Something for the Weekend - handshakes over handovers

I've started to notice a common weak point in many processes that I wanted to highlight, and perhaps you've spotted it too? It comes when tasks are passed over from team to team (or actor to actor is you prefer). Often, it's not that something is inherently wrong with the handover, all the information's there, the tasks flow, people know what they are supposed to do... it's something else. That something appears to be a combination of lack of ownership around the customer and sole focus on task.

With so many contractual or pseudo-contractual arrangements (SLAs, quality targets, incentives, etc) it's easy to forget that it’s a customer and not just a task that's being dealt with.

The symptoms are likely familiar. People performing steps in a process where they don't know what happens next, high levels of repair or worse lost requests, complaints and rework.

Obviously there are huge frameworks on getting processes correct and efficient but one very small step is to encourage the handovers to be considered as 'handshakes'. There's something very different about how you'd introduce two people than how we pass tasks. A clearer duty of care perhaps? A moral obligation? Certainly more ownership. Whenever there's a handover in a processes between 'actors' consider how we might make it feel less mechanical and more human?

Something for the Weekend - Gorillas in our Midst

You've probably seen this... It's one of the best known experiments in psychology and really illustrates how little of what goes on around us we actually notice. The invisible gorilla is an experiment created by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons to highlight 'selective attention'. It’s a short video in which 6 people (3 in white shirts, 3 in black shirts) pass a basket ball between themselves. The audience is asked to silently count how many times the people in white shirts pass the ball. Halfway through the video someone in a gorilla suit walks across the screen. You'd assume that nearly everyone would notice this however when the experiment was originally conducted at Harvard University only about half of the audience noticed the gorilla!

It really goes to show how when you're focused on the task you can miss the most obvious signals. The challenge is how do we overcome this? One of the easiest ways has to be peer review. Having one or more professional peer's provide their review of analysis, documentation, concepts & ideas. On the whole, people agree with the principle, but unlike the academic arena, they rarely happen in the business environment. A likely reason is time - there's rarely enough time to allow for someone else to critique your work and some might be nervous of receiving comments.

Here's a few tips:

• Plan in the time, agree the reviewers, the scope and the duration. It's really obvious but lack of time will always be one our biggest inhibitors.
• If asked to peer review, there are few things you might like to consider, check out this advice from the University of Wisconsin
• Peer reviews don't need to be offline or static - try planning them as walk-through removing the effort in providing comments.
• Participation should be positive for all concerned - make your reviews feel valued and accept any comments in the spirit of improvement.

A small step to ensure we see the gorilla, close the loop and improve quality in our work.

Sources and Credits
Find out more about the invisible gorilla at http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/
Watch the video on YouTube by clicking here