Case Study: Financial Services

FIRM A: Getting innovative ideas about hiring

"Firm A" is a large, well-known financial services company. As part of the MIT Process Handbook project on which the Phios products are based, researchers worked with AT Kearney, a research sponsor, and one of their clients, "Firm A," to generate highly innovative new ideas about how Firm A could improve its hiring process.

This project was motivated by the fact that Firm A was experiencing increasing problems with hiring. They were growing rapidly in a tightening labor market, and they had a culture of independent, competitive business units. Together, these factors led to increases in the time and cost to hire people and to increasingly frequent instances of business units "hoarding" candidates, or bidding against each other for the same candidate. Before this project began, Firm A had already invested a great deal of time and energy into "as is" process analysis using techniques such as flowcharting.

The project team’s first step was simply to see how the hiring process was represented in the Process Repository. Several of the steps in the Repository process called "Hire human resources" were similar to those already identified by the "as is" analysis; for example, identify need, determine source, select, and make offer. One immediate insight, however, resulted from the fact that the Repository process included a step of "pay employee" which had not been included in the "as is" analysis. Even though they hadn’t previously thought of it in this way, the team members from Firm A found it surprising and useful to realize that an employee's receipt of a first paycheck is, in a sense, the logical culmination of the hiring process. Receiving a correct paycheck, for instance, confirms that the hiring information has been entered correctly in the relevant administrative systems.

To generate further ideas, the team looked within the Repository at the overall hiring process and then at the specializations--or related processes--of each of its parts. As a result, they encountered dozens of examples of innovative practices other companies used in hiring
(see diagram)

Sample of innovative hiring practices viewed by Firm A (from release 1.0)

One interesting example involved Marriott's use of an automated telephone system to screen job applicants. The system asks job candidates a series of questions about their qualifications and salary requirements over the telephone, and candidates answer these questions using their touch tone keypad. At the end of the call, the candidates are immediately told if they're qualified for the position and invited to schedule an interview through the system's automated scheduling feature. Although this approach would be inappropriate in many situations, the team members from Firm A thought this approach might be very useful for some of their entry-level positions. Now, of course many companies follow this same model in their current hiring processes, often using dedicated in-store computer kiosks rather than automated phone systems.

After reviewing these examples of innovative hiring practices, the team’s next step was to look further afield in the repository for distant analogies, or "cousins" of the hiring process. That is, they looked first at generalizations or "ancestors" of the hiring process, and then at other specializations, or "descendants" of these generalizations. In terms of the two dimensional Process Compass navigation, they moved left and then right again (see compass diagram). This process of manually seeking out innovative ways of managing workflow issues has been automated and enhanced in Phios' web-based Idea Generation feature.

The Process Compass

For example, "hiring" is classified in the repository as a specialization of "buying", so a handbook user who looks at the generalizations of "hiring" will see "buying". In retrospect, this connection may seem obvious, since hiring is a form of buying someone’s time, but this analogy had not been obvious to the project team, and it was a stimulating source of insights. For example, the team found a description of General Electric’s Internet-based purchasing system through which buyers can find and compare suppliers, and this example stimulated ideas about how Firm A might be able to use a similar system to identify job candidates using the Internet, yet another concept which is now highly mainstreamed.

As a result of this project, Firm A identified dozens of new ideas for how they could do hiring. They also felt that, in addition to simply being a source of new ideas, the process repository could be useful as a framework for organizing and keeping track of all the ideas generated in the course of the team’s discussions, truly a Repository of process knowledge.