Giving Work Visual Transparency is Essential

Now that work, and the processes that support work, can handle emergence while being goal directed, a new challenge arises to provide all participants a visual audit trail of what actually happened. This is important for several reasons. At a minimum, there needs to be a visual history for retracing activity and at a maximum looking for ways to improve the work experience for all participants while helping managers adjust to emerging regulation, conditions, decisions and actions. Imagine looking at your last vacation trip, after the fact to think of better or different routes and experiences.

Visualizing Work Journeys:

Since emerging work is not necessarily visualized until it is well underway or after the fact, there is a need to visualize the actual journey for people or machines to understand the paths taken to meet a set of balanced goals in effect for the duration of the life of the work. The journey could start with a customer request or a tripped sensor, but what is decided and what happens needs to be tracked and visualized across multiple parties, countries, systems and technologies. This will allow for maximum transparency for all parties and many reasons.

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/11/work-journey-management-wjm-is-emerging.html


Visualization for Goal Improvement:

As more and more work is goal oriented, shifting the goals as emerging conditions is something that has to happen. In fact the goal settings, in force, when the work starts will be one of the major elements to capture as a map legend for the work visualization. By analyzing the work visualizations, managers can precisely adjust the collective goals for more desirable outcomes for specific work journeys, participants and scenarios.

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/11/is-work-goal-or-flow-directed.html


Visualization for Better Practice Patterns:

Goal driven or not, emerging work needs to be analyzed for better and repeatable practice patterns. Once visualized and analyzed, decisions can be made to make them part of a proposed process pattern inventory for participants (men or machines) to select and follow, In other words if a work journey looks successful, it can be put into a bag of tricks or made a happy path that can be leveraged over and over. For those who do not believe in repeatable sequences and that all work should emerge every time, this would seem unnecessary, but there are resource optimization reasons for doing so.

Net; Net:

Visualizing emerging work will be one of the most important business needs for the future. This means tracing work from on premise to the cloud and back, from machine to machine (IoT), from human to human, from automated personal assistant to humans and may need multiple sources of audit trails integrated for visualization. In some cases, patterns of emergence can be classified and put into repeatable processes for optimization reasons.


Additional Reading:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-digital-organizations-is-fully.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-two-faces-of-business-process.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/04/ptiney-bowes-canada-delivers-better.html