FRank / Feedback system
I have a brainstorm I need to get down to think about later. The CTO of the organization I work for (the LDS Church) set a goal we failed to reach this year. He wanted us to identify ten employees that could be reallocated to more important jobs. I have no idea why we failed, but I assume it's a tough thing for managers to do.
Nevertheless, I think it is a very worthy goal, and I'd like to set similar goals if I'm ever a CTO. So I need a way to answer the question, "What efforts are we making that are least valued by the important stake holders?" Once we have that answer, we can cancel those efforts and reallocate the employees to other, more valued efforts.
My original idea is this: for quarterly employee evaluations, employees could be asked to write 5-10 "contributions" they believe were the most valuable things they did, and who derived value from each. Then those lists would be combined from all employees, and handed to the "customers" or people identified as deriving value. The customers would be asked to rank the contributions, with no option to say all were valuable. The feedback from these surveys could quickly show which employees contributed in ways that were truly valued by customers.
Of course, like other ideas I've had that I thought were valuable, I can't help wondering if this would be valuable on a bigger scale. In this case, I'm very confident that an easy-to-use, general-purpose feedback / ranking system could help an organization in many, many ways.
To go further, I struggled at my last company to come up with metrics that a development team could use to measure success. The one metric I felt was most valuable was customer satisfaction, but I couldn't come up with a good way to measure that. This tool would give me that power.
Oh yeah, and the reason I titled this "FRank" was just because "Fancy Ranking system (FRank)" was a silly name I came up with for this as a product.
Well, as always, I have a load of thoughts related to this, but no time to write them, so I guess this will have to suffice for now.
posted by Sam Mefford @ 7:48 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Well, there are many things to discuss about this topic but I'll just mention what I can get to.
I think the question of how to better utilize talent is a different topic and your ranking system is just a slice of that subject.
In regards to the ranking system itself, it isn't really a silver bullet. It is a tool that like a horse corral, is very useful to some businesses in some situations but not for others.
Let's have fun with a few examples.
Example 1, the LDS Church. You could post a survey on the home page and ask what the customer (the free consumer) liked best about what you did that year. Depending upon the needs of that person, their answers might be very different. One person might be reading scriptures every morning and another might be reading the ensign messages for home teaching. But the survey may totally miss some very important things that the customer doesn't see, like the fact that capacity to serve up pages was doubled or costs were significantly reduced in bringing one of the current pieces of content to the website.
A company like HP might have 90% of its business be business to business, and the number of divisions that interact might make management of the thousands of surveys and the processing of that data a huge problem.
And then for a small product company like the one I work for, a survey is pretty pointless. I'm going through my mind the end to end sales channels and although I understand that although some feedback happens, more emphasis on feedback is pretty pointless. Imagine for a moment you make Ginsu knives and sell them for $19.95. There really isn't a lot to do as the product company other than make the product good enough (another company does the commercial). You could upgrade the metal from steel to titanium, but nobody would care. You could improve the sheath from paper to plastic, but you don't need a survey for that. The bottom line is that there is a certain minimum criteria of performance you need to offer and feedback is fairly unimportant.
Half the products at Walmart are like that, a cheap $.99 squirt gun that simply needs to be good enough, so they (the manufacturer) really operate in a realm that makes it hard for most of their employees to actually benefit from feedback.
Then you have eBay and Amazon. You want 2 or 3 pieces of functionality, they take polls, and give you 500 and mess up the whole system that you liked. Kind of like my remote control for the tv, I just want a couple simple buttons, so don't let feedback change a good thing.
On the other hand, going back to HP, maybe the only thing they do that is really good is make good printers, and surveys would keep them from pursuing all sorts of things that people don't care about.
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