Productivity Improvement
Objectives Matrix
How to value outputs
All functions in an office have customers for their services, not just those that deal with other organizations or members of the public. The staff of the organization are the customers of the salaries department, which itself is a customer for the data supplied by personnel. The analysis of who uses the services provided by each function, and the initiation of a dialogue about the value kind delivery performance of each of the services provided is the key to the development of useful performance measures. If the customer does not want and value the output you are producing, it has no value and you may as well not do it.
Equally what you consider to be the priority for the various services you provide may not be the customer's priority. When was the last time you asked him or her? (Tip, don't produce selected reports for distribution and see who calls to complain. Those that don't call after say a week or so can probably live without the selected reports.)
Matching your service more closely to customer requirements can in itself promote significant productivity gains by eliminating unnecessary work. I once undertook a business analysis study on a company's production planning and control system. The Information Services Department was working flat out producing reports on the various systems that were being run, production planning, production control, admin, stock control, human resources, engineering maintenance planning etc. In total there were over 100 regular reports produced, with distribution lists of running well into 3 figures at all levels of the organization, over a wide geographic area.
Producing these reports was a significant element of IS's workload, and due to increasing demands for other services, the IS department felt that it was forced, reluctantly, to try and reduce the number of reports produced or expand it's cost base by employing more. Part of my role as project team leader in this exercise was to interview the managers who received the information and try to persuade them to reduce their requirements.
In the event the reaction I received was the opposite of that which I was led to expect. Most managers I spoke to were only too happy to discontinue receiving the reports. Many predated their time in the job, and they merely looked at them, before filing "for reference, just in case."
Many of the managers who needed the reports said that the format was not as they wanted, the information was not exactly what they needed, or they had to make additional calculations, or change the presentation to make it easier to see relationships or trends.
As a result of the review, the number of reports was cut by more than half, and the ones which continued to be produced were changed to make them more useful to the managers involved. In this case, the performance of the Information Services Department was improved, because what they were producing met the needs of their customers more closely, while at the same time workload and cost were reduced. The department was more effective, as well as more efficient.
