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SharePoint & BPM: Kill The Things That Kill Productivity

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Steve Russell, 25 year technology veteran, shares how to resolve six of the main stumbling blocks to analyzing and managing typical business problems using SharePoint and BPM.

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Page 1: SharePoint & BPM: Kill The Things That Kill Productivity
Page 2: SharePoint & BPM: Kill The Things That Kill Productivity

Kill the Things that Kill Productivity?

Steve Russell

SVP of Research and Development and CTO, Global 360

© Copyright 2010 EndUserSharePoint.com

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About the Author

Steve Russell is the SVP of Research and Development and CTO for Global 360

Inc., based in Dallas Texas. He has over 25 years of experience as a technologist

developing enterprise process and document management software platforms.

Steve has extensive experience with large, mission critical systems development

and deployment within Fortune 2000 companies.

Global 360 is an independent provider of process and document management

solutions. For more than 20 years Global 360 has helped more than 2,000

customers in 70 countries reduce paper, automate processes, and empower

individuals to deliver increased productivity, service levels, and business

performance while reducing operational costs.

About EndUserSharePoint.com

EndUserSharePoint.com is a community of SharePoint authors dedicated to

providing support and encouragement for the SharePoint End User. The site

receives 50,000 unique page views a week, has a Weekly Newsletter subscription

base of 13,500 readers and handles hundreds of questions weekly through the

Stump the Panel: SharePoint Q&A Forum.

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Forward by Mark Miller, Founder and Editor of EndUserSharePoint.com

As the SharePoint product has matured, so has the SharePoint End User. We all

worked together when SharePoint 2007 came out. We coalesced as a community

with the need to share information on how to ride this unwieldy beast.

Maturity within the SharePoint market means moving to the next level, working

through business problems, not just standing up SharePoint sites to act as

document repositories and simple collaboration environments.

When Steve Russell approached me about writing a series of business articles for

EndUserSharePoint.com, my initial response was “Hell yeah!” What Steve does

here is echo the basic business principles, the thought processes needed for

improving existing systems.

Read these six articles and think about what it means to your own business

processes. Most of us will recognize ourselves in just about every one of these.

Use the articles as a roadmap, working through each one-by-one to generate in-

house conversation about what your team can do to make your work life better.

Your business will be better for it.

Mark Miller

Founder and Editor, EndUserSharePoint.com

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Contents About the Author .................................................................................................... 3

About EndUserSharePoint.com .............................................................................. 3

Forward by Mark Miller, Founder and Editor of EndUserSharePoint.com ........... 4

Introduction ................................................................................................................ 6

Part 1: Doing the Same Thing Over and Over ........................................................... 9

Part 2: Playing the Waiting Game ...........................................................................12

Part 3: That’s Not What We Do (Anymore) ............................................................14

Part 4: Did You See That? .......................................................................................16

Part 5: Something Went Wrong ...............................................................................19

Part 6: “A Little Help Here!” ...................................................................................22

Thank You ................................................................................................................24

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Introduction

When the financial markets fell apart, the party ended almost

overnight. Companies slashed payrolls and those who remained

were left to deal with the balance of the work. Doing more with less

(i.e. improving productivity) is the only answer we had. And, in

fact, productivity has increased 6.3 percent over the past four

quarters, the biggest 12-month increase since 1962. Yet, the productivity increase

in the last quarter was the smallest in a year, showing companies are reaching the

limits on efficiency. *Is your company reaching its limits on efficiency? Perhaps it

seems that way – but what if you are still not efficient enough? I try to answer this

question by looking at how to use SharePoint to “Kill the Things the Kill

Productivity” in your company.

Through a series of postings, I will present a set of “productivity killers” and

strategies for leveraging SharePoint to address them. There are two common

themes underlying these strategies. The first is adoption of SharePoint as

something much more than a platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing

with enterprise documents. While collaboration and document sharing has been

central to the growth of SharePoint, SharePoint is quickly becoming a platform for

core business applications. This isn’t to say that all business applications should be

re-implemented on SharePoint. That may make sense in some situations but most

of the productivity killers inherent in business applications today can be addressed

by integrating existing business applications with SharePoint.

