Customer Reviews

Area Activity Analysis

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book's theme is developing a workforce that is aligned to overall organizational mission and goals, is accountable for performing to established metrics and focused on meeting customer expectations. The workforce is broken into "natural work teams" are service-oriented as opposed to function- or task-oriented. Without a methodical approach, such as the one set forth in this book, developing such a workforce is a near-impossible task. However, the authors lay out a clear path to achieving just such a workforce.

The expected outcome of area activity analysis is cultural change (starting with renaming teams to reflect their real roles as service providers), focusing the mission on service, defining clear activity descriptions for which the teams are responsible, determining how to measure team effectiveness, establishing service-related performance standards and restructuring reward systems.

Using a seven phase approach, the book leads you through the entire process of transforming to "natural work teams". The first three phases are foundational, and consist of (I) preparations for the activity analysis, (II) developing service-oriented mission statements for the functional areas (not easily done), (III) defining the activities for each area.

Phase IV is the pivot point during which you develop customer relationships. Customers can be internal customers of the activity or external customers. In this respect there is a set of classifications that need to be performed for the activities themselves, which are: Real-Value-Added (RVA), which provide value as seen through the eyes of the activity's customer; Business-Value-Added (BVA), which may be necessary to support internal business functions, but provide no direct benefit to the activity's customer, and No-Value-Added (NVA), which are not essential to business functions, nor do they add any perceivable value to customers. This information is used in Phase V to determine the efficiency of the activity. It is also worth noting at this point that the what authors call "activities" are processes and process chains, so you may have to either adopt his vocabulary or mentally translate as you read. This is not a criticism of the book, however, because the approach is valuable and will enable you to classify activities in accordance with their value characteristics and determine if they are optimum for their intended use. Phase VI entails developing supplier partnerships. This is applicable to both external supply chain partners as well as internal activities. An example of an internal supplier partnership, taken from my profession, is services provided by IT to end users (usually codified in service level agreements and comprised of service level objectives). The final phase, VII, addresses continuous improvement. An added bonus is the CD ROM that comes with the book contains an application called WorkDraw, which is a process modeling tool with many of the same features as Micrografx iGrafx Process.

As an IT professional who works extensively on projects for service level management and IT-Business alignment I found this book to be a gem. In fact, the service-orientation of the "natural work teams" has changed my thinking about how to structure an ideal IT organization, and has also greatly influenced my thinking about how to manage service delivery. The book earns 5 solid stars and my highest recommendation.

Used successfully to re-work many of the operations of a small company.

AAA provides not only an analytical framework for organisational change, but - more importantly - an extensive and concrete manual for implementation.

When you've done enough reading on the subject and have to actually DO something, get this book.

Area Activity Analysis provided me with an excellent step-by-step methodology for increasing productivity & profits.

Of special note was the free Knowledge Management & Process Improvement Software included with the book.