Reviewing and Improving Workflow and Productivity: Methods and Tools

Cynthia Ng
@TheRealArty
September 28, 2017

Kuribo. (2008). Red panda eating. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_Panda_eating.jpg CC BY-SA 2.0

Some Context

To begin, I would like to give everyone a little bit of context.

When you are doing work individually, you obviously have full control of your own workflow. Often you just do the work and don’t think much about workflow.

Personally, I didn’t really start thinking about workflow until I started getting more involved with user experience. What did our users have to go through to complete a task in the library? I then turned more internally once I started supervising staff and their work, thinking about their workflow as individuals and as a team.

It was actually in thinking about other people’s workflow that I think started thinking about my own work and whether I was doing things efficiently.

I don’t think I have ever had a job description that specifically says to “manage and review workflows”, but many of my positions have involved overseeing operational work involving multiple people where work would not be done if there were no workflow established. This seems like a fairly common thing, but where the problems lie is when these very same workflows are never reviewed.

How do you know that the work is successful? That nothing is being dropped? Can the workflow be improved to make work easier? More efficient, and thus faster? Is the most appropriate person doing each task? Is the work appropriately divided? Is there a designated backup for each task? How do you ensure the backup knows how to do the work?

In the course of all this, I started to look at ways we can easily understand and analyze workflow. There are various ways that can help review workflows, and hopefully one or more of these methods can help you answer these questions. The methods I have chosen are also meant to be done in a reasonable amount of time, with minimal resources and without being overly complex.

Understanding Workflow

Flowchart

Task Analysis

Reidsma, M. (2013). Slide 38. Websites are for People. http://matthew.reidsrow.com/articles/29 CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Journey Sheet

Types of Material

Hardcover
Trade Paperpack
Children's Fiction
Children's Non-Fiction
Magazine
Newspaper
DVD

The sheets themselves have brief instructions and an example at the top, with information on who to contact. Once left with the staff member who does receiving, the sheets were attached as soon as an appropriate item came in and followed the item throughout the process until it was shelved in the public area, at which time the sheets were returned to me. One of the reasons I decided on journey sheets was because part of the process involves another department and involves many different staff members, so the journey sheets seemed like the easiest way to see what was happening with material.

Some people have asked me about having staff put a date as to when they receive it, which is certainly an option. However, in our case, we were more concerned with the process rather than how long the process took, and we did not want staff to feel as if the speed of their work was being evaluated. So, really, it depends on whether timing is something you want to review.

If you decide to use this method, be warned that sheets may get lost, so you will want a contingency plan of how to handle what happens. The one sheet we thought lost was accidentally kept with the book, so it came back weeks later when the borrower returned the book.

After the sheets were completed, I did a bit of analysis. What was most interesting was seeing how many people handled an item. In many places, the number of people handling an item is not necessarily an issue where items stay on trucks and are simply wheeled from one person to the next. However, at my workplace, due to space constraints, the less people that handle an item, the less time is potentially wasted simply moving an item from one person to the next, especially in Technical Services.

A journey sheet can be used with digital items as well, as long as it’s clear which item the sheet is “attached” to, and that the sheet moves along with it.

Swim Lanes

Kerr, P. (2006). Swimlanes flowchart of a business process. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Approvals.jpg Public Domain.

Questions to Ask

Does the order make sense?
Which steps are flexible in the ordering? Conditional upon other steps being completed?
Can specific steps be done more efficiently?
How many people are involved? Can it be reduced?
Is the most suitable person doing each step?
Is the process consistent? Consistent with other departments?

The Ideal Workflow

Reorganization

Card Sort Variants

Rosenfeld Media. (2009). CS002: Figure 1.2. https://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/3344341528 CC BY 2.0

The basic idea behind a card sort is that you write each item on an index card or sticky note. You then have individuals or groups of people organize each card. In a closed card sort as you see here, the categories are predetermined. In an open card sort, there are no predetermined categories, and allow participants to group cards into as many or few piles as they think necessary.

A card sort is a type of exercise typically found in web design to help create an information architecture for a website. Nevertheless, we can use variants of a card sort for trying to find an ideal workflow as well.