The second theme is that when looking at productivity killers, it is important to

take a process approach to analyzing and addressing the problem. Adopting a

process-centric view of your business is essential for evaluating productivity issues

in the right perspective. Through a process lens, you can see redundancies,

bottlenecks, gaps, mistakes, and other inefficiencies in business processes.

Solutions for these “opportunities” can then be assimilated into the design and

implementation of your SharePoint applications. SharePoint 2010 offers improved

workflow capabilities for basic, procedural types of activities, and it integrates well

with SharePoint-friendly BPM platforms for more complex business process

automation.

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I will build on these themes in the “productivity killer” posts and explore key

productivity challenges and ways to address them. Below are the posts that I am

planning.

1. Repetitious Work – Doing the Same Thing Over and Over: From one

customer, transaction, or event to another, automating the operational steps

in your processes enhances productivity.

2. Missing/Incomplete Information – Playing the Waiting Game: Everyone

in an organization is connected through business processes, and the

information dependencies between processes link your productivity together.

3. Dated Processes and Procedures – That’s Not What We Do (Anymore):

Subtle, continuous change creates extra steps and work-arounds that can

only be managed when users have the ability to maintain and enhance their

work environments.

4. Low Morale – “Did You See That?”: Outstanding performance needs to be

recognized and rewarded in order to motivate everyone to do their best. Low

morale and lack of motivation drain productivity.

5. Rework/Poor Quality Work – Something Went Wrong: When mistakes are

made, the additional effort to fix things multiplies the work effort by two to

three times. Getting the job done right the first time, and avoiding repeated

mistakes are essential to improved productivity.

6. Lack of Expertise – “A Little Help Here!”: You can’t know everything all

of the time, and when the odd situation comes up, you need to know where to

get answers. Collaborating with your peers and knowing who the experts

are avoids the productivity pitfall of getting stuck.

7. I will be posting on each of these over the coming days. Let me know your

thoughts throughout this series of postings. I’m interested in hearing about

your experiences, and other ideas, thoughts, comments as to what impacts

productivity in your organizations and how SharePoint can be the platform

for business applications.

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*Chandra, Shobhana and Homan, Timothy R. (2010). U.S. Economy:

Productivity Holds Up, Claims Decrease (Update1). Retrieved 11 May 2010 from

Bloomberg Businessweek: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/u-s-

economy-productivity-holds-up-claims-decrease-update1-.html

Original Article with Community Comments

http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/10/sharepoint-how-can-companies-

kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity/

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Part 1: Doing the Same Thing Over and Over

For this first topic in the Kill the Things that Kill Productivity

series, I’m going to talk about a trend in how work is performed in

a growing number of organizations. For years, business processes

were segmented into discrete steps and carried out in a specific

sequence with different specialists performing each step. Today

leading companies are applying LEAN and Six Sigma methodologies to their

processes and eliminating or automating the busy work. More importantly, they are

merging multiple job responsibilities into single roles to be performed by

generalists rather than specialists*.

In order to accomplish this transformation, companies have successfully overcome

one of the most pervasive things that can kill productivity – repetitive work. By

automating the mundane, reoccurring activities within a process, workers not only

have more time to focus on value-added work (i.e., serving customers, analyzing

information and making decisions), they also do not need to be trained in all the

specialized minutia required to perform those mundane tasks. In other words, they

can truly function as generalists.

The work required to fulfill one’s responsibilities consists of different activities

varying in nature from operational to intellectual work often with a degree of

repetition from one customer, transaction, or event to another. Productivity can be

greatly enhanced by offloading repetitive work activities to a process management-

enabled engine and concentrating users’ efforts on the unique aspects of each

transaction. Many operational work activities can be easily automated with

standard SharePoint integration tooling such as Business Connectivity Services and

workflow, while intellectual work may require more sophisticated technologies

such as knowledge sharing, business rules engines and scoring models. The

important point is that automation opportunities exist for both types of work.

