Updated: October 6, 2022
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Ask ACE: What to do when productivity 'improvements' aren’t working
By Carrie Green Yardley, Association for Consulting Expertise
Q: Something’s off. Top management agreed on a new workflow system to improve productivity, but implementation is all over the place, and we’re not seeing any improvement. One department in particular seems to be the problem. What do we do?
ACE Advises: Renee Kelly, vice president for innovation and economic development at the University of Maine, says, “Workplace system failures fall into two categories: ‘common cause’ and ‘special cause.’ Common cause failures arise from the system and make up 94% of all failures. The remainder may be attributable to individuals not following the system.”
Given the odds, start with the system. When the problem is systemic, no worker has the ability to resolve the problem. “They may be willing, but they are not able,” says Kelly.
Perhaps the system is not documented. For instance, there’s no roadmap explaining the goal of the system or who the stakeholders are or how success is measured. There may be a lack of milestone measurements that allow participants to track progress. The system may lack consideration of practical constraints, such as budget or time constraints.
Even when workers understand the overall system, they may lack adequate training or they may not have the right tools to do the job.
In a common cause failure, the system is the problem, and changing the system can help. However, in a special cause failure — attributable perhaps to an individual who won’t play ball — tinkering with the system to address the actions of a single individual often leads to needless rules for everyone else. As Kelly would say, “the worker is able, but not willing.”
In this case, the individual needs to understand the system’s goal, and how the system has been designed to achieve it, and how the individual’s contributions impact the performance of the system. A system may have constraints, but the people charged with implementing it should not create them.
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