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Citation:
Interdisciplinary Contributions to Strategic
Work Modeling An approach based on Schippmann’s (1999) Cheshire Strategic Job Modeling technique is proposed as an alternative to traditional job analysis or competency modeling. Frameworks from Business Strategy, Industrial Engineering, Accounting, Russian Engineering, Industrial/Organizational Psychology, Cognitive Science and Instructional Design are integrated into an analytic method of defining work and worker attributes toward realizing the organizational vision. Businesses must constantly re-evaluate everything they do in the increasingly competitive global business arena (Kaplan & Norton, 1996). The performance employees contribute toward organizational goals is especially crucial in this era where human capital is a key to strategic advantage. In the past, job analysts, competency modelers and instructional designers passively studied the job in order to build HR systems. They assumed that jobs were already designed to support organizational goals. This was reasonable in the industrial age where work was a fairly stable bundle of job tasks that didn’t change over time. Consequently, HR systems were based on the practice of assessing the requirements of the work and workers and building appropriate HR systems to support that work, sometimes with an eye toward how the job may change in the future. All too often in today’s environment, particularly with large organizations, the original purpose of the work activities contained in a job is lost, changed or forgotten. Today's global competition requires rapid changing of the work activities needed to support organizational objectives. Organizations benefit from aligning their products and services with markets, processes with product and service goals, and work tasks and worker competencies contributing fully toward process, product and service excellence. The role of HR must change from passively studying work and worker requirements, to proactively modeling strategic work requirements that ultimately support the organization’s goals with rigorous, integrated HR systems (Schippmann, 1999). A recent proposal by Schippmann (1999) to align business strategy with human resources through "Strategic Job Modeling" presents an important evolutionary next step for traditional forms of work analysis. Schippmann suggests that all HR interventions must directly contribute to realizing the vision, mission and goals of the organization and identifies appropriate places for more traditional job analytic techniques (e.g. interviews, focus groups, surveys) to drive this alignment more fully. The Cheshire Strategic Job Modeling process takes the perspective that organizations have a vision, called their end "Wow" state, a current or "Now" state, and a path directing "How" to achieve their end state. He proposes a set of steps that adjust the use of traditional job analytic techniques in a way that fully supports organization’s ability to transform themselves from "Now" to "Wow" with various integrated HR systems. Table 1 shows the sequence of steps taken in the Cheshire Strategic Job Modeling process (taken from pgs 28-30).
Industrial Engineering Ever since the era of Taylor's Scientific Management, Industrial Engineers have had an interest in modeling work. Although few still perform time and motion studies, they retain an interest in the ways work is organized into processes (Vaughn, 1985). Work processes are meso-organizational sequences of activities that transform organizational inputs into products, services, and solutions that customers desire. They span traditional reporting structures such as departments, teams and divisions and are alternatively called the organization’s "value stream" by some authors (e.g. Rummler & Brache, 1995). Understanding macro and meso-level organizational processes that are fundamental to the organization’s reason for existing can be a useful organizing framework for understanding key outcome criteria produced in the first stage of the Cheshire model. This addition provides a picture of the key business processes that span the organization’s reporting structure along with the key criteria and goals identified in the first step, establishing the wow, now, & how (future state, current state, and tactics to realize the future state). Business process maps situate work in its natural context and can help show job families and the inter-relationships between handoffs in work activities as they contribute to producing products and services. Quality engineers sometimes use process maps to redesign the flow of work between jobs (Business process reengineering/design), and solve problems that traditional HR approaches cannot. For example, business process redesign was used successfully to reduce the time needed to cycle one set of potential recruits through a selection system from 14 weeks to 8 weeks (a 43% improvement) (Barney, Artman, Prince, & O’Toole, 1999). Improving the recruiting interval in this example was essential to realize a key strategic factory goal: bringing a computer chip joint venture to full production at world-class speed. An example of an impact map for an ideal distance learning process appears in Figure 1. Note that Figure one includes the handoffs between organizational boundaries, as well as measures of process effectiveness. Russian Engineering Soviet engineers who work in a tradition started in the former USSR’s patent office offer useful heuristics about process and system design that can apply to strategic modeling. Engineers skilled in the Russian TRIZ engineering tradition (translated, "Theory of the Solution of Inventive Problems") argue that systems that accomplish their goals while using the fewest possible