, it is treated as such : reduced, removed, devalued, degraded and ignored. Systems, processes and habbits all actively encourage this attitude.
People will often be told to have a "clean up" of their files, or emails. Absolutley, but what should be understood that cleaning up does not mean removing data. Nothing should be deleted (or even slight value) if it cannot be easily reassembled. Deleting the only copy of a report run from a database is fine; the report can be run again. Deleting the only copy of a survey which a surveyor spent five hours in the field collecting is NOT fine.
Similarly, most of the 'email best practice' guides I have read plead with people not to send unnecessary emails. One of the largest, most frequent complaint of staff (especially at manager levels) at my organisation is they get too many emails, and many of them are irrelevant to them. Information can directly be a burden.
In other cases, a person may be trying to hoarde information for themselves. Their motives will almost always be good, but they may have become the sole custodians of massive chunks of information. They will sometimes have no method (or desire) to distribute this information to others. Why?
Well, Thomas Jefferson one said :
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.This peculiarity about ideas, or information generally is still not properly grasped by some and this, I believe, is the source of many errors in this field.
And so, bad practice item number three.
3) Where information is valued, its nature is sometimes misunderstood. Some see it as a personal treasure they must amass, and not let others gaze on for fear of corrupting, or losing it. Information is not correctly identified as an organisational asset.
The above occurs I believe, partially because people through their work career they have become familiar with physical (paper) files. With paper files, there are obvious restrictions in place. Usually:
a) Only one person can easily view the file at the same time.
b) It is relatively easy for a file to become damaged or lost.
c) A file, if lost or damaged cannot easily be recovered and often a pre-emptive backup or copying is not always feasible.
There are more, but because of the above three in particular it will often be necessary to have rigid controls in place for where files are kept (so everyone knows where to find them), who can use the file (to minimise damage / loss) and so on. Therefore, it is common for individuals to become protective of "their files" (a phrase I hear commonly). An understandable response, given the characteristics of paper.
Computer files are, to some extent, built on the physical file / file system model. They sometimes share charecteristics with physical files :
Many computer files can only be viewed by one person at a time, and there is certainly the need to ensure that files are kept in a particular directory structure (the equivalent of a physical place) to ensure they can be found again. Once again, when people refer to documents they have created, it is common for people to talk about "my files".
And while the file may be theirs, the data within is ours. It belongs to the organisation. This is best understood when looking at databases. Regardless of how often a user inputs into a database it is rare to hear them talk of "their data" or "their recordset" (this preciousness will usually be limited to the designer or administrator of such a system.
Related to this "personalising" of information, is another issue. The idea of person-specific knowledge, or what I term "human knowledge".
4) We rely in the wrong way on our "human-knowledge" and do not do enough to distribute, capture or evaluate it.
"Human knowledge" is information held only by human beings (as opposed by paper or electronic files). Almost all organisations rely on this asset to an extent, but in the wrong way. We depend on people being around knowing things for basic enquiries to be answered. We do not ask people to record things properly either generally or when they leave. And finally, perhaps more challengingly, we do not evaluate it. What if what we know is wrong?
There is movement in all of these areas, which I will talk about at another time.
For now, it's only necessary to see that information is not always shared evenly. Working backwards : People may know the answer to a question, but this knowledge is just in their head, and thus useless once they leave or are unavailable.
People may think they should keep personal hold of information, fearing it will be damaged somehow if others see it. In addition, they will not want to burden colleagues by passing on non-relevant information. This is where people speak of "information overload". The issue is not an excess of information, but that it is poorly organised and poorly distributed.
So, to return to my dilemma. I do not know who has the old form (if anyone, if it even existed) or where it is. Which leads to my next problem.
5. Our information is not organised with searching in mind. Our filing system assumes familiarity. Guests are not expected, nor welcome.
We have tens of thousands of documents on dozens of servers. Each server will have multiple drives. These shared drives are not necessarily poorly laid out. They form, to an extent, a certain logical flow, although each section will have it's own style (e.g. by sub-team, by area, by category, etc). But the filing system assumes you know what you're looking for in at least the title and location of the document. If you only have imperfect informaiton about the file (e.g. perhaps some of it's contents) then you are in difficulty. Searching (an increasing area of focus for the IT industry generally) is an option, but not feasible with present technologies for some tasks.
But enough of that. Let's imagine I did find the old form. Would I use it without hesitation? Well, actually, no - I wouldn't. Why? Quite simply : I do not know if it was ever any good.
I remember the website not being very good generally, and this form would have formed part of this website. Do I want to be proposing such junk as part of a new system? Clearly, improvement is the goal here.
And so we find our final lesson for today.
6. While measurements and KPIs abound about the organisation overall performance, it is rare that individual forms or processes will have been evaluated properly. Most of the time, records or metrics do not exist to tell us how certain things are doing.
So, how do we work out what to do then?
On a day-to-day basis, the people applying a certain process, if they are competent will know how things are going and therefore what decisions to take. They will be able to tell you what is working and what isn't. What could change and what should stay. These opinions may not necessarily be "objective" - in the sense of being statistically demonstrable, but that isn't necessarily the problem here. It may also be that these opinions are not listen to, but that is a management problem, not what I am talking about here.
In the longer term a problem develops with this working from this informal approach. For one, staff leave. My organisations turnover is something like 12%. 12% in one year. My team has over ten people, I've got to work on the assumption that at least one will be gone by next year. In fact, I know that at least two are going in the next six months and another will be reducing their hours.
Even if staff are around, their memories like all of us, will be imperfect. If you ask someone what is wrong with a system they use every day they'll probably be able to give you a list of specific problems they've encountered. Ask them in three months and their criticisms may be more vague.
In two years all they may remember is something like "It never seemed to work. Everyone hated it." Which might be enough to review, but is it reliable?
So with my repair form - did it work well? I cannot find minutes of any meeting which has discussed it. But was it used? I have no idea how many repairs were raised using the old system. Who created the form? I have no idea, we've had a large staff turnover in IT, I doubt anyone would know.
So....what do we find at the end of this? I can't find the form, don't know who was involved and even if I could, don't know enough about it to go forward without further evaluation. It's reached the point I discussed earlier : It was quicker to start from scratch.
I will continue this discussion at some point in the future.
