EndUserSharePoint.com: SharePoint: How Can Companies Kill the Things that Kill Productivity? – 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 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.

Guest Author: Steve Russell
Global 360 Inc.

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.