TECHNICAL PRODUCING PROCESS

Team Product 2

	THEORY INPUT

W
ork Teams That Work places a high priority on producing products and services which are of high value to their external customers.  These products and/or services are the result of well-designed, efficient production processes.  These producing processes make good use of all available resources—people, equipment, facilities, money, and information—and are designed to fulfill the primary purpose and goals of the team.

	TASK OBJECTIVE

The primary purpose of this task is to provide an opportunity, through experience, for you to develop your team’s producing process.  This should define how your team’s productive work, required by your team’s purpose and objectives, gets accomplished.

	DESIRED OUTCOMES

!	A set of work design principles that will keep your team highly productive and motivated.  
!	A producing process that describes “how” your team plans to produce its learning products and fulfill its purpose and objectives.

!	An understanding of how your team’s producing process differs from traditional work processes you’ve experienced.

!	A working theory about designing high performance production processes considering what your team has designed for itself vs. what you have currently at work.

!	A means for helping the other members of the other teams benefit from what you learn.

SUGGESTIONS

Before you begin working on the task, review the desired outcomes and reach agreement as to its objective and the outcomes that are expected.  Once this is done, design a process for how your team will accomplish the objective and produce the desired outcomes.  The following are suggestions you may wish to consider:

!	Openly discuss the following questions:

a)	How does work traditionally get organized to produce a product or service?
b)	How do we want to get organized to produce our learning products and fulfill our objectives and mission?
c)	Does our process make full use of all our available resources?
d)	Does our process fully utilize our team members’ strengths and developmental desires?

!	Review how you set about the task of creating your team logo, vision, mission and guiding principles.  What were the steps in your “producing process?”  What needs to be added/deleted in order for it to become your producing process?

!	Review and discuss Cherns’ Work Design Principles prior to developing your own team’s set of work principles.

!	Assess your learnings, and transform them into a working theory about designing high performance production processes.  Determine the application of these theories to your home location.

!	Prepare to share your team’s unique learnings in a way that the other teams will remember and can benefit from your experience.  (Each team will be provided up to 10 minutes for this purpose.)

	DESIGN

Cherns’ Work Design Principles

T
he process of design itself must reflect the values found in the new paradigm.  Organizational design or redesign cannot succeed in the end if the process of design does not follow certain principles.  For it is the process which sets the pattern of the culture for the newly designed organization.

These principles are:

COMPATIBILITY

The way in which the design is carried out should be compatible with the design’s objective.  Since the outcome desired is participation in which all organization members work together toward the same objectives, no one can be omitted from the process.  How well this principle is respected will greatly influence long-term commitment to the design.

MINIMAL CRITICAL SPECIFICATION
(SPECIFY AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE)

Identify only what is essential and specify as little as possible about how the work is to be done.  In the allocation of tasks to jobs, jobs to roles, or in the specification of objectives, only the key minimum requirements should be specified so as to not close off options and possible improvements by those who will do the work.

VARIANCE CONTROL

Variances should not be exported across unit, departmental or other organizational boundaries.  If they cannot be eliminated, they must be controlled as close as possible to their point of origin.  Controlling variances at other than their source has the effect of trying to correct their consequences rather than preventing them.  Control of variances is also greatly affected by the location of internal boundaries.

THE MULTIFUNCTIONAL PRINCIPLE—ORGANISM VS. MECHANISM

The traditional form of organization relies very heavily on the redundancy of parts.  It requires people to perform highly specialized, fractionated tasks.  There is often a rapid turnover of such people, but they are comparatively easily replaced.  Each is treated as a replaceable part.  Simple mechanisms are constructed on the same principle.  Disadvantages arise when a range of responses is required, that is, when a large repertoire of performances is required from the mechanism or the organization.  This usually occurs if the environmental demands vary.  It then becomes more adaptive and less wasteful for each element to possess more than one function.  The same function can be performed in different ways by using different combinations of elements.  There are several routes to the same goal—the principle sometimes described as equifinality.  Complex organisms have all gone this route of development.  The computer, for example, is a typical multifunctional mechanism.  The principle of minimal critical specification permits the organization to adopt this principle also.

BOUNDARY LOCATION

Determining internal organizational boundaries, i.e., the separation between units, sections, divisions, is critical in the design of any organization.  Boundaries should not be drawn so as to impede the sharing of information, knowledge, and learning.  Boundaries should be drawn so that:

!	the unit’s members have access to and control over the variances that occur while performing work;

!	unit members can develop substantial control over their own activities in achieving the goals of the unit;

!	unit members have access to all the information they need to solve the unit’s problems and assess its performance, i.e., they receive adequate feedback;

!	the unit can complete a whole transformation process, or produce an identifiable output, i.e., the boundary should not cut through the middle of a process;

!	coordination between activities and people can be accomplished within the unit, leaving integration with other units to boundary managers;

!	the unit contains all the skills and activities needed to perform its work and maintain the unit’s systems;

!	the need for external control is minimized as the unit is given the means to regulate itself.