Operational work is typically the type of work that can be easily automated – if not

eliminated entirely. For instance, when a life insurance underwriter receives a new

application she must first order lab work, request medical records, and setup an

applicant file. With a SharePoint case-oriented solution, both the lab order and the

medical records can be requested automatically, and a workflow can automatically

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match the associated documents with the appropriate electronic applicant folder

(the case) in SharePoint – eliminating the need to manually create a paper file.

Since the file is now electronic, distributing it, tracking it, and letting multiple

people access it simultaneously, all add up to productivity gains.

With BCS (or other integration technologies) you can enable legacy systems to

publish data and transactions into SharePoint so they can be used within

SharePoint-hosted applications. This preserves the transactionality and corporate

governance of the legacy system while enabling that same application to be

enhanced through the productivity tools provided by SharePoint. By removing

legacy systems, and replacing them with a task-based application that gives users

access to all of the information and steps needed to complete their work, you have

removed most of what makes people specialists. By eliminating the need to

navigate legacy systems and delivering the application through SharePoint, users

can be provided with a more intuitive interface that includes SharePoint

productivity tools such as discussions, tasks, document management,

announcements or other SharePoint features that enhance users’ productivity.

How to get started? As archaic as it seems, something as simple as time-motion

monitoring of people while they work is a great way to understand where to focus.

A simple three step process involves:

1. Identifying the processes that people participate in.

2. Map out the task flows they perform in each of those processes.

3. Identify for each activity within the task flows, the activities that are

repetitive, don’t require decision making or otherwise add little value.

You don’t have to study everyone. A small cross-section of users is sufficient to

surface the non-value add work that everyone has to do in order to complete their

work. There are other (and certainly more sophisticated) process improvement

methodologies out there. But the point here is not to re-engineer your business

processes (we’ll cover that in a later article), but rather make the ones you have

more productive. By keeping it simple you can identify and incrementally

automate the high return activities. It is this repetitive work that once automated

can significantly enhance productivity.

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What we have found is that by doing this, the task flows that used to have 30 user

performed tasks might now have 5 or 10. And simpler task flows enable more

people to perform them. This is how organizations transform people from

transactional specialists into customer-facing generalists. Using SharePoint to

simplify and empower how users get their jobs done is an excellent way to kill one

of the biggest productivity killers – - repetitive, low value work.

In the next article I plan to explore the productivity costs in missing and

incomplete information. Playing the Waiting Game looks at how to link processes,

people and information to make sure everyone has what they need and when they

need it.

*Le Clair, C., Moore, C. (2009). Dynamic Case Management – An Old Idea Catches New Fire. Forrester Research.

Original Article with Community Comments

http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/17/sharepoint-how-can-companies-

kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-1-doing-the-same-thing-over-and-over/

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Part 2: Playing the Waiting Game

For this second topic in the Kill the Things that Kill Productivity

series, I’m going to address one of the more subtle productivity

inhibitors – waiting around for work. It’s equally pervasive as the

issue of repetitive work, yet I think it’s harder to identify at an

individual worker level.

One of the frustrating things about working in a large organization is that

oftentimes the right hand doesn’t know (or really care) what the left hand is doing.

Evidence of this is very clear in business processes when workers have no real idea

why they do what they do, or what anyone else does for that matter. When workers

have only a minimal understanding of the big picture, it’s almost a sure bet that

productivity is being affected. SharePoint can help with this by highlighting for

workers the importance of their work and where they fit in the big picture.

People in an organization perform work in business processes that connect, relate,

and overlap with one another. The inputs and outputs of each person’s work

represent information dependencies between the activities in these processes. As

each step in a process is completed, information flows to the next step until

finished.

When these information dependencies are interrupted, productivity is negatively

affected. In many cases, problems are widespread and systemic due to a lack of

visibility and communication. People often do not know or understand the

importance of their work, and the relevance they have to other downstream

processes. When information is incomplete, not in the expected format, or missing,

downstream workers are either forced to wait for the missing input, or do extra

work and go without it.

