Monday February 1, 2010

Topic:  Operations Management

Reference: Hansen,Morten T.”The Future of Work.” CEO Magazine: January/February  2010. pp.41-46.

The style of modern business is to flatten organizations,work in teams, and foster collaboration and open communications acrossoperating units. These steps tend to help increase productivity, increasetransparency, and allow organizations to operate with fewer and feweremployees. However, fostering a disciplined work effort in this kind ofenvironment is difficult and must be managed through constant managerialvigilance. It is a real mistake to believe that once established teams willcollaborate willingly, understand the corporate directive, and workproductively. Collaboration is another of the managerial items that can’t beeffectively delegated or left to its own devices. It takes real senioroversight, commitment, and communication to make collaboration take placeeffectively. If real managerial oversight is absent, collaboration can beoverwhelmed by excessive meetings and produce poor results. The referencedarticle refers to this as the trap of over-collaboration. “[A] well-intentionedeffort that leads to lots of cross-company activities without a clear focus onresults. ”The commentator suggests that the way to make sure that collaborationis effective is to (1) make a real business case (covering innovationpotential, customer interests, and efficiency gain potential (I.C.E. Test); (2)spot barriers to real collaboration; and (3) after real analysis eliminate thebarriers. Special attention has to be paid to direct and direct incentives suchas pay, bonus structures and skill sets in order to ensure real collaboration.The commentator advocates having T-shaped employees on these teams (people withtalent in multiple areas and the ability to see the big picture). Having done anumber of collaborative projects I can concur that this is the right approachto making collaboration effective. One of the problems is that it is difficultto maintain managerial oversight over a number of projects, to have enoughT-shaped employees to staff the projects, and to make specific outcomes thegoal of collaboration. Skill sets and pay issues are seldom addressed upfront,but can be remedied with team awards and recognition upon project delivery. Inthe best of circumstances, you still have to pick your collaborative effortswisely and measure outcomes explicitly if your collaborations are to beeffective. Let me know what you do to make collaborations work in yourorganization.

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