The human factor
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

What's the biggest obstacle to optimising your team's operations? How can getting insights into your team characteristics and processes impact on improving the efficiency of your department's operations?

Item

The biggest hurdle in optimising your team's operations is not technology or budget or even time.

It's human nature.

Optimisation means asking people to change how they work. Even smart people who know that success lies on the other side of change can struggle - sometimes mightily - with the process.

A core aspect of Jinfo's current Research Focus, "Creating an Information Centre of Excellence", looks at the characteristics embodied by the best information teams. In addition to the professional and technical skills required of information professionals, the best teams are proactive, consultative, evolving, optimised, customer-focused and technology-enabled.

As we discuss in the blog item exploring Insight 2 for this Research Focus, these qualities describe the "how" of your activities and services, regardless of the specifics of what you deliver and to whom.

They don't always come naturally, or easily, but they can be identified, cultivated and strengthened.

To gain insight into your team's characteristics so that you can amplify them (or overcome them) to initiate change, start with our "Maturity model on team characteristics". This report provides you with a framework for evaluating your team and creating a development plan to enhance the qualities that make change - and thus ongoing optimisation - more successful. You can also compare your team's characteristics to the results of the survey we conducted as part of this Research Focus - the relevant chapter can be found here, or download the full report here.

Use these insights in conjunction with our "Maturity model on the scalability of services", which gives you a sense of what your targets might be for optimising and improving efficiency of your department's operations.

As anyone who attends a professional conference these days knows, there are a plethora of technology tools and platforms intended to make us hyper-efficient. We explored these in a recent webinar - access the recording from this page, and/or download the presentation deck with our notes as a Jinfo Report.

But all the smart technology in the world won't overcome the human element of change. Start from your assets - the people on your staff. And consider joining our July webinar on "The impact of reporting structure on your service efficiency" - another human-driven factor that can have a hidden impact on the reality of what works and what stalls as you make an effort to optimise.

As always, your peers can be your best teachers for gaining new insight into how to optimise. Our July Community session, "Jinfo for optimising your information service", offers you a unique, confidential forum for discussion and exchange of ideas.

Your Jinfo Subscription includes access to the full range of resources we develop to support your journey towards team optimisation. For closer work with a Jinfo analyst, consider bringing in our consulting workshop, "Do better with less - workflow optimisation" - you'll get one-on-one training, coaching and support for all the human foibles that accompany change.

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