For instance, an expense report submitted by an employee and approved by a

manager may be forwarded to Accounts Payable for payment. But if the employee

does not use the right spreadsheet, AP will not be able to load the information

automatically into the financial accounting system, plus if a receipt or two is

missing AP will have to notify the employee and hold the expense report until the

employee furnishes the missing documentation. In either event, extra work is

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created for AP because the employee and manager were not paying attention when

the expense report was submitted.

Productivity can be improved with SharePoint and process automation by ensuring

that work activities are performed on time, as expected, and that inter-process

connections are well defined. SharePoint tasks, actions and alerts are handy tools

that when fed to users’ can help them see important tasks, follow-up on

outstanding work, and monitor its status. Larger business processes may require a

more sophisticated process management system which looks at work processing

across multiple activities and departments, prioritize work according to service

levels or dynamically modify business processes to achieve a system defined

business goal.

Once a process and the associated tasks are automated, SharePoint’s business

intelligence can also enhance monitoring and predictions to make sure work is

performed on a timely basis. This includes KPI’s and alerts. Due dates, process

rules, and service level expectations for different types of work can be managed,

prioritized, escalated and kept in front of users. Forms, documents, and other

artifacts produced at each stage of a process can be validated, and notifications can

be issued when exceptions occur. All of these capabilities ensure that the

information flowing through a business process enables users to receive the inputs

they need to perform their work.

In the next article we are going to look at the productivity costs incurred when

systems no longer reflect the business processes in which they are used. We don’t

do that Anymore looks at how SharePoint applications can be more responsive and

continually add value to business users when used to automate volatile

applications.

Original Article with Community Comments http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/23/sharepoint-how-can-companies-

kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-2-playing-the-waiting-game/

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Part 3: That’s Not What We Do (Anymore)

In this third posting on how to Kill the Things that Kill

Productivity series, I thought it would be helpful to take a look at

change and agility – probably one of the most commonly heard

marketing drum beats in enterprise software for the last few years.

Everyone in enterprise software wants to enable agility in one way

or another, and to read some of their literature you would think business was in a

constant state of upheaval, but I don’t really think that’s the case.

Business processes do change. Occasionally, they change in dramatic ways due to

corporate events such as a restructuring or a change in strategy, new product

launches, and regulatory changes. More often however, they change in subtle ways

due to a new step in a procedure, an extra field to be coded, or another spreadsheet

to reference. Individually, each change is hardly noteworthy, yet their cumulative

effect is real and eventually very costly.

Dealing with the problem requires a move away from big IT support in favor of

incremental user updates that are implemented as quickly as possible. Let users

have control of the tools they need to keep their applications relevant. This has

been a big part of the success of SharePoint. The business has more control over

the solution and new applications and changes to existing applications do not

require full IT change management cycles. By enabling users to have more control

over their applications and the tools used to define them, technology can be more

responsive to business needs.

I’m not advocating that IT close their doors and that end users (or more accurately,

end power-users) should manage and maintain everything having to do with core

business applications. IT plays a very important role in ensuring that company

policies and governance is implemented, systems continuity is maintained and a

host of other extremely important functions. My point is that when all application

maintenance is owned by IT, small incremental changes to how business gets done

is rarely reflected in the systems that support the business.

With each business change, the existing applications and systems satisfy a

diminishing percentage of the business’ needs. Productivity slowly degrades as

workers accumulate additional manual or “extra” steps they are required to

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perform – steps that are not supported by their legacy systems. SharePoint offers

the opportunity to immediately assimilate change into the application environment

and prevent this extra work from evolving. Once legacy systems are turned into

services providing data and transactions to SharePoint-based applications, the

strength of SharePoint’s flexibility can be highly leveraged. No longer do you have

to wait on IT to add new fields, reorganize screens or include relevant information.

Wikis, notes and other SharePoint productivity tools can help address this problem.

