Observable work, not status meetings
Status updates – via email, a meeting, a PowerPoint deck - kill productivity.
Information workers spend countless hours gathering information, preparing and presenting about their work rather than DOING their work. If information about their work and the deliverables from their work is visible and available to their team and their leadership, information workers free more time to do the work and thoughtfully analyze information. This leads to more efficiency and to moreengaged and motivated information professionals.
Every information professional values knowing what their colleagues are doing and how it will impact their work. We all want to know the status, but we don’t have the time to waste building materials just to convey it. It should be conveyed by the work execution process.
In manufacturing, many companies used to do quality review at the end of the production cycle. It was a tedious exercise and when something was found, the point where the breakdown was often difficult to determine so the quality of the products suffered. When Edwards Deming identified that testing throughout the manufacturing process and identifying an issue AS SOON AS IT HAPPENS would result in both higher quality and lower costs, the American auto manufacturers rejected him. The Japanese embraced him. We know the end of the story.
Status meetings are the quality control of information workers – they happen after the product is created and are outside the natural process of doing the work. They add time to the process and when an issue is identified, delays are magnified because the issue “waited” until the status meeting. Imagine instead a process where issues are apparent in progress and status is always available. Managers can assist (or intervene) when an issue arises rather than later. Managers can reallocate resources and change timelines as work requires. And status meetings transform into brainstorming and collaboration sessions where information workers stimulate each other through dialogue to best approach the projects.
Build visibility into the work process and not only will productivity go up, but this new data will allow you to plan for future work and devote resources more effectively.
- Avinoam Nowogrodski
NOTES
I did a post on this very thing back in 2008, Adoption idea : meetings are KM 2.0 behaviours. In that post I included and old school example from the Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein case study:
The teleconference used to be one and a half hours long, with much time wasted on bringing people up to speed on the week’s events. Now team members update themselves on the wiki, and that part of the teleconference takes five to ten minutes.
The rest of the teleconference is used for ideas generation, being innovative, talking about problems and looking at solutions, which is what the meeting should be about. It shouldn’t be about updating people as to what’s happened, but thinking about our clients and how we can service them.
Also see Joe Crumpler manage team projects with less status meetings.
Of course this is about “observable work”, see Jim McGee ‘s post from last year on this meme
…or otherwise known as tiny work, or invisible work
…and how is converges with knowledge work and adaptive case management
Coupled with doing work in-the-flow and observable is also narrating your work or journaling
I posted about how it helps with the “know-why”…when you are reading a report one day and wonder why a decision was made on paragraph 2 on page 7, now you can look back to the online discussions. That post was inspired by Paula Thornton’s words on a comment on one of my posts
Conversations are artifacts of work. Do not confuse artifacts of work with work products. Work products often miss much of the “real work” that occurred. Any evidence of “real work” qualifies as an artifact.
KM tended to focus on “work products” (often most closely aligned with ‘the explicit’). But the goal was never to document the “implicit” (as was often postulated), but simply to make it observable by others”
In another post I talk about using microblogging to do tasks. When working in the open your boss doesn’t need to ask for an update as they can observe you as you work
(Source: zdnet.com)
