How to STOP People from Cherry-Picking the Easy Work Items

This is a story of Mark (not his real name).

Mark is an Operations Supervisor who is managing a team of 12 people processing billing-related work items.

There were 2 working shifts – morning and evening, each with 6 team members respectively.

Their productivity metric was based on average number of work items completed per day. The higher the number of work items each person completes per day, they are perceived to be better performers in terms of productivity.

The problem that Mark faced was that there was a huge disparity in the productivity scores between each shift. The morning shifters are perceived to be able to work faster compared to the evening shifters.

At first, Mark let it pass, as it just so happened that the morning shifters were more tenured than the evening folks. So he thought perhaps that because they had more experience, the morning shift would really be able to outperform the evening shift.

But once a shift bid was initiated by the management team, some folks from the morning shift got moved to the evening shift, and vice versa.

That’s when people started to complain.

Fortunately, Mark had just completed Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Training. It was the perfect opportunity to put what he learned into practice.

Mark plotted his end-to-end process map and conducted value stream mapping to find out where the wastes and bottlenecks were.

Upon further analysis, Mark found that at the end of each shift, all the simple work items in the team’s inventory list of workable volumes have almost all been cleared-out by the morning shifters, while the complex work items are being left behind for the evening shifters to complete.

To make matters worse, it had been observed that some of those who have already finished their target numbers early in the day stopped working once they achieve it, sometimes with up to 1 hour to spare. They just pretend to be busy for the rest of the day.

Lo and behold, through root cause analysis, Mark found that people have been cherry-picking the easy work items from the list, because the more they can accomplish, the better their productivity scores will be.

To identify potential action plans, Mark conducted a brainstorming session with his Subject Matter Expert, as well as with his Quality Lead. And they began to pilot the potential solutions to identify what works best.

In the end, the best action plan that worked was to first identify the work item categories and tag the corresponding complexity – low, medium, or high.

Second, they did a time and motion study to identify how long it takes to complete each complexity type.

Third, they set the ideal target handling time per work item based on complexity e.g. 5 minutes, 15 minutes, and 30 minutes respectively for low, medium, and high complexity types.

Finally, they set the target productive time per day, such that each person is supposed to meet that target time spent, with the volumes dependent on the complexity.

For example, and I’ll just round-up numbers for simplicity, if the target daily productive time is at 400 minutes, then one person can choose to do 80 low complexity work items at 5 minutes each, or about 27 medium complexity items at 15 minutes each, around 14 high complexity items at 30 minutes each, or any combination thereof.

The effect was that Mark was able to create an equal playing field for everyone, as their performance was based on productive time rather than on number of items completed.

People no longer cherry-picked the easy work items. If they wanted to work on the easy ones, they had to do a lot. If they wanted to work on fewer work items, they had to pick the complex ones.

The bad behavior of pretending to be busy once they complete their target numbers was completely emilinated.

Moreover, Mark was able to free-up 1 FTE worth of work within his team. And they were able to ask the client to send them more work equivalent to 1 person, without having to actually hire an additional resource.

To ensure sustainability in using this strategy, apart from adjusting the team’s scorecards accordingly, you must do a periodic review of handling time per complexity type, and adjust you targets accordingly

For example, after 3-6 months, check if it still takes them 5, 15, and 30 minutes to complete the low, medium, and high complexity work items respectively. Check as perhaps they have improved to 4, 12, and 20 minutes. If so, set that as the new benchmark and adjust your capacity planning accordingly.

Fast forward, apart from becoming Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certified, Mark has become one of the most awarded people managers, and has since climbed the ladder to become an Assistant Vice President for Operations.

He is a continuous process improvement advocate through the use of the Lean Six Sigma methodology, as it has allowed him to uncover several operations risks and issues that everyone else just created band-aid solutions for.

If you want to learn Lean Six Sigma, be Certified, and take your career to the next level, then head over to https://robbieagustin.com/courses and enroll today.

Or at the very least, if you haven’t yet, download your FREE (for a limited time only) eBook – The Business Optimization Blueprint, where I show you a simple and straightforward 5-Step Process how to transform your business and take it to the next level.