All those specialist case handlers, counter staff, underwriters, complaints specialists and more tell me that every work request is different. When I ask if we can measure how long the task should take, the number there are or the result achieved, I’m also told: “Well you should have been here yesterday” or “That one’s not typical” or “This is different because…”or “Yesterday they were all easy ones!”
However, there is no need for anyone to worry! We all know that there is variation in how long things take and so any measure that covers standard time, quality, skill, service levels or process performance can be a good guide – even if the measure is not 100% precise. It will then support how we report performance or plan for the next period ahead.
The great news is that by getting comfortable with a “robust” measure for these things, aka “the balanced range of measures”, then we have a basis for both: 1) telling us how well our process or operations perform now and 2) telling us how to plan for the future. They provide a guide to help us answer “How many people do we need to hit our service levels?” “Who should I train next on which process?” and “Which processes will need more or less resource in the future?”, amongst many more issues you might like more information on.
So using the law of averages and the 80/20 principle (“Pareto’s Law”, where 20% of the time gets 80% of the result) we can refine the measures and move them ever closer to what everyone believes is a truly accurate figure.
Tell us your experience of measuring your processes – what works for you? What should we avoid? We’d love to hear! Contact us: ask@eguk.co.uk.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Andy,
I have heard all the excuses over the last 10 years and more. Saying that we still use the old stopwatch method for timing processes. Interestingly, where staff tell us that things take longer than the task time, when we come to record it, the timings invariably come out less or the same! The difficulty comes in making sure you record a range of speeds as there is always somebody in each team that works quicker than anybody else. Whilst you don’t want to time somebody new at a task, you don’t want to time the quickest member of staff.
We always try to involve staff as much as possible with why we are re-timing which really helps as they feel that they own the timings. Making sure that you take timings over different periods in the month and having a fairly large number of tasks timed will reduce the impact of variation, or “They were all easy last week” etc.
Saying that, I recently offered to increase everybodies task times by 20% if they could guarantee 100% quality and no complaints. Oddly enough, I didn’t get a single taker…
As the task times impact on effectiveness and staff performance and ultimately pay, I don’t think you will ever please all of the people all of the time.
November 4th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Hi Andy
I’m a firm believer in you get what you measure as people overwhelmingly have a desire to achieve. I therefore take great pains to understand the end result of the measures / targets, i.e. if I target this measure, what behaviour could this drive and what impact will this have on service, customer experience and quality? This often leads to a blend of targets driving the right overall result – or at least striving to!
My other tip would be not to manage people too closely on a hourly / daily basis as this can lead to the excuses of the long / indepth query, etc. Yes of course we should address peformance issues early and have a good understanding of what our people are doing – however the average performance over a weekly, monthly or quarterly time period is much more meaninfgul, smooths the exceptions and helps to provide a better comparison against peers.
November 11th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
I thought I would share this recent experience with you.
I recently set up a new task on work manager with a unit time that I thought would be accurate given the process. How wrong was I? Well actually I wasn’t that far out, and here is why.
Having set up this task I was quickly asked to complete a unit time review as staff completing the process were struggling to hit the unit time. I quickly carried out some testing on 2 team members. I’m glad to report that the 1st individual was excellent, right pace, followed the process to a tee and excellent quality results. The 2nd indivudual again on paper a good performer with good results in the past. However when I sat with this person the current unit time was smashed from its previous 4 minutes to 2 minutes. This got the alarm bells ringing.
I then asked the trainer to quality check the work and guess what, out of the 10 cases sampled for unit time review 7 of these were incorrect.
The conculsion I draw from this and what I want to share with you all, is the importance of getting the right person, following the right process and maintaining an excelllent quality score.
Ironically it was the 2nd individual that requested I carry out the review as this person was struggling to hit the time!