For starters, the rookies gave the staff a PowerPoint presentation on the topic. Hardly a groundbreaking training method. But Best Practices makes it effective by stressing brevity: three to five top findings. Even new hires know to keep it short and sweet, because their company orientation emphasizes BP's "rule of three-five-seven." The rule pushes employees to think constantly about topics in terms of three to five (and, at most, seven) top issues. Conceived to help staffers boil things down for summation to clients, the rule also assists Best Practices' digestion of new ideas. Richardson's team may identify 17 ideas in the planning meeting, but the team thinks in "a three-five-seven mentality" the whole time, says associate Elio Evangelista.
To prevent post-PowerPoint amnesia, Best Practices archives new processes in a directory on its computer network in what Bogan calls a "checklist library." The library contains lists of procedures for things like writing a press release, drafting a cover letter, and creating an invoice. There's also a library of blank templates for such documents. Those tangible resources supplement the changes that, to many employees, happen not through official channels but through everyday interaction. Says David Wang, gesturing at the company's setting of newsroom-like cubicles, "You walk around and share stories."
Step Three: Does the New Idea Work?
The frequent interaction among staff members also helps when it comes to gauging the effectiveness of new ideas. Bogan didn't need a sales report to know the Dell-esque pages were a smash. He heard the phones ringing. And he didn't hear employees griping about added work.
Nonetheless, the company has two formal means for monitoring how well an idea is working. The first is through crafty use of technology. The method was developed by senior associate Rachel Porter, who heads the company's Global Benchmarking Council, an annual membership service that includes conferences among its benefits. In January 2000 she began offering other Best Practices products to council members. As it pitched the company's reports and database access to the council members, Porter's team borrowed cross-selling techniques from Citigroup and Verizon. But like Weaver, Porter could not borrow the real-time Web-based tracking systems that the large companies used to buttress those techniques. She had to improvise.
So she decided to take software that BP already owned -- Excel and a client database -- and adapt it into a tool that could track her team's cross-selling efforts. Her standout idea was to insert a link to the Web on the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was linked to the customer-specific Web pages that Weaver had designed. Weaver had already made the pages easy for any BP employee to update, and Porter knew that the pages would be updated shortly after any sale. After updating the database, Porter could get the up-to-the-hour status on any account by clicking on the link she'd placed in the Excel file. The spreadsheet, meanwhile, provided a value of its own. Porter used it to tabulate totals and averages on each account. Whereas the Web page might tell her how many conferences a given member had attended in a year, the spreadsheet could compute how many products, on average, each member had purchased.
Porter smiles and calls the spreadsheet a "Chris-management device," referring to Bogan. The phrase has dual meanings: indeed, the spreadsheet allows her to "manage" Bogan, but it also allows Bogan to keep tabs on the council. Porter is far less jocular when discussing Bogan's other means for keeping tabs, both on her division and on the entire company: time-tracking reports, which the CEO has tried for four years to persuade employees to use. Though many employees hate recording their time -- and they often, in acts of civil disobedience, don't -- the software furnishes key statistics for the company's second means of monitoring new ideas: a Friday-morning session called the "resource-allocation meeting."
Adapted from Custom Research Inc., a past Baldrige Award winner, the meetings last 30 minutes max, as do nearly all the meetings at Best Practices. Managers scan a spreadsheet that categorizes the percentage of time each employee spent on the previous week's tasks, broken down by project and product or service area. During the week of April 6, for example, Evangelista spent 45% of his time working on consulting projects, 28% on writing reports, and 27% on other projects. Such statistics, and the discussions that surround them, let managers keep a weekly tab on whether a new idea (or anything else) is consuming an inordinate amount of employees' time. After perusing the numbers and addressing their potential inaccuracies, managers discuss what changes they'd like to see in the upcoming week. "You're arguing over the human resources," notes Keith Symmers, who heads the database product line.
During a week in March, Porter noticed that staffers were devoting far more labor hours to Symmers's team than they were to hers. She "freaked out," she says, because her team "brings in way more revenue" and because she faced deadlines that week. She and Symmers amicably settled the situation. But Porter still abhors logging her time, even though as a team manager she sees the benefits of doing so. Along with her colleagues, she complains that accounting for her every hour makes her feel "micromanaged." Bogan says 60% of staffers record their time beautifully, 20% to 30% grudgingly, and 10% only when nagged.
Bogan understands the resistance. "We hear things like, 'I went to Harvard, Duke, UVA; tracking my time feels like I'm in a factory," he says. But he remains committed to the idea. To him, the battle over time tracking is a tiny skirmish in a larger and much more profound war: the campaign to convince people and companies of the value that can come from studying others' proven techniques.
