You know you’ve been busy all-day, you just don’t know what you did.
Organizations are leaner than ever and it’s not uncommon for teams to be operating at their full capacities. But are the team members doing the most effective and efficient work they could be doing or is it just business as usual? Now, more than ever, it is important for everyone to engage in the highest value work possible. Developing key analysis tools such as needs assessments, work process maps team feedback on the “time thieves” that they deal with on an ongoing basis give leaders the benchmark they need to determine where they are now and plan how to get to a more effective operating model.
CASE STUDY:
Industry Sector: Biomedical
Representative Project: Process Mapping and Identification of Best Practices / Outsourcing Opportunities
The business operations team found that they were consistently busy and needed large amounts of overtime to accomplish all the tasks that arose on a day-to-day basis. Although each team member was fully utilized, it was difficult for each to articulate how their time was spent. By identifying key tasks & processes that took up 10% or more of their time, a clearer picture was developed as to how each resources time was spent. Once completed, the process maps were shared with the entire team at an offsite meeting. At this meeting, opportunities to outsource lower level work were identified, best practices were shared and higher level/more productive work that could be done was identified. Finally, a gap analysis was done to present work that fell beyond the bandwidth of the current team and guide the discussion on what next steps should be taken.