Process Blindness
I went to see a client a little while ago and followed some work while I was there. The work was basically to receive a paper form from a client and enter the data into a database that made it available on the web site. The wrinkle was that the main office received the forms and logged the receipt and then batched and packaged them to go off site for the the data capture.
I would just like to bring to your attention one little part of the process.
When they had accumulated a pile of like forms together, they would take that pile from a big table and bring them over to their desk where they would take twenty forms at a time and read the bar codes from the forms into a spreadsheet. They would press a button on the spreadsheet and it would print two top sheets. They would write a batch number on both the top sheets. One sheet would be put on top of the twenty forms, secured by an elastic band, ready to go into a crate and thence off site. The second sheet would be scanned and then filed. The scan of the second sheet was kept in their electronic file system and could be searched if they needed to find out which batch a particular form was in.
Phew. Was that paragraph as boring for you to read as it was for me to write? Imagine if that was your work every day? Now imagine if you were a customer who came to the office to watch how the data you neatly inscribed on the form got onto the web site and instead you saw that?
The value for the customer was to see the data on the form, up on the web site. If you can manage it, re-read that paragraph and see if you can find any step in there that contributes to that value.
No? That's because there is no value to find.
They didn't see the problem and the difficulty they had was not a lack of intelligence but process blindness. They had been doing it that way so long, they could no longer see another way to do it. This was where having defined value to the customer was so valuable. When customer value is your only criteria for judging a process then the scales fairly spring from your eyes and you see your process afresh.
I would just like to bring to your attention one little part of the process.
When they had accumulated a pile of like forms together, they would take that pile from a big table and bring them over to their desk where they would take twenty forms at a time and read the bar codes from the forms into a spreadsheet. They would press a button on the spreadsheet and it would print two top sheets. They would write a batch number on both the top sheets. One sheet would be put on top of the twenty forms, secured by an elastic band, ready to go into a crate and thence off site. The second sheet would be scanned and then filed. The scan of the second sheet was kept in their electronic file system and could be searched if they needed to find out which batch a particular form was in.
Phew. Was that paragraph as boring for you to read as it was for me to write? Imagine if that was your work every day? Now imagine if you were a customer who came to the office to watch how the data you neatly inscribed on the form got onto the web site and instead you saw that?
The value for the customer was to see the data on the form, up on the web site. If you can manage it, re-read that paragraph and see if you can find any step in there that contributes to that value.
No? That's because there is no value to find.
They didn't see the problem and the difficulty they had was not a lack of intelligence but process blindness. They had been doing it that way so long, they could no longer see another way to do it. This was where having defined value to the customer was so valuable. When customer value is your only criteria for judging a process then the scales fairly spring from your eyes and you see your process afresh.
posted by Rob Worth at 10:17 AM
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