Procedure manuals and sharing of tribal knowledge is not only facilitated, it can be

saved, indexed, reviewed and pushed to everyone. This doesn’t require any

computer system changes. All it takes is giving the people doing the work, the

tools to let everyone benefit and adapt as business changes.

Businesses can further restore productivity by implementing a dynamic case-

oriented solution leveraging the inherent agility of a business process management

platform to continuously maintain and update a process. Once enabled with a

business process solution, organizations have an economically viable platform for

maintaining alignment between their current business processes and their

supporting applications.

Let IT do what they do best; maintaining and delivering the core transaction

systems that underlie and support how companies do business. Let the user

community have access and control over tools to make those transaction systems

more dynamic and responsive to all of the little changes that vibrant organizations

face every day. By doing so, the automation that everyone depends on maintains its

relevancy and organizational productivity is optimized.

In the next article we are going to look at the opportunity (and low cost) of

increasing user morale. Low Morale: “Did you see that?” looks at the benefits of

using SharePoint to provide feedback and motivation to business users.

Original Article with Community Comments http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/06/28/sharepoint-how-can-companies-

kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-3-that%e2%80%99s-not-what-we-do-

anymore/

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Part 4: Did You See That?

"Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it." – Lou Holtz

For the fourth topic in the Kill the Things that Kill Productivity

series, I’m going to discuss how to motivate people and help them

maintain a positive attitude about their work because without it,

there is no way they will be highly productive.

Let’s assume you hire people with the ability to do the jobs you intend for them to

do. Now how do you inspire them and make sure they show up with a positive

attitude day in and day out? For many companies it starts with the corporate

culture and creating a sense of purpose throughout the organization. But beyond

that – at an individual level – what gets people out of bed in the morning? For the

majority of people, it comes down to financial incentive, recognition for a job well

done and the opportunity for advancement.

The training, systems, and policies put in place to improve productivity are all

concentrated on making participants in a business process more efficient at

performing their work and increasing their output. At the same time, companies

must also motivate those participants and understand the attitudes they have toward

their work. At risk is a low morale work environment that will always result in

lagging productivity and under performance.

High-performing, high-capacity individuals – the kind that all organizations seek to

hire – look for opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities and excel in their

careers. When an organization is unable to differentiate and reward the

performance of its best workers, their motivation is suppressed. Over time, an

individual’s output settles to the organization’s prevailing acceptable level, which

is based on the under-performance of an unmotivated team.

By focusing on user feedback and goal management, companies can disrupt this

cycle and get more productivity out of their people and organizations. In order to

do this information needs to be collected from applications and business processes.

Simple indicators around how much work is getting done tends to be numbers of

transactions a user performs, relative difficulty of these transactions, how much

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idle time a user is consuming, etc. While most process management and workflow

systems provide some mechanism to capture and report on this data, not all

processes are automated with a process management system. And those that do

don’t always capture everything that is relevant to a user or a team.

We advocate using a separate set of tracking tables that multiple applications can

pump data into. For example, by capturing an event when a user starts a business

transaction (e.g. open a new account) and another event when the user completes

it, you now have a rudimentary set of events that can show work completed, how

long it took to get it done, who did it and when they did it. This can quickly grow

as more complex reporting and work patterns need to be reflected. But the key is

that by having a simple event format and an easy way for applications to create

those events, most of the data needed for good reporting and goal management can

be captured.

Next is where SharePoint (with a little help from SQLServer) starts to shine. With

metrics by user and team on work backlogs, processing time, work completed, etc.

very simple dashboards can be delivered via standard web parts that keep users

informed of how they are doing, how their team is doing, how much work is

outstanding and how they are performing against their service level goals.

This is hugely motivational and focusing for people. Knowing what’s going on and

how you are doing is a simple but valuable way to keep productivity high.

SharePoint also provides some very sophisticated capabilities for dashboarding,

reporting and analysis via Excel Services and PerformancePoint. Coupled with a

rich base of data, and sometimes using SQLServer Analysis Services, everyone can

view information that they need to keep them most informed about their business

operations. SharePoint 2010 does a lot to advance these capabilities and makes it

easier than ever to get this information out to users.