resources are ideal (Altschuller, 1984). If a system can produce its’ desired result with fewest possible resources, ideally without any resources, it should or else it is wasteful. This approach suggests that the best HR systems address business gaps that cannot be solved better, faster, or cheaper in other ways (e.g. automation). Taking the TRIZ view seriously requires HR to think carefully about the most effective set of interventions required to realize the organization’s goals, even if they fall outside HR’s area of responsibility. In particular, modern computing technology makes it easy to automate routine tasks that don’t require creativity. For example, in Europe, Australia and South Africa, a motel chain called Formule 1 has been successful at providing extremely cheap rooms by automating tasks (e.g. self-cleaning bathrooms, self-service check-in with credit card) and consequently eliminating the need for most human labor (Schachtman, 1999). In medicine, robotic phlebotomists can now take blood samples more gently, with fewer injuries, more reliably than human nurses (BBC News, 1999). If automation or a business process redesign produces better, faster, and/or cheaper results than a more labor-intensive approach, then the human resources and systems designed to support their performance should be re-deployed elsewhere. Strategic modelers should think about the results the organization seeks and understand other colleague’s contributions to the collective goals in order to place scarce resources in the places where they can do the most good. Lastly, TRIZ heuristics suggest that job analysts and competency modelers have been missing an opportunity to use job analytic information to redesign jobs. Data from job analytic surveys that fall below a certain cut score are typically deleted from competency models, and only the highly important and frequent job tasks, knowledge, skills and abilities are examined for use in an HR system. TRIZ suggests that strategic modeling practitioners should proactively eliminate work that is done frequently (time consuming), but is of no importance toward achieving the "Wow" end-state. Educational Psychology & Instructional Design Instructional designers, and Educational Psychologists calling themselves, "Human Performance Technologists" have crafted an approach complementary to the Cheshire model called Performance Analysis (e.g. Brinkerhoff & Gill, 1994). Performance analysts seek to map the strategic meso and micro-level organizational goals and ultimately influence how work behaviors causally impact the effective realization of those goals. These objectives, along with data about the performance of the current state of the business can guide decision making about which particular interventions are required to realize a company’s vision. Human Performance Technologists do not, however, typically pay attention to the same sorts of concerns as Industrial-Organizational Psychologists such as construct validity, and legal defensibility. Also, persons working in the Human Performance Technology tradition usually ignore traits and abilities in their impact maps connecting business strategy to work and worker dimensions. Impact maps are very similar to Schippmann’s "Business Context & Strategy Web" (p. 59). An example of web-based tool to create impact maps that include ability and traits tied to electronic business metrics that was done in the style of Human Performance Technology appears in figure 2. Accounting New developments in the field of Accounting can further refine the business requirements for effective strategic work performance. Activity-based costing (ABC) is an approach to measuring financial and operational performance by grouping costs by the product or service they produce for a market. One important idea ABC introduces is the notion of target costing. In the past, organizations priced products or services based on how much they cost to produce. Target costing starts from marketing estimates of the customer’s willingness to pay, and then allows senior managers to identify the strategic profit margins required to be competitive. From this framework, managers determine the maximum costs, and minimum quality and speed levels required to produce the product or service in a way that realizes the organization’s strategy (Cokins, 1996, p28). The result gives valuable business-centered threshold limits of expenditures the organization should incur on the total sum of activities, including IT, procurement, real estate, labor as well as HR systems targeted by the strategic work models. In many ways, ABC suggests a more holistic approach to organizational design, recognizing that HR systems are just one of many important components to organizational effectiveness. Resources applied to HR are resources that cannot be used elsewhere, and ABC helps frame the amount and locations where resources are best placed. ABC requires up-front estimates of how many dollars are worth spending on a strategic work model construction, and on the complete set of HR interventions required. Synthesis of Approaches Since each approach seems to have significant merit, why not take the best of each? Combining the Engineering, HPT, ABC and the Cheshire approaches may give us a nice way to model the strategic requirements of organizations. All approaches identify the key organizational vision, mission and objectives to establish the desired "end-state". They also support the idea that all organizational activities should be fully directed toward achieving the strategic vision. Activity-based costing does a nice job of precisely articulating the size of the market opportunity and the resource constraints required for profitability and competitiveness. This drives the budget that should be spent on strategic