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| A
better way to manage staff ideas |
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| Members
of the Innotech team introduced
a new system to effectively manage
the large number of suggestions
submitted by staff. |
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A
tedious, frustrating job provided an opportunity
for a cross-organisation
WIT to develop a creative and effective solution
that bagged the gold award at the National Quality
Circle Convention in July 2002.
Without an automated
system for information gathering and report
generation, managing staff suggestions can be a job which entails long hours
of tedious paperwork.
For newcomers, landing such a job can be nightmarish. The backlog of unevaluated
suggestions, ideas pending implementation and those to be kept for future reference
is enough to frighten new recruits into resigning. Staff complaints that evaluators
are unresponsive, closed to ideas and biased are also another cause for headaches.
A group of SSS administration officers from the Ministry of Information and
the Arts, together with their counterparts from the National Library Board,
formed a cross-organisation WIT, called Innotech, to tackle the problem.
They began by conducting an analysis of the causes and effects of the problem,
and decided on automating the process of generating quarterly reports. They
also looked into ways to clear the clutter of ideas which could neither be
evaluated nor implemented as they had become outdated.
Getting rid of the paper jungle was next on their agenda. The team managed
to give the old Lotus Notes Staff Suggestion Information System a new lease
of life by modifying it to create a new system called Post-iT. The remake,
which cost only one-third the price of a new system, came with modular features
that could be reconfigured quickly.
Changes were also made to the SSS management system. Bold moves were made to
empower suggestors to choose relevant evaluators and send the suggestions to
them directly. This helped to eliminate complaints of biased evaluators as
well as the need for an administrator to forward the staff suggestions.
The suggestors are also responsible for managing their own staff suggestions
until they are accepted by their organisations.
The suggestors must also account for their own performance. Through Post-iT,
suggestors and their supervisors can track their performance, which will contribute
towards their staff appraisal. |
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By
Ng Siam Gek, MITA
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