Challenge description My work is heavily focussed on designing and improving administrative processes and generating new ideas to increase administrative efficiency. I work for a recruitment agency that has been using the same manual and labour-intensive administrative processes for a long time. My challenge is to find ways to cut or automate these processes. For example, all of our recruits are required to undertake a vetting process prior to signing their contracts. For purely technical reasons, this vetting process has been manually completed for every recruit by our administration staff on behalf of the recruit. This requires significant repetitive data entry and takes time away from other tasks. The challenge was to overcome the technical constraints and automate or shift the labour of this task to the recruit.

Tool selection

For this task, and many others in my work, I used the visualisation tool, as explained by Angela Meyer in week one of the course. I find visualisation one of the best ways to describe a process or workflow using shapes, arrows and text. It helps my team and I to work collaboratively to show where there are unnecessary steps or where tasks could be moved or altered. It also allows to show connections and interactions between people and systems and to quickly sketch required software improvements.

Application and insight

In this case I first independently diagrammed the current process that I had learned from key users (the same people who would benefit from improvements to the process). I then gathered relevant team members and we began to diagram a new process on the whiteboard. We thought about the best-case scenario and what technical fixes would be required to make the new options work. If we were to take our staff out of the workflow, what software and systems changes would we need, what would they look like and how could they be implemented?

I was pleased that this approach allowed our team to create a solution to a problem that had previously been assumed unsolvable. It gave us a clear way forward for implementation, who to go to for implementation and what the next steps were. One key insight is that if you take only a small amount of time to visualise a challenge, rather than just discuss or write about it, it can clarify and crystalise the key elements which can help generate a solution. Having a visual can also help you to explain the issue and solution to people further down the process (tech and software people, for example, as well as eventual end users).

Alternative approach

I believe this approach is the best for this type of problem. It makes collaboration and innovation easier and makes sure everyone understands the challenge in the same way. If I were to do this again, the only thing I would change would be to visualise earlier. A lot of time can be wasted on discussing (verbally and in email) when a quick visualisation session can get to the heart of the problem and generate a solution.

