Learning Launch for Annual Review Process

Challenge

Every year my team completes a months-long review process of international trade data. In the five  years I have been working on it, this process has remained unchanged. This year, not only are we short a  team member due to a vacancy, but we also have a brand new project that will be competing for time  and resources during the annual review. Our challenge is to try to make our annual review process more  efficient both with time and resources.

Selection

Because we have been aware of and preparing for this issue, our team has already come up with  multiple ideas for getting all of the work done with less resources. These range from ideas like tightening  the schedule, having team members work concurrently on different projects and even pulling resources  from other teams.  Because we have a lot of ideas to sort through and not a lot of time until the review  starts, we will try learning launches in order to test solutions quickly. In our case, our “customers” are  not traditional customers,  but other employees of the organization who compile or otherwise use our  data.

Application

For our first learning launch we focused on the project’s schedule.  We created process flows, including  durations and dependencies, based on past reviews. By mapping out the entire process, and inviting  feedback from the other areas of the organization that use our data, we were able to identify tasks that  could be processed more quickly or concurrently. Because all of our stakeholders were involved, any  problematic schedule changes (like unrealistic durations, unavailability of inputs) were identified and  avoided right away.

Our second learning launch was a prioritization of the work. Our annual review consists of three data  phases- preliminary, final and revised. Each phase has a similar process but emphasis is placed on  different tasks for different phases of data. We conducted a brain storming with another area that does  similar work and applied their process to our data, where applicable. We then met with stakeholders to  present these ideas and efficiencies to get feedback.

Insight and Approach

By going through the learning launch, we were able to reject a lot of ideas quickly and cheaply and gain  more insight into how we should redesign our review process. We realized a lot of the team was doing  redundant work. It was also clear that our schedule is dependent on other divisions and we were better  off keeping our schedule similar but designating time to work on other projects during downtime. This  allows less people to complete the same work and also allows for a few team members to devote time  to other projects.

