Process Management: Workflow, Workload & Work Control

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process management

workflow, workload, work control

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	Workflow represents a way of managing office-based work in terms of the demands of the individual work item. It therefore focuses on prompt and effective response (resolution and expediting of each transaction).
	Workload represents a way of managing office-based work in terms of the available resources and structures. It therefore focuses on throughput and utilization.
	Work control represents the management balance between workflow and workload. This is an important strategic issue for many organizations.

On this page, we shall be focusing on office work, although similar principles apply to other forms of organized work.

on this page

3 perspectives
management dilemmas
workflow
workload
work control
backlog

on other pages

systems engineering for business process change

Process Modelling (pdf)

Business Process Improvement (pdf)

Business Processes Resource Centre- BPR, Reengineering

Workflow Management Coalition

what is a process?

A process is a connected set of activities with a coherent purpose.

Processes are traditionally thought of in sequential terms. The so-called value chain is a sequential process in which each step contributes in an incremental way to the purpose or outcome of the whole process. (But new business processes are often too complex to be accounted for in these terms.)

Software Process Improvement: Process-in-Use versus Process-on-File

3 Perspectives

veryard projects > process management > workflow, workload, work control > 3 perspectives

workflow

workload

work control

Workflow focuses on the whole transaction.

Workflow management can be directed at strategic goals:

customer satisfaction
worker empowerment
partner relationships

Workflow can be understood at multiple levels:

from task to task.
from worker to worker
from department to department
from company to company

Managed utilization of working resources

Resource specialization

Resource allocation

Task mix

Conflict between workflow and workload

Balance between workflow and workload

Authority and autonomy

Priorities between competing processes

System design implications

In some offices, the workflow perspective is dominant. The urgency and nature of the incoming events constrain the work. Everything is oriented and geared towards responding to these events.

In some offices, the workload perspective is dominant. The resources, capabilities and structures constrain the work. You cannot do the work any other way without acquiring new resources or additional capabilities. There is no flexibility in the existing structures.

In some offices, however, neither of these perspectives is dominant. The work is not wholely determined by capabilities or by events. There is some freedom of choice within the office, to organize the work. We might imagine that it is one of the goals of technology (including CSCW) to achieve this happy state.

We are then faced with the management question: who is to exercise this freedom of choice. Sometimes it will be left to the individual workers to sequence and organize their work, within some defined limits. Sometimes managers will wish, for various reasons, to impose some standards on the work, in addition to the constraints implicit in the work itself. These are issues of autonomy and authority, sometimes called deontic issues.

Management Dilemmas

	A purely event-driven workflow faces the following dilemma. Either you've got enough excess capability / capacity to deliver the required quality of service even at peaks of demand or contingency, or service degrades. Think of an Accident & Emergency ward in a typical hospital. Think of websites that had to be taken off-line because the installed boxes couldn't cope with unexpectedly high traffic. Margaret Thatcher used to complain when television crews brought what she saw as excess people to film interviews at Number 10, and used this as evidence of chronic overmanning. But look at this from a risk perspective - imagine a journalist losing an interview with the prime minister because of some technical problem, and having to explain this to the managing editor.
	A workload may be optimized for cost, or for security/reliability, but possibly not both. Such processes are usually (but not always) fairly inflexible. Workload depends on a reasonable backlog of work. Sometimes the workload is designed around the assumption of a balanced mix of demands. There are risks relating to the length of the backlog, and also its composition. Think of an oil refinery, designed on the assumption that the demand for petrol will be between x% and y% of the total mix. Or a hospital operating theatre, designed on the assumption that a given percentage of operations will require a given piece of equipment. Note: a hospital also depends on a reasonably stable mix of three kinds of work: urgent and unpredictable (accidents and emergencies), planned (childbirth, long-term repeated treatments such as chemotherapy) and moveable / discretionary (hip replacements).
	Top-down directive leadership may be more effective in a crisis, or with inexperienced staff, but doesn't provide space for local autonomy, responsiveness, flexibility or growth. While bottom-up evolution of working practices arguably cannot sustain bold or radical initiatives. This seems to imply a contradiction between BPR (top-down change) and TQM (bottom-up change facilitated from the top). (Such a contradiction has been widely prophesied by management gurus.)
	Process design can make an organisation more robust or it can make it more vulnerable. Notions of robustness or vulnerability relate to time horizon, as well as scope. Short-term robust may equate to long-term vulnerability, and vice versa. (In the short-term, the triceratops was robust, the mouse vulnerable. But the mouse survived.)

Workflow

workflow

Workflow focuses on the whole transaction.

Workflow management can be directed at strategic goals:

customer satisfaction
worker empowerment
partner relationships

Workflow can be understood at multiple levels:

from task to task.
from worker to worker
from department to department
from company to company

Workflow focuses on the whole transaction.