In my last posting, I talked about giving users control over the tools necessary to

adapt to change on their own without heavy IT involvement. Reporting and

information is probably the most common example of this need. Someone with

good excel skills can easily create views of data and publish them out to users

without a lot of IT assistance or development skills.

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This is a pretty big topic and this post only covers one aspect of the opportunity

here. Giving users real-time views into their performance is one way to focus and

motivate people. This combined with other tools such as just in time training can

make for a user and workplace experience that can greatly contribute to

productivity.

The next article in the series is entitled Rework/Poor Work and discusses the cost

and opportunities associated with catching mistakes early and figuring out how to

make sure that they don’t happen again.

Original Article with Community Comments

http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/07/02/sharepoint-how-can-companies-

kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-4-did-you-see-that/

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Part 5: Something Went Wrong

About the only thing worse than doing work slowly is doing it over.

When work is done incorrectly the impact can range from

embarrassing to damaging, and it inhibits the productivity of other

downstream participants. The extra effort to fix mistakes often

exceeds the initial work effort by two to three times as the

organization has to figure out where a mistake was made, redo it correctly, and

then deal with the ramifications (customer service, financial reporting).

As organizations deploy business-critical applications onto SharePoint, a natural

benefit is to use the collaborative and task management capabilities within

SharePoint. The opportunity is not just to automate something that is currently

done manually, but to improve how it is done through automation. Too often we

focus on automating the current way of doing things without stepping back and

asking if automation can open up other ways to get things done. One challenge that

we constantly see is that people tend to automate processes based on how they are

supposed to work, not necessarily how they do work. In manual environments,

mistakes are made, work has to be redone and maybe as a result, a customer

situation has to be cleaned up. By adding in some fairly simple work management

concepts, SharePoint applications can not only automate the tasks people are

expected to perform, but can help manage and avoid the pitfalls that create costly

mistakes.

The focus is to design applications that ensure that the right person is working on

the right task at the right time. Many mistakes and rework are simply a result of not

having the best possible person performing the needed task. This sounds easy but

in most business applications it is not.

There are three key considerations that can be helpful here. The first is to match

the requirements of the task to the available people. In a manual environment, this

tends to be pretty simplistic. There might be a team to handle a certain type of

customer transaction, but it is challenging to make those qualifiers very complex

simply because no one has the time to figure it out for each task and then

determine who to give the task to.

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For example, in a bank a loan underwriting team processes loan applications. That

team may have smaller sub-teams that deal with different types of loans. But that is

usually about as granular as it gets. But with an automated system, we can now tag

work with more helpful pieces of information. For example, the size of the loan,

foreign language skills required, expertise in the type of business that is requesting

the loan, geographic location, etc. By expanding the amount of information that we

capture about each loan request we now have more information to base our task

selection on. And once that same set of information is used to describe the people

performing the tasks, we now have a simple framework for matching tasks to

people.

While this is a good start on getting work processed more effectively, we can do

more. The second consideration has to do with matching the person to the value of

the task. By value we mean value to the organization. Organizations place value on

different things. It may be the profitability of the transaction, the value of the

customer, or the value to their brand. Prioritizing tasks based on value gives

another level of task management that is often overlooked. But by doing so, we can

now match task based not just on the skills needed, but also the competency of the

people performing the task and maybe even the policies under which the task is

going to be performed. So for a highly valuable customer or transaction, it isn’t

enough to have the right skills, we want people have the right skills and are highly

competent in them. So for each skill, it is nice to have a competency rating for each

person who has the skill. Simple rules can then be used to state which skills are

needed and how competent the person needs to be in each of the skills. The more

valuable the transaction, the higher the competency that the system requests.

And the third consideration is around prioritizing tasks. Many problems arise not

because a mistake was made but rather an expectation wasn’t met. Knowing what

work is most important to process helps avoid falling short of expectations. It is

easy enough to place deadlines on tasks, SharePoint makes that available right out

of the box; but if the workload is too great then no matter what tasks get

performed, expectations will not be met. That is why it is important to differentiate

between deadlines and service levels. Deadlines are placed on individual tasks.

