 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
||||||
|
|||||||
you are here: > Self > 21.
Ekasys
| 21.10 | Work as the management of tasks, issues, records |
|
| Work in most modern organisations can therefore be considered a balance of tasks, issues, record and document management. | ||
| 21.10.1 | Why is issue management important? | |
| There are two reasons for the importance of issue management. | ||
| The first is the management of issues is at the heart of effective corporate communication. | ||
| Customer satisfaction is almost directly attributable to how reliable an enterprise behaves in terms of issue management. A poor history of resolving issues will definitely be reflected in poor customer satisfaction. | ||
| Recent changes in industry and government standards across developed countries also placing key demands on how an enterprise keeps track of what it says to its customers, suppliers and staff. A poor system of tracking and recording every piece of communication can now also mean hefty fines and even in some countries, criminal liability. | ||
| Most individual staff in organisations already try to manage issues in some way. The problem is that they are usually relying on their own brains to remember the subtle threads between the mountain of communications covering their desks and in their computers. | ||
| For an effective issue management solution to be in place, an effective technology solution must be considered that addresses: | ||
| An automated way of eliminating "junk" communication from the system
A single view of all types of communication for all staff across the entire business A single storage point for tracking every item belonging to an issue thread An automated way of making staff aware of issues that they have a direct/indirect responsibility An automated way of escalating issues that are not being addressed . |
||
| 21.10.2 | Ad-hoc work | |
| The second reason is that nearly all ad hoc work is driven by issues. Whenever a customer calls with a query, it results in work. Often the work involved is merely a couple of minutes on the phone to resolve the issue. At other times it may require research, or the retrieval of documents, or you might have to call on an internal expert to respond to the customer. | ||
| Sometimes the resolution of an issue may required many interactions over a period of days, if not weeks. Several documents may be involved. Face to face meetings, phone calls, emails and letters may all be part of the communication chain created in dealing with an issue. | ||
| Not only do we deal with customer issues, but also business partners, suppliers and our own management. When the managing director raises an issue, he wants action and resolution. Imagine if we gave all our customers the level of attention we paid to the MDs requests! | ||
| So issues are intimately entwined with tasks, documents, communications and our business relationships. Any system that does not link all of these seamlessly is going to less than optimally productive and efficient. | ||
| 21.10.3 | Putting a value on work | |
| If you cannot measure the time taken to perform work, you have no metrics to decide where there are problems and where improvement is needed. | ||
| You also have no measure of the true cost of work performed and whether or not the work is profitable. | ||
| Any enterprise can be said to be made up of activities, issues and transactions relating to staff, customers, suppliers, the public, products and services. | ||
| Activities or tasks can be defined as those things that staff actually do during the course of their working day.Tasks are activities that form part of a staff persons core job and they are also all the ancillary tasks that are taken for granted, for example taking and making phone calls, attending meetings, writing documents, reading document, resolving issues etc. | ||
| 21.10.4 | Total enterprise tasks per year | |
| While an enterprise may be unable to definitively provide an exact figure (on their current systems) of the total tasks performed for a year, it is possible to estimate a reasonable lower limit and higher limit of what the figure might be. | ||
| For example, if the assumption is made that an average staff person performs around 30 tasks (eg phone call, letter, meeting etc) per day, then on 220 actual days at work 50 staff would complete 330,000 (220 x 50 x 30) tasks per year! | ||
| 21.10.5 | Cost per task | |
| Even on an estimate such as 330,000 tasks per year, an enterprise can estimate an average cost per tasks by dividing the total costs by the number of tasks. | ||
| A figure of $10 to $15 cost per task is not an unreasonable estimate. | ||
| 21.10.6 | Knowledge Value per task | |
| Each enterprise has its own unique profile of activities. However, it is possible (by adopting the EKA Standard Knowledge Worker Categories) to define activities by value and type. | ||
| The six core types of activities performed by knowledge workers (in lowest value-add to highest value-add) are: (lowest knowledge worker value) Data.Entry Data.Research Data.Transmission Conversation Knowledge.Analysis Knowledge.Creative (highest knowledge worker value) | ||
| Anything associated with data is considered the lowest value-add level of enterprise activities because it virtually does nothing to add value to the data obtained. | ||
| Because all service enterprises are about value-adding raw data, the more time staff spend directly associated with data, the lower value the service that can usually be charged. | ||
Copyright © 2010 UCADIA. All rights reserved. |
||