Hoarding
I am in the process of moving and then you realise how much people are hoarding stuff. Every job move a take about 1 or 2 boxes with me, full of old courses, interesting reference documents, etc. and usually I never see them again until the next job move. It is hard to break this habit and it is clear that I am not the only one. All around the company I see cupboards full of papers and I guess there is a lot of junk in it that we throw away, plus a few valuable gems that we may have lost ...So is this a problem? Probably ... because paper takes up a lot of space, people loose a lot of time searching in their papers and valuable information may get lost, because the information is not accessible anymore (since it is store in some sort of personal collection).
So there is some merit in address the 'hoarding' problem. And actually there are ways to address this.
One - drastic way - is the idea of Open Plan offices. You may love or hate them, but for hoarding paper it is a good remedy. Just allocate little space for storage and then apply a clean desk policy and soon people are only retaining the most valuable information. Obviously this only works if there is also a good library type of function, else people start to throw things away that should have been retained.
This problem also extends to digital data and therefore a similar measure like clean desks can be applied to shared drives. Offer people a controlled environment for key documents and clear out the team space (say every week).
Another measure is the 'big brother' type measure of having a information delivery compliance monitor for what kind of documents need to be stored at the start and end of each business process. This works for repetitive processes (e.g. every project should have a signed off project plan, stored in the EDMS), but this does not work for more creative, or iterative environments. In that case it is hard to measure the value of what has been posted as key information, but than a manager could sign off on a general statement that key information was managed. All other information should be thrown away, or at least stored outside the prime information traffic areas. Note that this only works if it is on the manager's scorecard!
Getting people to rotate in the organisation is also a good way of cleaning the house once in a while. Usually people tend to clean up a lot of information at the ends of their jobs and the new person coming in can do another sweep.
posted by Evert Ruijs @ 10:36 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home