Transaction Drive. The transaction is goal-oriented. Like a light beam, it wants to reach its destination. This is the crucial difference between the transaction focus and the task focus. Bureaucrats are motivated merely to pass work onto the next bureaucrat, and not to get the transaction completed. Where there is a chain of bureacrats, or a complex interaction between multiple agencies, is quite easy for each bureaucrat to deny responsibility for any delay, each claiming that one of the others is holding things up.

A colleague gave me a good example. There was a long delay building a pedestrian crossing in his neighbourhood. It turned out to be due to a lack of coordination between the local authority and the Ministry of Transport.

Long-term diarized transactions.

Level of computerization. Many computer people like to think of transactions in computer terms. But in a typical business, considerable amounts of transaction activity typically don’t touch the computer system at all.

Workflow management can be directed at strategic goals.

Customer satisfaction

Worker empowerment

data entry
progress chasing
fault chasing, fault correction
customer satisfaction

How does this notion of empowered work fit with traditional notions of quality management, as represented by ISO 9000?

Workflow can be understood at several levels.

From task to task

To understand workflow, we start with a diagram that shows the dependencies between tasks. Such models should be familiar to practitioners of structured system design methods..

When people describe processes, they usually describe a set of tasks in a particular sequence. However, there may be good reasons in some circumstances to perform the tasks in some other sequence. If a computer system has been narrowly specified, it may make alternative task sequences difficult or impossible.

Some structured design methods ignored these other flows.

A long time ago, I used to teach systems analysis courses. I’d get the students to model a film processing company. Unprocessed films would arrive together with customer payment and return address. The films would be tagged, the data would be captured, the film would be processed, and then the data would be reunited with the processed film. The students could design systems that would do this - but their systems could not tolerate the slightest error. If a tag fell off, tough.

Suppose a customer writes a letter containing a request for information, an instruction to amend an order, and a complaint about a previous transaction. Do you write three separate letters back? Or do you wait until you can answer (or at least acknowledge) all three items in one letter?

From worker to worker

The technology base for such workflow is CSCW. The workers may be in the same office, connected via a LAN, or may be geographically dispersed.

The communication between the workers may be data-oriented or may be hybrid ‘multi-media’.

For example, how does a team of developers and users cooperate on the building and confirmation of a requirements model?

Workflow management tools can be used to help define software processes. They therefore have a place in software quality management.

From department to department

Traditional Business Process Reengineering (BPR) offers a programme of global optimization, across the whole process chain. According to the BPR experts, this needs to be sponsored by a level of management with authority and responsibility over the entire process chain.

From company to company

Some extreme examples of local optimization leading to globally unsatisfactory results can be found in the UK Health Service. A typical example: a community rehabilitation centre is short of funds, which means patients cannot be discharged from hospital, which means that new patients cannot be admitted to the hospital, which means that the community health resources are diverted to caring for people awaiting hospital treatment, thus reducing further the resources available for rehabilitation in the community.

The British Government is currently engaged in a long-term political programme to reengineer the UK Health Service, using the concept of the Internal Market. This is highly controversial, and there is no space here to take sides in this debate.

Responsibility handover. The greatest opportunities for patient dissatisfaction occur at the interfaces between different agencies. But the tensions between the agencies are not merely economic. Each agency operates within a different professional paradigm, and thinks it knows best what is in the interests of patients.

Workflow requires coordination between several levels

Several perspectives on workflow

From the perspective of the department manager: local optimization. (The same is true of the separate agency in a system involving many organizations. The Health Service is full of examples.)
From the perspective of the IT manager: the worker is a ‘user’, whose prime responsibility is to enter perfect data.
From the worker’s perspective.
From the quality controller’s perspective

How important is workflow to your organization? Should you be doing or planning anything in this area? What do you see as the main issues, pains, benefits of managing workflow?

Which form(s) of workflow are most relevant to your organization? Who is best placed to do the analysis: user, IT, HR, … ?

Workload

veryard projects > process management > workflow, workload, work control > workload

Managed utilization of working resources	From a workload management perspective. the main preoccupation is in the utilization and scheduling of resources. The office manager needs to make decisions to maintain the throughput and efficiency of the office. Is the backlog of work increasing or decreasing? Should we pay people overtime to clear the backlog? Should we schedule other lower-priority work?
Resource specialization	Do we want to have some resources dedicated to particular types of activity? This question applies both to people and to machines. We may want everyone in the office to be able to handle every stage of the work, or we may want people to specialize in different stages. We may devote one computer to message handling or file handling, or we may put some of this work onto each of the computers on the office network. Specialist resources can sometimes be more efficient at given levels of throughput, but may be much less flexible when throughput levels or other circumstances change. Employers are increasingly keen on negotiating flexible working arrangements with staff, and usually encourage staff to become competent at a range of tasks. If the required range of tasks is coherent and manageable, then the employee may gain in job satisfaction.
Resource allocation	In a large office, there may be many people capable of handling a particular case. One of the key functions of workflow/workload management is to assign incoming events to resources. From a workflow management perspective, this is done to expedite the transaction. From a workload management perspective, this is done to balance the load on the available resources. These perspectives may not always coincide. In the worst case, this can create a positive disincentive to individual efficiency. If Jo can complete a task in 12 minutes, and Chris can complete the same task in 11 minutes, then a workflow-oriented manager will only direct incoming cases to Jo when Chris is already busy. Whereas a workload-oriented manager will share the work more fairly between Jo and Chris.
Task mix	A variety of tasks helps with utilization as well as job satisfaction.. For example, if you've got ten minutes before a meeting, there's no point starting a long and complicated task. However, in some cases, a level of self-discipline or supervision may be required, otherwise you can spend the whole day on small tasks, and never get your teeth into the large tasks.

