Framing an Engagement - 3 of 4
I’ve helped several businesses implement configurable software to streamline and scale home renovation projects. While the needs of every client are different, there are a few big decisions to land in framing an engagement to make sure we deliver the most business value as quickly and consistently as possible. These articles steps through the four big points to scope before we build or implement new tools:
Clarify the Exam Question
Work Backward from “Done”
Walk & Document the Gemba
Set the Leading and Lagging Indicators
Walk & Document the Gemba: Who Is Responsible For Which Steps?
When you know the endstate of the workflow, it’s time to step through the assembly line from beginning to end. One of the most important parts of every project is defining the ideal workflow and clarifying who is responsible for which steps. This often takes several iterations before you can put your arms around the ~5-7 high-level phases of a process, then break it down to the task level to surface inefficiencies, and see whether one role or step is functioning as a bottleneck in your process.
I love to walk the gemba with individual field-based and desk-based team members–to go and see what challenges they’re really running into in doing their jobs. The term “gemba” comes from Japanese, and it means the “real place.” In lean manufacturing, the gemba is the most important place for teams, as it is the place where the real work happens.
With enough perspective on the current state, you have an opportunity to lay out the workflow the company expects to follow in the next 6-12 months, with an eye towards whether the process effectively delivers projects up to the property standards we just put so much effort into documenting.
The most valuable way to visualize a complex workflow is as a swimlane, laying out all the individual tasks by role and surfacing handoffs and approval loops across roles. Once you have laid out all the “work” that needs to get done to move the project from A to Z, try to clarify the goal of each individual task–that’s where you’ll see if the same unit of work is being performed at multiple stages.
Beware of Workflow That is Single-Threaded On One Person
Some managers love being the sole point of approval and can only sleep well if they make every decision that will have more than a $100 or $500 impact on each project. If speed is not your problem, by all means let one manager be the sole point of approval, and make sure he/she is comfortable with never really taking a vacation. But if there is interest in going faster and letting that manager operate at a higher level, it’s time to rethink the workflow so it only passes across his/her desk at most twice: once to QC the initial project scope and suggest changes upfront, and once at the end of the work to make sure best practices were followed, with escalations for big scope changes. That manager will manage best when he/she is managing by exception, so make sure he/she can see exceptions in the project management tool or a reporting system (past-due to start; past-due for phase verification; over-budget on trade X; etc). As you think about tools, look for ways to surface these exceptions for your managers so you get the most out of these expensive resources.
Clear is Kind; Unclear is Unkind
In many cases, no one has said to the desk-based administrator or to the superintendent in the field “your job is to take the project from here to there.” New team members who learn by shadowing the next-to-newest guy or gal can figure out the gist of most of their tasks, but they often miss out on understanding the goal of what they’re being asked to do. Employees love the clarity that comes from laying out the process from A to Z, and in particular knowing which parts of the job they shouldn’t need to worry about–in a company with a strong culture of ownership, everything can feel like everyone’s problem until you step in and sort out exactly what each person is responsible for delivering on each project.
Quality control is, of course, everyone’s job, but it needs to be one person’s job to fulfill a given task up to the relevant quality standards. He/she should be empowered to fix the QC issues in the place where they first crop up, but if the quality issue stems from something earlier in the workflow, the deficiencies will keep coming until we raise the issue up and address it where it’s being created.
Clarifying responsibility goes hand in hand with clarifying metric ownerships–metrics that are shared across people/roles only serve to create a lot of finger pointing. The best metrics gear around questions of “with the input you received (A) from the person upstream, how quickly did you execute your task (B) and pass it on to the next step (C) downstream?” and “with what level of accuracy/quality did you fulfill the task at this step?”
In spelling out the workflow, I’ve seen many, many issues where the same function is performed by two or more people, or the same process (invariably scoping a renovation) is done three and four different times. In lean manufacturing, it’s this type of rework, this waste, that is the most pernicious in slowing down production.
What Will Your Organization Look Like in 6 Months?
When mapping out the workflow, consider how the organization will be staffed in the busiest stretch of the next 6-12 months. Are you close to implementing a central support team for project setup, procurement or vendor compliance? If so, let’s map that workflow and design a system that includes them, then see how we can bridge that gap until the to-be staffing and to-be systems are in place.
Specializing Roles
It may make more sense to a have a flexible central support team that can handle a mix of project setup, vendor compliance, and material purchasing until you have enough volume that teams could handle those disciplines individually–under- and over-utilizing those resources becomes expensive very quickly, and up to a certain level of project volume it makes more sense to empower someone in the field to handle most of the functions even if they’re only 90% as effective as the desk-based person would be. Please see this post for more on when to specialize functions.