In the context of a workflow, you would write each task on a card or sticky note. There are then a couple of different exercises you can do, either separately or together in one session.

Either individually or as a group, the first exercise is to pile or group together the tasks that should be done together or at the same time. For example, a library’s name is stamped or stickered onto an item, and you might want a branch’s stamp or sticker to be added to an item at the same time.

re-organized workflow using sticky notes

Getting to the Ideal

example workflow of accessible format production

Once you're ready to implement the new workflow, consider a staggered implementation that reflect the workflows that you may have developed as intermediate steps towards the ideal. If you can, break it down even further, so that you make one or two changes at once, then give staff time to adjust before doing more changes. The bigger the change, the more time staff will need to get used to the new workflow.

For example, this timeline shows transferring duties from a Library Assistant 3 to two different Library Assistant 2s. It then gives each Library Assistant 2 a month's time before shifting more work from the Library Assistant 3 to them. What follows is ample time for them to get used the new duties and resulting workflow. In that following time period, there are also review sessions built-in to make sure the transition and new process is going smoothly.

Tools to Increase Productivity

Okay, so at this point, we will shift gears a bit, since I promised that part of the presentation would cover productivity tools.

While what tools to use to make work more efficient very much differs depending on the workflow and what’s involved, there are a lot of great tools that are lightweight or commonly available. To finish off the presentation, I would like to go through a few applications that are almost all free to use and have fairly general usage.

One of the issues that many people have in libraries and similar organizations is that individuals cannot install programs without approval and involvement of the IT department, so the first set of tools that I will cover are all portable, meaning that they can be run from anywhere including a USB stick or by simply copying the files onto a computer.

KeePass (Keychain)

Reichl, D. (2010). KeePass Main Window. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KeePass_Main.png Free license.

Total Commander (muCommander)

Notepad2

Notepad2 is avaialble standalone or as an installer. If you install Notepad2 on Windows, the installer will give you the option to completely replace Notepad on your computer. Regardless, Notepad2 is a very lightweight and very easy to use alternative to Notepad. It looks just like Notepad, but with lots of basic tools built-in and comes with code highlighting by default.

Particularly useful are the functions around batch text manipulation: remove all empty lines, compress whitespace, add text to the beginning or end of lines, and search/replace using regular expressions.

Many people recommend Notepad++, however, I find that it is too complex for what most people need it for and it is much less intuitive in comparison to Notepad2, which is much easier for most people to learn without any extra help since the interface is the same as Notepad.

IrfanView

Lightscreen

While Windows allows screenshots, one of the handiest things Mac users have by default is to automatically save screenshots as image files, and to choose a section of the screen.

Lightscreen is a neat little program which will give you the functionality of choosing a specific section of your screen to copy or save, and save all your full screenshots, active window screenshots, and selection screenshots to any folder you specify by default. Functionality-wise, screenshot selection is such a small thing, but too often I have heard or seen people spend a lot of time cropping screenshots. Lightscreen also has a few extra options that are really handy, including choosing the image format, whether the cursor shows in the screenshot, and the ability to change the shortcut keys.

GifCam

PDFtk

PDF Labs. (2014). PDFtk Free. https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/.

Sublime Text

Roe, A. (2012). Sublime Text 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sublime-text-2-screenshot.png Copyrighted/Fair Use.

MarcEdit

Excel

Trello

Take Away

Workflow and processes are not something that you need to or should necessarily do a big review for often, but each workflow, especially those used regularly, should be documented and understood by everyone involved. If at any time someone has questions, it becomes a good opportunity to review whether something needs to change and how it will affect the workflow as a whole even when the workflow only involves a single person. If changes are being discussed, consider if there are tools or technology to help solve any issues or improve efficiencies. Regardless, the focus should be on a balance of efficiency and quality as the ultimate goal is always to provide timely, quality service to our users.

I would love to hear if anyone has done these or other workflow review exercises and how successful they were; or if anyone has used tools that has helped their work be much more efficient. If there are any questions, I would be happy to answer any now as well.

Thanks!

Cynthia Ng
@TheRealArty
about.me/cynthiang