Service levels manage performance across all tasks. By incorporating service

levels into the equation, we can now categorize work and track service level

averages across all categories of tasks. By maintaining rolling averages, we can

now make decisions about which tasks to give the most priority. If the current

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rolling average service level for a given category of work is exceeding the goal,

then if other service levels are below goal, the tasks associated with those service

levels can be given a higher priority.

Simple ways to categorize tasks and people can build a foundation for providing

far more productive mechanisms for assigning tasks to people. You can build on

that by incorporating competencies and service level monitoring and in turn really

super-charge an organization’s productivity.

Original Article and Community Comments

http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/07/15/sharepoint-how-can-companies-

kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-5-something-went-wrong/

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Part 6: “A Little Help Here!”

In this last posting Kill the Things that Kill Productivity series,

I’m going to talk about collaboration, which is a long time sweet

spot for SharePoint. Typically, when you hear about collaborative

business processes, most people think about creative efforts where

something is being designed or developed by a group of people.

However, there’s another type of process I’ll call real-time dynamic collaboration.

This is where people come together on an ad hoc basis to exchange ideas,

recommendations, expertise, and help one another on the spot.

Probably the most obvious cause of inefficiency is people not knowing what to do.

Policies, procedures, and end-user application training give workers the essential

information they need to perform their responsibilities, yet inevitably situations

arise where the appropriate course of action is not clear. System errors, odd

customer requests, and little known transactions are examples of things that cause

workers to get stuck. Have you ever been on the phone with a call center when

someone puts you on hold so they can consult with an expert or supervisor?

Workers normally rely on their peers and supervisors to provide assistance in

working through such issues. However, the quality and accuracy of the feedback

they receive can be hit-or-miss. Not all scenarios or outcomes can be documented

within a standard operating procedure, and a precedent may not exist. In other

cases, people may not feel comfortable raising questions and prefer to work in a

vacuum without exposing their uncertainties.

Dynamic collaboration is the key to improving productivity in this area and

SharePoint 2010 provides a load of features to enable this. The extended personal

profiling capabilities within SharePoint enable people to maintain personal profiles

with their interests, ratings, and roles allowing others to locate them when they

need help. The “Ask Me About” feature allows people to apply expertise tags to

themselves making it easy for others to locate people with a needed expertise.

Similarly, subject matter experts (SMEs) can post newsfeeds to their sites with

updates on new policies, best practices, and other relevant knowledge sharing. As

people in an organization connect through My Site social relationships they build

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personal networks of SMEs that become invaluable when they need to dynamically

collaborate with expert resources.

SharePoint is also integrated with Office Communications Server, which displays

everyone’s real-time presence. A person needing help can see the availability of all

his or her SMEs and reach out to them directly through instant messaging, email,

or phone.

Lastly, people can use their newsfeeds and presence indicators to broadcast their

personal work status and alert team members when they have a problem. Team-

leads and designated SMEs can be notified of these situations and immediately

engage to help them with their issues.

By providing users with a network of easily accessible experts and consultants, and

by giving them the tools to interact with them, work is no longer held up while

issues are being researched or resolved. SharePoint and Office Communications

Server are well integrated and provide all of the building blocks necessary to create

a real-time collaborative platform. By integrating these collaborative capabilities

into business applications, these collaborations can be contextual in that transaction

specific information can be shared and the collaboration itself can be linked or

copied into a system of record so audit trails are more complete and reconstructing

how decisions were made is easily enabled.

Original Article with Community Comments

http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/07/19/sharepoint-how-can-companies-

kill-the-things-that-kill-productivity-part-6-%e2%80%9ca-little-help-

here%e2%80%9d/

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Thank You

Steve and I hope you found this series enlightening. We look forward to your

comments on the site and hope to personally meet you at one of your local

SharePoint events.

Regards,

Mark Miller

Founder and Editor, EndUserSharePoint.com