Managing work crews spread out over large areas can be challenging. It is often difficult to effectively plan and schedule so many teams’ work, and then monitor their activities and performance, to make every day as productive as it can be for every crew.
In our experience, there is typically significant improvement possible in this area. Improvements typically come from:
- Improving planning, scheduling and supporting processes
- Improving measurement and proactive reviews of performance
- Extensive coaching in how to actively manage for performance
There are two main areas where we support our clients to achieve excellence through their field forces:
Helping our clients to identify and reduce unproductive time (more time on task/tool time)
We work closely with the field managers and their teams to identify the key drivers of, and solutions to, unproductive time. To do so, we typically follow a three-step process to:
- Understand current performance levels and root causes of unproductive time. By determining where time is currently consumed and what proportion is spent on non-value add activities, we help clients estimate wasted field force time and the resulting costs. We then help perform Root Cause Analyses of unproductive time and create a habit of prioritising the most important drivers.
- Understand current work planning and scheduling and identify improvement levers. Effective and efficient planning and scheduling are critical to field force productivity. We support all levels of the organisation to map, and then identify, weaknesses in the current processes, including bottlenecks and dependencies.
- Increase task time. We then work side-by-side with the client’s team to generate, evaluate, prioritise and implement ideas to improve field crew performance, reduce unproductive time and improve planning and scheduling. In addition to injecting our own ideas from our previous experience, we work to uncover client staff’s improvement suggestions. We then help them choose the best ideas, from whatever source, and work with them to drive their implementation through to measurable results.
By improving productivity and quality of task time
In addition to increasing time on-task, we typically find that field forces can improve the quality and speed of their work as well. To do this, we coach extensively on performance measurement, management and improvement. We enable these improvements by helping clients bring complete transparency to operations management, so everyone knows what work is assigned, and completed, each day. We help put in place systems to ensure that individuals are accountable for performance and managers are active problem-solvers and coaches. We coach Supervisors or Field Managers to reduce their own administrative workloads, become proactive coaches to their teams, drive performance and embed continuous improvement into their crews.
A recent example of our work in field force effectiveness
The operations group of a large oil and gas company were consistently falling short of production targets and senior management felt they had little control over the contractors in the field. We helped the client increase gas production by 29%, reduce variability in production versus forecast, from 20% to 1%, and increase work-plan compliance by 24%.
Actions taken included:
- Clarifying roles, responsibilities and accountabilities (RACI)
- Implementing new key performance indicators and daily reports
- Improving work-plan quality, through clarified requirements, increased specificity and better matching of the resources to the tasks
- Coaching of Field Supervisors and Superintendents to build their capabilities to effectively drive work-plan execution
Partners in Performance has been able to deliver significant and sustainable savings (above 15%) quickly and efficiently. Our people were coached and quickly improved their skills and experience. My lasting impression has been a focus on the relentless pursuit of improved performance.LEN, PROCUREMENT MANAGER, STEEL INDUSTRY
