Baseline performance metrics, cost per FTE, utilization models, spans of control, delivery center layouts, bell-curved performance reviews, even the very idea of an FTE are central to the legacy model of BPO and are based on the application of the idea of averages. This approach might have been acceptable in an era of staff augmentation and manual process delivery, which we refer to as “legacy BPO,” but it isn’t the right way to think about delivery in the As-a-Service Economy.
The tendency to look at the world in terms of averages, and the drawbacks that has created, is the central theme of the new book by Todd Rose, director of the Mind, Brain and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, The End of Average. He argues that “Any system designed around the average person is doomed to fail.” We believe that legacy BPO is no different and is following that same rule.
None of us are average. We tell that to ourselves everyday when it comes to our personal and professional performance. Translating that into BPO parlance—none of us think of ourselves as a generic FTE either. Yet the very industrialization of BPO as a delivery mechanism and as a market has been largely predicated on the existence of the average FTE.
So ask yourself if that’s really the way your business should operate.
The deployment of robotic process automation (RPA) technologies will remove many of the mundane tasks in business process delivery that we have previously thought of in terms of FTE. Indeed, every service provider and employee currently aspires to move to higher value work facilitated by other new technologies in analytics and cognitive computing—or at least that is what we are told is the case every day.
This will not be a simple transition for many service providers that have explicitly or implicitly handled staff using the management theories of Frederick Taylor that value standardization (AKA, operating to the average) above all else.
Service providers (and shared service centers) need to stop hiring an “average employee.” They also need to stop training these employees for generic skills that aren’t going to be valued in the future and then promoting them based on evaluations against bell curves of standard performance. Instead, service providers need to re-skill or, more likely, simply encourage existing employees to take on roles and tasks that are a mix of being more creative, analytic and insight driven than before.
Doing this requires stepping back and seeing employees more as individuals with their own unique sets of strengths and weaknesses to be incorporated into the new work styles and roles. Delivery center environments will also need to further adapt to give support to the integration of individualism and team delivery without just falling back on old models that represent the industrial revolution rather than knowledge revolution. In other words, a lot needs to change in the existing BPO model.
Unless, as an entire BPO sector, we all radically reframe the way that we view the role of individuals as being something more than faceless FTEs (or averages), we are not going maximize the opportunity.
That is why design thinking and writing off legacy (in this case, specifically writing of the idea of the average) are such fundamental Ideals to the As-a-Service Economy. We can’t go forward unless we fundamentally break with our past constructs for viewing problems and solutions.