FEATURE - Managers often confuse doing work with managing work. Effective management requires focused metrics—service performance, customer demand, and system constraints—rather than overwhelming, lagging control data.

Words: Tshepo Thobejane

While working on a client engagement recently, I proposed to a manager that we set up a Daily Management System (DMS) dashboard for her and the team to reflect on the department’s performance and systematize improvement efforts in their department.

We defined the key performance metrics and populated the dashboard with the measurements to be managed and tracked. But as time progressed, this activity fell flat, with the required data (supplied by her internal customers, Unit Managers, in the wards) being either incomplete or totally unrecorded. I was puzzled because the Unit Managers stood to benefit the most since this data was tracking the service quality that was rendered to their units, and at the time when we asked them to provide this data they did not disagree or raise concerns about supplying it.

Then again, it wasn’t the first time I witnessed this dynamic. Indeed, I had seen it time and again, and it really got me wondering: “How and what are managers managing when they don’t have visibility of their processes?”

As I was still processing this question, I found myself blurting to the manager: “What is the difference between doing the work and managing the work?” The question popped before I could even construct my potential response, in case the manager put it back to me. From her response it was clear that this was something to which she hadn’t given much thought. The question was posed back to me, and I’ll try to answer it in this article.

DOING THE WORK VS MANAGING THE WORK

Doing the work results in the transformation of something (physical or non-physical) into a product or service. The work is made up of actions that take something from an initial condition and transform it into a modified condition that is beneficial to the next person in the value chain. The recipient is either an internal customer or the external client who pays for the service or product.

On the other hand, managing the work is made up of actions that maintain and/or improve the transformation process. But in most cases, managing the work focuses on maintaining the transformation process and ensuring that it is in control. Those who do the work have a direct impact on the customers and those who manage the work have an indirect impact on customers, through their direct impact on the environment and conditions of those who do the work.

DATA IS THE KEY TOOL FOR MANAGING THE WORK

It is generally easy to see the tools/methods used by those who do the work, since they are directly used in the process of service delivery. What about those who manage the work? What tools do they use and how do they improve customer service? In many cases, those who manage the work use management theory, coupled with data and the facts about their operations. This may be the reason why I was puzzled when the Unit Managers did not support the initiative to collect the requested data. I could recognize that they – and many other managers – work with data and some may already be overwhelmed by the amount of it and by the reporting that they have to do. Perhaps that’s why they felt discouraged to take on yet another reporting request.

Although those that do or manage the work are collecting lots of other data, they are not collecting data that helps them drive and support improvement. Based on my observations, it seems that most of the collected data is control data, and their measurements are used as lag indicator metrics. The control data that I have seen managers focusing on includes: shift rosters, staff clocking data, staff leave data, registers for handovers/receiving, stock and orders. In many cases, the metrics used are reporting on the past and usually don’t provide deeper insight into what to improve and how to improve it. The common metrics include: output per shift, number of defects, number outstanding/late, efficiency ratios, etc. Of course, these metrics are important, but the gap is that they are normally not used to track performance trends and drive proactive corrective actions. If they are used for improvement, it is usually localized improvements, instead of systemic ones.

Collecting lots of data will not necessarily lead to improvement, so this means we should take the words of Edwards Deming to heart when we setup our dashboards. “Just because you can measure everything doesn’t mean that you should.”

So, how does one narrow and focus on key metrics? My proposal is to use at least three metrics that provide you with a summary assessment of how your team/department is performing from a systems thinking perspective.

MEASURE USING A SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE

The open systems model (Katz and Kahn version shown in the figure below) gives us a general framework that can help the assessment of how an organization is performing in relation to its goals. What I like about this depiction of an open system is that it makes it possible to see that the output of the system should be seen within the context of the external environment. In the case of defining metrics, these should focus on our performance in relation to the promise made to the external environment. So our first and key metric should be how we are performing in relation to the service level agreement (SLA) and therefore the customers’ experience of the organization.

If we are not a monopoly, how we perform in relation to our customers’ expectation will impact the demand for our services. Hence the next key metric should be the customer demand. This metric provides us with two insights. The first is whether our key assumptions about what customers expect from us were correct or incomplete. If we are meeting our SLA and yet the demand is not growing, it means there may be other things in the environment that we don’t understand (assuming the economic cycle has not changed). The next insight from this metric is whether or not we have sufficient capacity to meet the demand without compromising the SLA. Plans can be made to safeguard the SLA while meeting the growing or variable demand.

The third metric should come from the operations of the team/department. This is probably where the question of where to focus comes in, since there are many variables that can be measured. An understanding of systems theory is very helpful here because it is from this that we recognize that the performance of a system is determined by the performance of the system’s constraint. The terms ‘bottleneck’ and ‘constraint’ are sometimes used interchangeably but it is very important to know that they mean different things, and understanding the difference is fundamental to managing systems (a topic for another day perhaps).

So our third metric should inform us about the performance and capacity of the system’s constraint. In particular, we want to look at the relationship between the customer demand and the constraint’s capacity. If the constraint makes us unable to manage the demand, we need actions to close this gap. In addition, if the performance of the constraint is dependent on multiple conditions, we would need to increase our metrics to account for those conditions. This is because anything that compromises the constraint also compromises the performance of the system. Therefore, at a minimum, our dashboard will have three key metrics: Performance against SLA, Customer demand, and Performance of the constraint. The need for additional metrics will be determined by the constraint’s relationship with other components of the system.

At a time when people are talking about big data, and dashboards are becoming the hype, it may be easy to get lost in the details. I hope this article will provide some food for thought for those who are feeling overwhelmed by the demands of measurements everywhere. It’s important that we remember that organizations are systems and how we use metrics should reflect this understanding. As a manager, what are you measuring? Are you coping or are feeling overwhelmed by data and reports?

_THE AUTHOR