PowerDoc is a market research organisation which services clients from the advertising industry who require high-quality research documents. These documents are produced to tight deadlines by managers who work within project-based groups comprised of account managers, researchers and secretaries. A typical report is prepared by several members of the team whose contributions need to be collated, revised and checked before being finalised. It contains technical data and statistics. An accurate, polished report is crucial to customer satisfaction.
Traditionally, each account manager had assigned to their project team a senior secretary with one to four juniors. The secretaries forrned an integral part of the project groups and carried out a broad range of tasks including document creation/checking, quality control, and client liaison; they were responsible for maintaining accuracy and high standards of presentation in the documents. A project group might be responsible for several projects at any one time. No formal organisation existed, with each secretary (all of whom were women) being attached to three or four researchers for as long as the project lasted.
In the mid-1990s an expansion of business meant that secretaries at PowerDoc came under increasing strain. The company experienced increased turnover, but failed to increase profits, in spite of the fact that the client base was expanding. The need to cut operating costs seemed obvious. The finance director decided that the company should try to identif~ those parts of the business where cost cutting could be achieved. The company had a computer which was used to store and provide information on accounts, finance and market research data. This was controlled by a data processing Under the existing system, wordprocessing was carried out on stand-alone machines. The data-processing manager proposed that the wordprocessing could be handled by more advanced networked facilities, where printers and other expensive peripheral devices could be shared by project teams. He also proposed that junior clerks could process an increased workload if document creation was centralised into a wordprocessing pool, with senior secretaries retaining responsibility for workload organisation and client liaison. The use of this new system was linked to a payment system which rewerded the inputting clerks according to output. The new technology allowed this to be measured in terms of keystrokes per clerk.
The system was a technical success, but a number of unintended consequences followed from its introduction. Output rose, but quality fell sharply, and the amount of rework/correction increased. This had an adverse effect on certain 'non-price' aspects of the firm's performance such as docoment turnaround and delivery times.
Staff turnover also increased. New and temporary clerks were unfamiliar with the requirements of project teams. Project managers and researchers spent an increasing amount of time 'progress chasing' and checking the accuracy and quality of documents. Documents often had to be submitted to the centralised pool twice or even three times before an acceptable standard was achieved. Customer satisfaction was badly affected and PowerDoc lost a number of important clients as a result.
The PowerDoc case contains elements of both technological and organisational change. One of the key aspects is that the changes are being driven, not by the technology itself, but by managerial choices, which may take account of one or more stakeholders within the organisation.
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