Once upon a time in a large financial institution that had many thousands of people in their headquarters, a handful of hourly-paid contractors got their manager to sign their time sheets for times they did not work.<\/p>\n
This was clearly a type of fraud and the police were called and the contractors went to jail.<\/p>\n
The senior managers looked for a way of making sure it would Never Happen Again. <\/p>\n
They came up with a cunning plan! Connect the time clocks in the security gates with the electronic time tracking system for all contractors (yes, even those on day rates). A little while later, some of the contractors began to change their behaviour. They started to watch the clocks themselves and only work the weekly 40 hour minimum number of hours. When they went out for a big lunch, they stayed out longer if they\u2019d \u201cdone their time already this week\u201d.<\/p>\n One clever team of contractors even worked out the rounding rules of the gate system so that if they arrived by 9:14 in the morning it would round their time back until 9:00 effectively saving them from having to work 70 minutes each week. Some of them even set timers to go off around the end of the day so they didn\u2019t stay a minute longer than they were being paid for!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This story highlights the importance of understanding the cause of a problem and the type of variation the problem represents before trying to solve the problem.<\/p>\n Common cause vs special cause In a special cause situation it\u2019s worth asking \u201cis there a specific root cause that explains what happened here?\u201d because it\u2019s likely there are a small number of identifiable causes. In the absence of good data (such as a longitudinal plot of data), a useful rule of thumb is to ask \u201cIf we replaced this bunch of people with another bunch of people would the problem occur?\u201d. In this story, there were hundreds of other hourly-paid contractors in other teams who did not fabricated their timesheets, so the answer is probably \u2018no\u2019 indicating that this was likely a special cause situation. In a common cause situation there\u2019s no point asking \u201cwhat was the cause of this?\u201d because there are multiple sources of variation (causes) all contributing to the problem.<\/p>\n The fix for a special cause situation is to go to the root cause and see if it can be prevented. Indeed in this story it would have been useful to question the manager involved and understand what lead him to sign timesheets for times that his team did not work. The fix for common cause variation (and most variation is common cause) is to go and study the situation, experiment and try and look for patterns or trends in the data before making a change to the system.<\/p>\n Implementing the wrong type of fix is tampering and mostly makes things worse The story above is actually a reverse of the more common scenario where managers often treat what is a systemic problem as a special cause and blame the individual<\/strong>. There are many examples of this such as setting targets for sales in call centres (tip: most of the sales are the result of customers who want to buy phoning in, rather than the technique of the person who receives the call).<\/p>\n Have you seen examples of tampering where the wrong type of fix was applied to a problem? (such as yesterday\u2019s blog where a manager tried to change the team\u2019s process to cater for the behaviour of specific individuals<\/a>) Do you have stories of fixes that were applied to the whole system when there was a clear special cause that could have been prevented at its source (e.g. sign-offs in a deployment process)? Please share your story in the comments.<\/p>\n Image credit: flickr<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a story of how managers detected a problem, but by not understanding the cause of the problem of the type of variation the problem represented, applied the wrong type of solution which meant things were worse for everyone: Once upon a time in a large financial institution that had many thousands of people in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,13,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techpeoplethrivi-i2tkeoduos.live-website.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techpeoplethrivi-i2tkeoduos.live-website.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techpeoplethrivi-i2tkeoduos.live-website.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techpeoplethrivi-i2tkeoduos.live-website.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techpeoplethrivi-i2tkeoduos.live-website.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/techpeoplethrivi-i2tkeoduos.live-website.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techpeoplethrivi-i2tkeoduos.live-website.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techpeoplethrivi-i2tkeoduos.live-website.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techpeoplethrivi-i2tkeoduos.live-website.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"EntranceGates\"](\"http:\/\/benjaminmitchell.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/entrancegates.png\" "\\"EntranceGates\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n
<\/strong>In this case, the small handful of hourly paid contractors were not representative of the thousand of other full time employees and contractors in the building. So the fraud they committed was not a signal that something was wrong with all the people in the building, but instead just a tiny minority. Rather than seeing this problem as a signal that represented a special event with an identifiable cause (referred to as special cause<\/strong> variation) the management acted as if this was a problem with all contractors in the building (something that could have happened in any team at any time \u2013 referred to as common cause <\/strong>variation)<\/p>\n
<\/strong>As this story illustrates, applying a common cause solution to a special cause problem – \u201ctampering\u201d as Deming called it – can lead to bad results. Making all contractors (even those on day rates) use the electronic time keeping system sent that all contractors were thieves! And as Deming says, if you muck people around they will use their ingenuity finding ways around the system instead of working towards the purpose of the system. Applying a common cause solution to a special cause problem will reduce humans intrinsic motivation because it can seem unreasonable and unjust.<\/p>\nHi, I\u2019m Benjamin<\/a>. I hope that you enjoyed the post. I\u2019m a consultant and coach who helps IT teams and their managers create more effective business results. You can find out more about me<\/a> and my services<\/a>. Contact me<\/a> for a conversation about your situation and how I could help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"