work modeling, and consequent HR system development. Industrial Engineering and HPT techniques model the current and ultimate state of the processes by which the organization transforms inputs into products and services. Further, they both examine the inter-relationships between different work activities, in a way that is very similar to Schippmann’s Business Context and Strategy Web (p.59). The next steps in the Cheshire model can be further refined by using a model refined recently (Pearlman & Barney, 1999, see figure 3). Once the strategic goals are generated in the combined steps proposed above, the General Work Model suggests that we should model the task and contextual performance required to produce the results needed to achieve the "Wow" state. Modeling must consider internal factors such as organizational culture/climate, and external (e.g. social, market) contextual factors. Task performance includes specific work activities that directly impact process results, whereas contextual performance includes helping and other behaviors that are outside formal job requirements. Contextual performance is especially important in influencing "value-added" criteria such as customer and employee loyalty. Once the desired outcomes of work are known, the General Work Model points toward modeling particular antecedents of effective task and contextual performance that may be influenced through a variety of organizational change efforts. The General Work Model provides a nice connection between traditional, individual-level work analysis to meso-organizational outcomes (e.g. process results) that have a strategic implication to the business. It’s important to note that this interdisciplinary approach proposes that the results sought are more important than the specific configuration of processes, systems (e.g. HR, IT), work or jobs currently present in the organization. Some systems or jobs may need to be eliminated or redesigned in order to realize organizational goals, an insight sometimes overlooked by mature organizations, but less so since "Reengineering" movement of the 1980s. In other cases, HR solutions are not the most effective at realizing the desired goals. Only after the key results and work are established does it make sense to examine which jobs might be part of the strategic gap, or consider which interventions (e.g. curricula, selection, performance management, reengineering) might be needed to close the gaps. Consistent with the recommendations of HPT, TRIZ and ABC, this hybrid approach recommends carefully understanding the root causes of the business gaps, and recognize where non-HR solutions are most appropriate. Taken together, these seem to be a nice supplement to the Cheshire model’s first stage. An example will help illustrate the integration of these techniques. If the market opportunity for a new .25 micron semiconductor design processed at a 95% yield within 28 days cycle time is $150M, then all costs (e.g. labor, materials, systems, programs, facilities) must be less than $75M to achieve a strategic, industry-leading gross margin target of 50%. The entire set of business activities including procurement, quality control, sales and HR must all fit within this cost constraint, since competitors often realize similar operational and financial targets. The strategic work modeling effort, along with all interventions it will spawn must fit within HR’s ABC cost model. Some of the strategic work activities required to ramp the new design might include running experiments on the factory process to get acceptable yields on this more advanced design; reducing scrap to cost-effective levels; or procuring expensive new machines for advanced new copper layers on the chip. In this example, each of the strategic work activities likely impacts many different organizational processes, job tasks, and consequently competencies required. Looking at the root cause data may reveal that portions of the fabrication machine operator’s jobs can be automated thereby simultaneously improving scrap and cycle time speed. A close examination of the work may reveal that new maintenance work must be performed at engineer (as opposed to technician) performance levels to keep contamination low enough to realize the 95% yield goals. Workload analyses along with a scarcity of engineering talent in the marketplace may require a simultaneous overhaul and integration of the compensation, recruiting, selection, and training systems. Also, the context in which engineers work is crucial to attracting and retaining them – they seek interesting, meaningful, creative work and fun co-workers. Increasingly, scarce engineers can successfully request unique work arrangements such as telecommuting, virtual offices, and even bringing pets to the office. At the same time, this is just one of many chip designs running through the factory, and employees must be willing and able to quickly switch processing batches and priorities based on fluctuating market demands. This requires significant adaptability such that each employee cooperates to do whatever is needed (e.g. fix a different machine, run a different lot) to impact changing priorities in spite of their particular job classification. Of course, the combined sum of all work and systems needed to support the process must all fit within the financial rigor imposed by the ABC analysis, $75M. If they cannot, the company must either get creative about reducing costs, redesign work to be done in a more cost-effective way, or stop plans to move to the new chip design. If the business process and market estimation efforts are done properly, reducing the strategic gross margin targets, quality limits, or cycle time are not viable options, since those are the goals required to beat the competition.