Work Control: Workflow versus Workload

veryard projects > process management > workflow, workload, work control > work control

Conflict	The workflow perspective focuses on prompt and effective resolution of each case. The workload perspective focuses on throughput, performance metrics and cost-effective processing of a large number of cases. There are many situations where these different perspectives collide. For example, in book publishing, the author wishes to get his book into print as quickly as possible, But the publisher wants to keep down the cost of support services, such as editing, proof-reading, indexing, cover design, typesetting, and printing, in an industry where rush jobs are charged at a premium rate. In the health service, medical staff are concerned about individual patients, while adminstrators are concerned about bed occupancy and waiting lists. An important strategic issue for such organizations is to balance these two perspectives.
Balance	One way of thinking about work management is that it requires a coordination between supply and demand. The organization of demand is represented by workflow: this is the work that is required. The organization of supply is represented by workload: this is what supplies the required work. In some cases, the available resources constrain the organization of work. In the short term at least, there is no other way to carry out the work. In other cases, there are several ways to organize the available resources to carry out the work. The work is constrained by the demands placed on the work, which are so pressing as to give no room for choice in the response. In other cases again, an office has considerable freedom of action to organize the work.
Authority & Autonomy	Where the organization of the work is not totally constrained by the supply structure (the available resources), or by demand structure (the urgency of the demand), then there are some choices to be made. This raises the question: who exercises these choices? Is it appropriate to leave these choice up to the individual workers? Or is there a need for consistency and coordination, so that the choices need to be made at a higher level within the management hierarchy, and imposed on the work? In some cases, management may impose working practices on a working environment.They may create a range of incentives and inhibitors for staff, or define authorization mechanisms for exceptional cases.Computer systems may be designed to help enforce such management edicts.
Competing processes	Some resources may be used by different processes. Sometimes one process has higher priority than another. Software developers often share some computing and network resources with operating mission-critical systems. It is often taken for granted that production takes precedence over maintenance, and corrective maintenance takes precedence over normal software development. Resources are often cheaper if you are willing to accept a lower level of availability, or a reduced guarantee of service.
Liberation & Control	Many computer system designers have a covert (and sometimes unconscious) agenda. Some believe in control, and will add controls to the system as if on principle. Others believe in liberation, and will try to design systems that encourage horizontal communications and subvert hierarchical authority. (Many of these designers are sadly ineffectual, and often unwittingly achieve the opposite of their intentions.) There are important strategic issues at stake, and these should not be left to the bad habits and untested assumptions of computer system designers.
Front office Back office	A common organization pattern is to separate the work into "front office and "back office". The front office is customer-facing and possibly workflow-driven, the back office is almost certainly workload-driven. The structural issues here are to do with maintaining loose coupling and synchronization between front office and back office, as well as in the information systems supporting both.

Workload and Backlog

veryard projects > process management > workflow, workload, work control > backlog

Zero Backlog. Campers know that there are two types of wood for a campfire. Pinewood burns quickly and brightly, and leaves no residue. Deciduous wood burns more slowly, and produces glowing embers that are great for cooking. The "backlog" is a large piece of deciduous wood that keeps the fire going - especially when the night gets colder and damper.

The internet business is fast, bright, and views backlog with scorn. When times get hard, it has no staying power.

Traditional manufacturing has always maintained a backlog. This allows factories to work at a regular pace, without tight coupling to the fluctuations of demand. When times are hard, you can continue to produce stock for future demand - at least for a while.

Outsourcing has often been seen as a better way of shielding a company against fluctuations of demand. Just-in-time supply chains take pride in the absence of inventory and backlog. But there are limits to this approach. "Inventory-free companies do not escape the business cycle or disruptions in demand." (Peter Martin, Financial Times, September 24th, 2001)

Lack of backlog is also a feature of the service industry generally. After the events of September 11th, travel plans were curtailed, and normally crowded airports and aeroplanes were suddenly half-empty. The airline industry has no buffer against such sudden cuts in demand.

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