Workshops are great for quickly extracting people's understanding of how things work in an organisation.
Unfortunately, if you only run workshops and ask people to describe what they do, you can end up with an idealised or distorted view of what really happens. Here are some reasons why this happens:
- Managers and operational staff always see things differently
- People often take for granted existing system and organisation limitations and can fail to recognise the waste they create
- Where there is a blame or fear culture, people tend to say what they think they ought to be doing not what they really do
- Behaviours are better observed at the stress points than described in the comfort of a workshop
- People system interactions are hard to describe
We run Witness Walkthroughs to collect evidence of effectiveness. A facilitator or person not involved in the work process critically observes and captures:
- The ergonomics and physical layout of the workplace, how work flows through it and where it stalls
- How individuals execute each task as described in the workshop
- The tasks they did not describe in the workshop
- The information they need to execute the task confidently
- Screenshots that define the system steps to execute each task, and how easy the system is to use
- The typical times of each task, the causes of interruptions, delay and rework
- Things people worry about, and their ideas for fixing them
We change the maps to reflect reality and generate process performance information reports that enable us to prioritise improvement activity.
Contact us to find out how a Witness Walkthough programme will help you get more than you paid for from you new system implementation.
