Time and Process Management

Here is the scenario.  Person 1 doing the same job day-after-day for about one year, never manages to stay on top of things no matter what.  Person 2 comes into the same job after 2-weeks of training and manages to complete what they are to have done AND still have time to take a 30-minute lunch AND help out the rest of the Customer Service team take calls.  How can that be possible?  How can one person stay on top of the job, while the other begs for overtime because they are so far behind?

This has bothered me for years – not only in my current position but in every position I’ve held.  There has always been someone that just can’t stay on top of things.

My goal when I come in in the morning is to ensure that the tasks that I need to have done for the day are complete – regardless of what comes up during the day.  For the most part, I do succeed without putting in any overtime – most managers don’t get overtime – so why would you want to put it in unless you absolutely need to?

What are they doing differently?

First lets look at what actions can waste time.

Time Waster: Distractions

This by far has to be the biggest time waster of all.  Distractions.  Distractions come in many shapes, and sizes:

• Excessive Internet usage – I’ve caught people playing games during business time (they were not on breaks), browsing the web or just checking e-mail.  This can eat up A LOT of time since time seems to slow down when you’re on the internet and only later do you realize that you just wasted 4-hours on FaceBook or MySpace.
• Personal phone calls – another huge time waster.  I’ve caught many people on personal phone calls, and while I can understand them — they should be for emergencies only.  Not to discuss with your spouse/partner/friend about the great time you had on the weekend or where you want to go out for supper, or how you should decorate the house!  Seriously this is another significant time waster.
• Cooler talk – aaaah, my favourite.  I must admit, I partake in cooler talk from time-to-time but normally when I know I’m caught up or to just get relief from sitting behind my desk and in front of the monitor for the last 3-hours straight.  Problem with cooler talk is that it’s usually the same people, all the time EVERY time.  I see some people head into the lunch room every 30-minutes, others every 60-minutes and they are then for 15-30 minutes each time.  How much time is wasted in one day?
• Desk chatter – another significant time waster.  Everyone has someone on their team that likes to talk.  I have a few, and they pop into my office unannounced and start talking.  Hey, don’t get me wrong – I enjoy socializing but when I’m not busy.  Because I try to maintain an open door policy – my door is always open and people figure they can just come in when they are free and talk.  I’ve even tried closing the door at time – but they don’t know when to stop.

These are only a few time wasters.  The other time wasters are more dangerous because the individual doesn’t even realize that what they are doing is wrong.  They think that what they’re doing is the right and will continue to do things this way.

Procedural Wasters

These time wasters are the procedural time wasters, not knowing the right way to perform a task or what to do first.

Procedural time wasters are the worst of the bunch – these are the processes that have been set-up in order to help minimize errors, these are the companies best practices.  Unfortunately they are not always the best practices, and nobody has thought of auditing them because they may have been put in place by a previous supervisor who was well liked or by the boss or worse the bosses son/daughter/nephew/niece that did a summer job or work experience at the office and nobody wants to offend the boss.

Your company isn’t in business to lose money.  If a procedure is not working, discard it or tweak it so that it does work.  You can’t be bashful about making changes, especially if they will improve the efficiency of the team.

Here is an example of a huge time waster.  This example is from someone that I knew that worked in a auto-parts distribution company.  They worked in the warehouse and filled the orders that came in.  Once the order was filled, it went into a box and down to a parts checker to ensure that the right item was picked – if the right items are there, they pack it up and leave it for the delivery driver to take it and deliver it along with the packing slip and invoice.

The box was ready to go, all the driver did was put it into the truck along with a master sheet of the deliveries for the day.  They only needed to ensure that if the delivery sheet showed 20 deliveries that they had 20 boxes (or however many there were to be sent).

They had one problem – sometimes the wrong item would be sent or the item was in the wrong box.

Now someone thought that this process could be improved.  So rather than pack the box and have it ready to go – the box was left open for the delivery driver to first check it, if it was OK then the invoice was generated.  Everyone thought that this would reduce shortages and speed things up.

It did.

But the side effect was that the delivery person now spent 30-60 minutes checking the parts and waiting before the invoice was generated.  This meant that they could not get to between 3 and 5 deliveries per day — which got pushed back.  Once management saw that deliveries were pending, what did they do?  Hire additional drivers.  But because the process was flawed, it didn’t matter how many drivers they would hire they would not be able to stay ahead of the curve because the same flawed process was being followed which resulted in the new drivers going through the same thing.

The drivers were stressed.  They had less work, but also less time to make the deliveries they did have to get done.  They were driving faster, and the number of speeding tickets increased.

The warehouse people were upset, eventhough they realized that mistakes were being made in the past for the most part they were accurate 99.95% of the time.

Management was wasting money on more drivers when none were really needed.

Fixing Procedures To Enhance Productivity

It is important to constantly audit or review processes in place.  As the business environment changes, so should the procedures.  Some should never change, like address verifications (if you send products out via mail or courier) but others can be evaluated to ensure that they are still meeting goals that were put in place.

Going back to the scenario above, it wasn’t until the parts picker told their supervisor, who went to management and told them that the process was flawed that the process was audited, the extra step removed and a new Customer oriented “guarantee” put in place that the operations were back to normal.

The company guaranteed that the delivery would be “worry free” – if any parts were missing, or the wrong part was sent their next delivery would be free.

This encouraged everyone from the delivery driver to the parts picker to make sure each delivery was 100% — they went from 99.95% accuracy to nearly 100%

…and would you look at that, they didnt’ need an MBA to tell them what was wrong.  The nice thing with process changes is if you involve your team, frequently they will be the ones that come up with what works best.  Remember they live and breathe these processes everyday.

As this post is getting pretty lengthy, I’ll go into handling time wasters next day along with determining which tasks should take precedent.