No Secret » Workflow

Getting Paper Out of the Office

noccrit — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:20:06 +0000

I’m speaking in New York in three weeks on the topic Getting Paper Out of the (Attorney’s) Office, as part of a two-person panel at the LegalTech Conference and trade show.

Below are the main points I’m currently looking at for my part of the discussion. I’d love to hear from folks who have additional or different ideas.

Use workflow systems to route work throughout the office
- Optimize the processes behind them. Don’t automate broken processes (Steven’s First Rule of IT).
- Reconsider “standard procedures” — should they really be standards?
- Look to Lean Six Sigma to reduce waste and non-value-added activities.
Use scan-on-demand when users request paper records from storage (which at least gets the paper into cheap storage space and over time will obviate those paper records)
Send documents to clients via PDF or Word (or equivalents).
- Invoices, too: if clients don’t have electronic invoicing, don’t send them paper that they can lose track of.
Get dual monitors, or an extra monitor in parallel with your widescreen laptop, to read large documents comfortably on screen
Use Kindle, Nook, smartphones, etc. to read documents during commute time (this is in New York, where most commuting is by means other than driving yourself; obviously, this is a very bad idea — but becoming unfortunately common — when you’re driving!)

Suggestions welcome. Thanks.

A Healthcare-IT Professional Discusses Workflow

noccrit — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:59:38 +0000

Healthcare IT pro Elyse Nielsen has one of the best-named blogs around: AntiClue. She also has a recent post on workflow. In it, she lists what she sees as the top six workflow issues:

Automating a bad process will just make it fail faster and magnify the problem. This is very similar to Steven’s First Law of IT: Don’t Automate Broken Processes. It’s absolutely the #1 issue.
A clinical process may be the art of the workaround. This is a relative of item #1. Workarounds happen, and indeed are often necessary… but don’t automate them unless the workaround itself is the best way to solve the problem long term.
Avoid grandiose workflows. Yup, don’t boil the ocean. The 80/20 rule should be your watchword. Keep it simple. Then revise as you learn more.
(Specific to healthcare. I don’t know how to translate it well.)
Not everyone flows work the same way even when they perform parallel functions. It would be easier for you if they did… but the goal is to make it easier for the users, not the project team.
Engineer for the mainstream, not all the exceptions. Here’s another version of the 80/20 rule.

I’m not sure I’d list these as my top six, mostly because I think 1+2 and 3+6 are redundant… but they are important no matter how you number them.

Improving workflow may be the most significant thing an external professional (e.g., outside the user/customer community) can do to help out a team. It’s often surprisingly simple, at least at the 80/20 level. Junk simply accretes on processes. If you can get out the pressure washer and scrub off the accretions, you can make a dramatic difference. (Just make sure the spray from the pressure washer doesn’t hit the users; don’t wash the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.)

Kludge or Inspiration?

noccrit — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:21:01 +0000

A fascinating picture-blog called There, I Fixed It: Epic Kludges had a photo last week of a whiteboard competing for space with a light switch, reproduced in reduced size at right. Kludge or inspired work-around?

(A kludge, pronounced KLOOZHE, is a term for an ungainly quick-and-dirty solution to a knotty problem. It started in the tech world but is now seeing currency elsewhere.)

So the whiteboard: kludge or inspiration?

I think it depends on your goal… which is the point of this post. How can you judge something like this in a vacuum?

Let’s start with an assumption on how it got there. The whiteboard arrived after the light switch was installed, and either the employee in the office wanted the biggest whiteboard that would fit or the whiteboard was pre-ordered and the installation person took installing it as a challenge.

I suspect different people might have different takes on it:

Buildings and Grounds manager: Ugly, inappropriate, next time get the right-sized whiteboard.
Installer: Well, I got it up there. I hope my manager doesn’t find out.
Employee in the office: Thank you! I now have extra whiteboard space to sketch out ideas, space I wouldn’t have had if the board had been a foot shorter (stopping to the right of the switchplate).

As in inveterate whiteboard user, I’m with the employee. I have whiteboards up all over the place. Frankly, I wish I’d thought of this in my last office at Microsoft!

(And if I were the B&G guy, I’d applaud the installer for ingenuity, unless perhaps this was in a customer-facing lobby.)