INFORMATION FLOW

The previous principle of boundary location stresses that boundaries should not be located so as to interrupt the flow of information to a work unit.  This, however, will not in itself ensure that information (such as data or feedback) is provided quickly to those who require it, because blocks to information flow are not only horizontal, but vertical.

Information systems that provide management with comprehensive and detailed information about the operations offer a virtually irresistible temptation to over-supervise and to intervene in subordinates’ decisions.  Under these circumstances, the individual or team cannot feel ownership of the unit’s performance and cannot truly be held responsible for it.  The key to designing effective information systems is to design them in cooperation with their primary users and to remember that primary users should always be the first to receive information needed to take action or control variances.

Information required for record should be readily available for recall when needed.  Information for the control of behavior is an element of the “old paradigm” design, and if considered at all in the new design, should be given directly to unit members or teams as part of their information base for self-management.

SUPPORT CONGRUENCE

This principle states that the systems of social support should be designed so as to reinforce the behaviors which the organization structure is designed to elicit.  If, for example, the organization is designed on the basis of group or team operation with team responsibility, a payment system incorporating individual members would be incongruent with these objectives.  Not only payment systems, but systems of selection, training, conflict resolution, work measurement, performance assessment, timekeeping, leave allocation, promotion, and separation can all reinforce or contradict the behaviors which are desired.  This is to say that the management philosophy should be consistent and that management’s actions should be consistent with its expressed philosophy.  Not infrequently a management committed to philosophies of participation simultaneously adopts systems of work measurement, for example, which are in gross contradiction.

DESIGN AND HUMAN VALUES

This principle states that an objective of organizational design should be to provide a high quality of work.  We recognize that quality is a subjective phenomenon, and that not everyone wants to have responsibility, variety, involvement, growth, etc.  The objective is to provide these for those who do want them without subjecting those who don’t to the tyranny of peer control.  In this regard, we are obliged to recognize that all desirable objectives may not be achievable simultaneously.

What constitutes human work is a matter again of subjective judgment based on certain psychological assumptions.  Thorsrud (1972) has identified six characteristics of a good job which can be strived for in the design of organizations and jobs.  They are as follows: (1) the need for the content of a job to be reasonably demanding of the worker in terms other than sheer endurance, and yet to provide a minimum of variety (not necessarily novelty); (2) the need to be able to learn on the job and to go on learning (again it is a question of neither too much nor too little); (3) the need for some minimal area of decision-making that the individual can call his own; (4) the need for some minimal degree of social support and recognition in the workplace; (5) the need for the individual to be able to relate what he does and what he produces to his social life; and (6) the need to feel that the job leads to some sort of desirable future (not necessarily promotion).

BRIDGING THE TRANSITION

Starting up a new design entails a lot of stress.  This phase should be handled in a way consistent with the design objectives and philosophy, otherwise it will send a double message into the system and undermine the success of the implementation.

INCOMPLETION—BUILD IN AN ONGOING MECHANISM

Design is a reiterative process.  The closure of options opens new ones.  At the end, we are back at the beginning.  The new paradigm is that of an organization flexibly adapting to its environment.  Although a certain degree of stability is necessary to operate, the organization must be prepared to review and revise its design.  Being prepared means having mechanisms built into the structure of the organization at all levels to deal with changes it must make on a continuing basis.

LEARNING JOURNAL
TECHNICAL PRODUCING PROCESS

Teaming Skills and Learning Checklist

(Check the areas in which you excelled)
(Circle the areas you wish to improve in next session)

	Growth Values

Empathy

Authenticity

Spontaneity

Courage

Open-Mindedness

Intuition

Teaming Skills

Meeting Effectiveness

Brainstorming

Problem Solving

Planning/Organizing

Decision Making

Assessing Results

Conflict Resolution

Giving Feedback

Receiving Feedback

Decisiveness

1.	What did I learn most around Growth Values and Teaming Skills:

2.	What did I learn about the connection between purpose and producing process?

3.	What did I learn as we organized ourselves and produced our product without prescribed “leadership” from outside our team?

4.	What can I do more of or less of to be more effective in producing our team’s product?

5.	The things I learned that I most want to be able to use back home are: