Being brought up in the glorious North West of England, the legacy of the Industrial Revolution is part of my DNA; mill towns, factories and grim working conditions...but I didn't expect to find the roots of management consultancy there, which started with time and motion studies carried out by innovators in the field in the late 1800's. Indeed, history may judge the 1900s not as the tail end of the Industrial Revolution but as the start of the Consultancy Era.
So given that industry has been scientifically analysing worker behaviour for a hundred years, it's a shock to me every time I go into a big corporate and it has no time recording function. How can such a key component be missing? In my experience a US corporate is more likely to gather such data and put it to use in project plans, whereas UK companies just don't seem to be driven towards the same rigorous statistical analysis.
Simply put, to ignore effort is to ignore your business and, perhaps paradoxically, the least important information you get out is who's working and who's shirking.
The primary benefit is actually realised months after deploying a time recording tool as the data begins to build up a historical record of task execution. There's an argument for properly structuring the entry of time data and then doing nothing but collect data for months, finessing the capture process and ensuring compliance while the database builds the real management information.
It's easy to see uses for this data but applying it to estimate generation can produce real benefits, as it supports and informs the estimates that technicians produce. With your database behind you, you can play variables into the decision making process; changes in productivity between different project approaches or types of deliverable for instance.
If you're in the business of quoting fixed price projects then you can be more accurate, reducing the contingency in your proposals and therefore giving better value to the customer whilst retaining margin.
More obvious but to be treated with caution is the management hook; "cost visibility". Some visibility is better than none but it's absolutely not a panacea and ill-managed it's a nightmare as the temptation is to react to a perceived statistical trend rather than managing it's root cause. For example, a valuable member of staff can look like a luxury player when in fact they're just being badly managed.
It's not just a service industry focus either. Working with a manufacturing business at the moment, it's clear they have no interest in charging out resources to third parties, or quoting for jobs - after all, they make bulk chemicals. However, two things are in the pipeline; getting third parties to self bill using timesheets and a more active internal market structure aimed at driving operating costs down. So even in such an introverted environment, time recording is seen as a crucial component.
Somehow I think none of these requirements would be a surprise to the mill owners of the late 1800s. Where wool and cotton were the valuable assets, effort and expertise have replaced them. In fact our Victorian ancestors would have no trouble adjusting to a modern manufacturing world (well, perhaps with the exception of Safety, Health and Environment regulations).
Both then and now, effort is just one key datum common to all businesses. Administering it - allocating effort, collecting data and so on - is only an easy first step. As even introverted corporations start to virtual team and social and corporate networks merge, successful management becomes more about people rather than less; efficiency becomes the differentiating factor between avatars if you like.
And so management needs to evolve to reflect these democratising processes. Those we work with are masters of their own destiny; it's a Democratic Revolution. I'll have more thoughts on how this might occur soon.
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