The risk of human failure is possible in any endeavor, not with standing the work that I am doing to help a client plan for the migration of an enterprise claims management system. As part of developing an operational readiness plan, which spans two and a half years, we are developing a wide variety of governance characteristics which range from migration requirements to staging infrastructure to migration approach to business/risk assessments. It is a fairly comprehensive model for how, when, and where their business will be migrated.
As part of the process, we are now looking at some of the elements surrounding the human condition; specifically, the impact on productivity on the business during migration. Several studies have clearly demonstrated that there is a significant chance (30-50%) of decline in performance during periods of transition, during which new characteristics are being adopted. The question being address is how to deal with decline in a way that does not impact their clients. One can better prepare the employees which takes time or add additional temporary capacity (people) which takes money.
Our current thinking on how to address the impact on productivity is to create a Personal Operational Readiness program tailored to meet the individual capability maturity needs of each employee. We are not only looking at different kinds of training (beyond the 3-5 day training programs), but training on operational data as well. When employees see their work in the new ontology, their productivity increases significantly, which is key for making the transition without adding large numbers of temporary employees.
More on this to follow…
The following recent experience might be relevant, in part, to your transition and readiness needs:
- building a new plant in another country
- moving portions of production from 3 US plants
- transfering process, skills, tribal knowledge to new location / new employees
- sustaining productivity in existing operations.
Small number of existing experts assigned to the project on dedicated [including expat assignments] basis for 12 months or more.
Larger group of people supporting transition in addition to their “day jobs”
Belief that these people could / should be “backfilled” in their current roles to sustain productivity of existing operations before new plant was producing
Difficulty in hiring and training “backfill” people – and doing so early enough to allow redeployment
Partial sotution to sustain productivity and quality:
- inventory and audit of requirements and skills available from existing resources, both dedicated and supporting
- bucket current activity – on 2 dimensions: uniqueness of skill X extent to which essential to continuing operation
- bucket transition requirements – on 2 dimensions: uniqueness of skill X duration [from transition only to long term need]
Identify situations were existing experts were applying unique skills part of the time, with remainder in the “can be done by others” [DBO] bucket. Map unique skills to unique requirements for transition. Allowed increased application of unique skills to unique requirements, with “backfilling” being used to cover the less essential / less difficult to train portions of the experts work.
Rubric: not everything that a uniquely qualified expert does falls into the realm of that unique expertise.
I agree that those thing that uniquely qualifies somebody as an expert goes beyond the realm of “unique” expertise.