This interdisciplinary addition to the Cheshire model requires a new approach to analyzing work and worker data in the Cheshire’s survey stages (6 and 7). Traditionally, job analytic scales measure work and worker constructs such as overall importance, frequency, difficulty to learn, and when a competency is needed. Alternatively we can now group work, and align competencies and work activities with specific business processes and strategic business objectives. In the interview, focus group and job observation stages (Cheshire’s stage 5), we can ask SMEs what specific work activities (task & contextual performance) are critical toward producing specific outputs and value-added results at the business-required performance levels. This may be easier to rate (and more face valid) for SMEs because the rating object is more specific, and is connected better with the strategic needs of the business. Later, in the survey stage (6-7), SMEs can rate work activities that are related to producing more than one strategic result at targeted levels. In some cases, it may make more sense to examine all the work activities, across different jobs, required to realize each particular goal. This is a very different level of examination than traditional job analysis. Here, the outcomes of interest drive the work behaviors and competencies required, rather than assuming the jobs are already configured to produce important results. An electronic (e.g. web) survey may be the most practical and flexible way of administering these sorts of unique scales, since each work activity may be rated using different sets of strategic scales. Once the key work activities required to realize the meso-level business criteria are known, then the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other personal characteristics required to perform those work activities can be determined using standard job analytic techniques, such as a matrix of ratings. Strategic scale development may provide a more precise connection between strategic models of work and the attributes of workers required to leverage the business strategy, a sort of macro-organizational content validity. New data analysis techniques are needed to examine strategic modeling data collected from this new type of strategic scale. How do we determine what work is essential toward achieving various goals when each work activity is linked, like a spider’s web, to varying numbers of business-level outcome criteria? First, work activities that are rated as unimportant toward impacting all strategic measures can be eliminated. This is identical to initial steps in traditional job analysis, using cut-scores as an initial sort. Second, the remaining important work activities can be printed in a Pareto chart format showing work activities connected to the highest number of strategic objectives first and cascading down to those that are connected to only one strategic objective. This approach, however, is appropriate only for situations where the importance of accomplishing all strategic objectives is equal. It is more likely that some goals hold a greater weight for the organization’s success than others. To overcome this difficulty, a multi-attribute utility approach can be more useful. Each strategic objective requires senior business leaders to assign different weights based on their relative importance toward organizational success. The weights can be algebraically combined with each work activities’ ratings (e.g. weight x rating), and then hierarchically ordered by work activity importance in a Pareto chart. Alternatively, unique weighted Pareto charts can be generated separately for each outcome criterion. In keeping with TRIZ, those work activities that fall below the cut score (are unimportant) or have wide disagreement (e.g. high SD) should be proactively eliminated to increase the strategic focus of the work - a new use for old-style job analysis data. At the same time, work activities centrally responsible for fulfilling numerous important goals should be the top candidates for resources. Wherever those work activities must be best achieved through people (fastest, cheapest, highest quality), the knowledge, skills, abilities and personal characteristics that drive their effectiveness should be the first HR systems targeted. Limitations Many environments will require a passive job analytic approach. This is particularly true where union contracts dictate work scope and content, or where steadfast customs don't allow for changes in the definition of work. In these cases, rigorous job analytic techniques are still reasonable professional data on which to base HR systems that impact organizations. These proposed additions to the Cheshire method can still be used in these environments, but there may be more restrictions toward the types of interventions that are possible. Job redesign or automation, for example, may not be allowed. These cases do seem increasingly rare as the information age’s global electronic competition continues to place competitive pressures on business. Market Darwinism will assure a future for companies with rigid, inflexible work customs and labor agreements