Bertrand Duperrin's Library tagged interdependance → View Popular, Search in Google

Nov

2011

Task-based work revisited

"Technology does not determine social and organizational change, but it does create new opportunity spaces for social innovations like new employment forms. Partial employment for young unemployed people is becoming much easier than before, and truly global task-based work is becoming possible, perhaps for the first time in history."

eskokilpi.blogging.fi/...task-based-work-revisited

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job work networkeconomy networkedconomy humancapital interdependance knowledgework tasks organization hierarchy

The opportunity today is in new relational forms that don’t mimic the governance models of industrial, hierarchical firms. We are already witnessing the rise of very large-scale efforts that create tremendous value in a very new way.
The production of information goods requires more human capital than financial capital. It is more about connecting with brains than connecting with money. And the good news is that you are not limited to the local supply. Work on information products does not need to be co-located. The architecture of work does not resemble a factory any more.
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- Our management and organizational thinking is derived from the era of tangible goods production and high-cost/low-quality communications.
- Almost all economic theories make the same assumption: the employer – employee relationship makes work possible.
- The other taken for granted assumption is that it is the independent employer/manager who exercises freedom of choice in choosing the goals and designing the rules that the members of the organization are to follow. The employees of the organization are not seen autonomous
- In contrast to the above, digital work has brought about circumstances in which the employee in effect chooses the purpose of work, voluntarily selects the tasks, determines the modes and timing of engagement, and designs the outcomes. The worker here might be said to be largely independent of some other person’s management, but is in effect interdependent
- The interdependent, task-based worker negotiates her work based on her own purposes, not the goals of somebody else, and chooses her fellow workers based on her network, not a given organization.
- The organization is not a given hierarchy, but an ongoing process of organizing.
- The factory logic of mass production forced people to come to where the work is. The crowdsourcing logic of mass communication makes it possible to distribute work to where the people are, no matter where on the globe they may be.
- Knowledge work is not about jobs or job roles but about tasks.

May

2011

Give pods a chance

"Pods – also known as self-directed work teams – have been around for more than 20 years. Pods are 30% to 50% more effective than their traditional counterparts. A survey of senior line managers offers some of the benefits derived from implementing self-directed teams:

Improved quality, productivity and service.
Greater flexibility.
Reduced operating costs.
Faster response to technological change.
Fewer, simpler job classifications.
Better response to workers’ values.
Increased employee commitment to the organization.
Ability to attract and retain the best people."

www.dachisgroup.com/...give-pods-a-chance

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pod innovation podularity reward complexity interdependance modularity casestudies 3M amazon

Modular components are a critical element of a connected company. But to take advantage of pods you also need a business that is designed to support them.
Perhaps one of the reasons more companies haven’t organized around small, empowered teams is that their business architectures don’t allow it. It’s not easy to plug modules into a platform that isn’t designed for it.
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- Xerox, Procter and Gamble, AT& T and many other companies have credited self-directed teams with marked impact on their operations, including improvements in customer service, manufacturing, inventory management, and other productivity gain
- 3M has roughly 100 autonomous profit centers, each of which operates like a separate company. As operations grow, profit centers divide in order to keep each group small and agile
- In the 1990’s 3M implemented “self-directed work teams” in their manufacturing operations. The teams do their work as a team and manage themselves. Managers in this system were freed up to become coaches and teachers – essentially full-time trainers. Self-directed teams were not a top-down directive at 3M.
- Bezos does have an answer though: Break big problems down into small ones. Distribute authority, design, creativity and decision-making to the smallest possible units, and set them free to innovate. Small teams focus on small, measurable components that customers value
- Teams are limited in size to about 8-10 people. At Amazon they call them 2-pizza teams: If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.
- Self-managed teams must not only have authority, they must be accountable for the results they deliver. The results the team is responsible for should be clear and measurable. There is some debate over whether self-directed teams should be compensated on a pay-for-performance basis.
- So I believe successful teams should be rewarded in other ways: by being recognized by their peers, or allocating more of the resources that make them successful, like better equipment, more people, support, and so on.
- This is where culture is critical. The culture of the company should be clear about expected behaviors like resolving disagreements, dealing with underperformers and so on
- Technical standards help to reduce friction, but they are secondary to culture. Focus on culture first, and teams will start to demand the technical infrastructure they need to perform.
- What you want is a part of the company that can be treated as a “black box.” If you can clarify the inputs and outputs you expect from a group or department, and what is inside the black box has limited interdependencies with other units, you have a sandbox where you can experiment with pods.