as secure as Homo Erectus. And what if your business strategy is wrong in the first place? The proposed interdisciplinary Cheshire model helps ensure that an organization realizes its’ articulated strategy, but senior leaders should constantly be monitoring the environment (e.g. competitors, government regulation/legislation) to make sure the company is headed in the right direction. If all internal tactics seem to be producing their intended results but, for example, the competition is dramatically gaining market share, the hypothesis that the organization’s strategy was effective with may need to be rejected (Kaplan & Norton, 1996). Each revision of the strategy necessitates a revision of the structure of strategic work that serve to realize that strategy. Further, some organizations such as the United Way or Red Cross have humanitarian, but not revenue generating goals. In these cases, a strategic work modeling approach can be undertaken using donations as a financial constraint, and model work against key charitable goals all employees and volunteers should help realize. Lastly, some Congitive Scientists (e.g. Vincente, 1999) argue that work behaviors are an inappropriate analysis for basing HR and computer interface decisions. They argue that the specific work behaviors elicited on the job vary wildly based on the needs of the business at any particular time. Instead, they suggest focusing only on those factors that serve as constraints to work. Vincente makes an important point about the rapidity of work changes. At the same time, classes of behaviors can still be useful boundary conditions upon which to base HR systems such as training, and personnel selection. Classes or types of behaviors that must elicited effectively given organizational constraints and goals are still a reasonable basis for establishing HR systems because they are finite. For example, CEOs are likely to negotiate frequently, even if they negotiate radically different deals on a daily or hourly basis. Chief executives don’t usually program or troubleshoot equipment, so C++ and equipment problem-solving courses aren’t likely to improve their performance and realize a strategic advantage. Different types of employees use different types of behaviors to produce important outcomes, even if their specific job tasks within those behavioral classes vary. Conclusion Many of the ideas presented in this paper are hypotheses informed by practice and literature from various professions, but must be tested for effectiveness against alternatives. For example, we don’t yet know whether decisions made using the sort of strategic work scales described are judgments that SMEs are capable of making in a meaningful way. Can reliable and valid strategic modeling scales be constructed? Can the interdisciplinary additions to the Cheshire technique be applied quickly enough to meet business needs? Does this approach focus too exclusively on the "technical" system by which organizations produce outputs, and not enough on the "social" systems that provide a human backdrop to organizational effectiveness? Equally important, we don’t know the degree to which managers are receptive to such an approach. Given the converging methods and techniques from varied disciplines, however, these hypotheses are worth testing. Bibliography Altshuller, G.S. (1984). Creativity as an Exact Science: The theory of the solution of inventive problems, translated by Anthony Williams. Studies in Cybernetics:5. Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. New York, NY. Barney, M.F., Artman, D., Prince, A. & O’Toole, S. (March, 1999). Reengineering HR Development Systems to Support a New Chip Factory: A Case Study. In Chan Meng Khoong (Ed.), Reengineering in Action: The quest for world-class excellence. Imperial College Press. BBC News (1999, April 14). Robot Hits Right Vein. http://news.bbc.co.uk. Brinkerhoff, R.O., & Gill, S.J. (1994). The Learning Alliance: Systems thinking in human resource development. Josey-Bass. San Francisco, CA. Cokins, G. (1996). Activity-Based Cost Management Making it Work: A Manager’s guide to implementing and sustaining an effective ABC System. McGraw-Hill, New York. Kaplan, R.S., & Norton, D.P. (1996). The Balanced Scorecard: Translating strategy into action. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. Pearlman, K & Barney, M.F. (August, 1999) Selection for a Changing Workplace. In Kehoe, J.F., Managing Selection in Today’s Organizations. Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology Professional Practice Series. Josey-Bass, San-Francisco, CA. Rummler, G.A., & Brache, A. P. (1995). Improving Performance: How to manage the white space on the organizational chart. Josey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. Schachtman, N. (1999). Welcome to the Motel Automatic. Wired, April 22. http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/19255.html Vaughn, R.C. (1985). Introduction to Industrial Engineering. Iowa State University Press, Ames Iowa. Vincente, K.J. (1999). Cognitive Work Analysis. Laurence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.
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