pinkfloydpsw's Blog

First let me start with a statement, I like working here, it’s a good place, it has interesting people, I have an interesting  job and what we all contribute to is the betterment of lives, that is a good thing that needs no further qualification. I think it is fundamental to this essay that it does not present itself as merely a gripe, I will attempt to make structural rather than personal criticisms so as to highlight obvious, to me at least, deficiencies in efficiency and process labour but in doing so I may have to mention roles, in doing so I may stumble into indicating specific cases of specific persons without going so far as to name them, yet they may recognise themselves or be recognised by others. I would assure these individuals that there is no intent of malice on my part and that my attempt here is to alleviate the bloat that holds them back from achieving efficiency rather than marking they themselves as problematic. With that said we can move toward criticisms which will take various forms and draw on various theories which I will try to explain as I go. Another caveat, I am not a professional in this field, I am a process worker too, I am willing to be wrong and this is not a manifesto for its own sake, it is a criticism based on immanent experiences, observations over time and what can only be described, and admitted as incomplete information (only what I am privy to).

We use information (data) as an instrument of change; we better the lives of learners by learning ourselves, becoming better by measuring both process and output. To that end we have certain instruments; we can call them for the purpose of this essay, technologies. Information is gathered and used throughout the time the learner is in partnership with the institution.

Now the reason we are looking at this is simple, forces within our marketplace (this is now a marketplace of learning and we are a business within it), will play out the same for us as for any other competitors. There is no escaping these forces, we cannot not change because we are used to our way of doing things or we fail to recognise where small changes aggregate into larger more desirable and, more importantly, more competitive outcomes. Our failure to compete in this market of education will undo us elsewise, it is simple naivety to think that we are an exception, we are forced and must embrace change, and to this end I propose a change management strategy.

Let us identify why change is needed…

If your competitors change then you change too – where another institution utilises technology to replace human labour they increase their efficiency and improve the value of human labour through productivity. This does not necessitate redundancy; the imaginative resistance that occurs when persons feel that their employment is threatened by technological advances must be dealt with both quickly and correctly. Efficiency means also an increase in productivity for the individual and that may equate to an increase in value to the company, this is a positive outcome for the employee. Since 2010 the institution has flogged that horse time and again, we have seen redundancies and reshuffles, if it was going to work it would have worked by now I think. The imposition of an HR consultant does nothing to quell the worries of the workforce and is in no way a help in winning them over in this argument, they are more likely to resist change than ever. HR consultants are not economists; they are more in the ilk of accountants and tend to see the price of everything but the value of nothing. Viewing human workers as simply a cost to be counted misses a fundamental point, that human workers create value.

What value do we seek?

Karl Marx pointed out that people create value, things, such as machines and assets, do not, they may have value but they cannot make value alone. A workforce creates value, some more than others, but all are necessarily able to create value and all will agree that they put-in and play their part. We can separate the institution’s workers into three distinct camps, those that create outcomes (Tutors), those who facilitate the creation of outcomes (Support Staff) and those that organise all of this labour (Management). Tutors are what Marx called Variable Capital, they have the capacity to create much more value than they cost. This capacity is contingent on Constant Capital which is a cost that creates nothing but it facilitates value creators (we can lump technology, machinery, assets, buildings and transport in here as well as persons), management is a constant capital of sorts, their greatest gains are to be reaped through correct organisation of labour, fiscal responsibility, cooperative communicative practices and a good reading of the marketplace; they are facilitators, but not through process or product, more through a kind of guidance which based on information gained by means of measurement. If we look comparatively at the costs involved here we can identify the major problem of where Variable Capital is being used to do the work of Constant Capital – just rough figures here but I think they are close enough to the truth to be relevant. We pay £20 per hour to tutors, £10 per hour to admins, this means that every hour spent by a tutor doing administrative work is inefficient and overly costly since 1) they are not producing value by teaching and 2) they are doing the labour of a much lower paid and lower skilled worker, a mistake I’m sure you’ll agree. The counter argument to this is that it is their job to do certain administrative tasks because they are best placed to do them; I would argue that a reduction to only the most necessary of these tasks would be beneficial. If you have 10 tutors and you can gain the same end with 9 tutors and 1 admin then you have saved money (9x£20 + 1x£10), if you chose not to reduce the amount of tutors but instead add the admin you have increased the potential for value, this of course would be dependent on having a need for the extra tutor. Regardless of which direction is chosen the mistake of using high value / high cost labour to do the work of low value / low cost labour has been rectified. Of course since we are moving from a predominantly academic establishment toward a more vocational one the reduction of tutor numbers is irrelevant since they will be more specialised and therefore less dynamically applicable, this consideration does no harm to the overall efficiency of my proposal, it is merely another aspect that must be wrestled with, the counter to this is maybe a reduction in status from full time to part time provision.

Complexity is the enemy…

Complexity reduces value, where any system can be streamlined, it should be. Take for instance 2 separate systems that have the capacity to do the same function and produce the same output, each of these systems has components that are themselves useful and usable in their own right, in a comparison between only component parts and their equivalents we may find that component A from system 1 is better than component A from system 2 but component B from system 2 is better than component B from system 1 and so on, it may make individual rational sense to combine complex systems, using only certain components of them, but it may consequently yield an overall irrational outcome by involving further technological processing and intellectual labour in making these systems coincide gracefully. Here I am speaking directly against certain systems that are favoured by certain individuals who may be unaware of this burden of complexity but are motivated by only a narrow personal awareness of how an individual component serves their own particular role most adequately. Workers maybe should in many situations have systems foisted upon them, to let a worker (who lacks this wider awareness) chose the tools of their own labour is inefficient and indicates bad planning since different users will make choices based on immediate biases rather than overall benefits. The benefits I speak of are simple, systemic compatibility, internal support efficiency, lowered running costs, more focused and less costly training, reduced technological footprint, a reduction of disaster mitigation and/or recovery, lower costing/higher quality external support, a greater possibility of expertise etc. What we have seen historically is the shoe-horning of mixed technologies and systems into the technological infrastructure, this has not resulted in value since we now quite obviously face rampant incompatibility issues between Microsoft, Apple, Canonical and Google products (Windows, IOS, Linux and ChromeOS), a gaping chasm between the expectations of management for the professional usage of ProMonitor, Moodle, REMS, CELCAT, Symmetry, SmartAssessor etc.. and a lack of expertise for the staff users involved, combine this with an inability to fund progress in these areas and contrast the approach with that of other, similar, establishments that have acted toward, and benefited from, both financially and in all the other ways I have mentioned, the adoption a single all-purpose system that may be in every individual component deficient to a rival product, but discovers a greater rationality in the all singing from the same song sheet benefit.

Complexity protects roles, there is a tendency towards making it look like magic, what I mean by this is that there is incentive toward complexity for the sole purpose of maintaining positional importance; obfuscation, obscurantism, abstruseness, we can call it motivated awkwardness but it is with purpose. An example would be where a worker happens to be the only person who can operate a particular machine or carry out a particular process task, they may be aware that the same task can be done and the same end achieved by other means than the one they use now but they also know 2 further things that influence their perspective, 1) if everyone can do what they do then they lose their prominence, their power, and 2) if others are unaware of these facts then they are fooled into believing that what is being done is necessary, to illuminate them would be, politically speaking, damaging. Complexity also serves to increase time available for the utiliser in this case, if I can convince you that my task takes a week, when in reality it takes a day, I have given myself 4 days within which to be idle.

Output, not wishful thinking….

Attitude is unimportant, product is paramount – The easy mistake to make is to believe that a person who is trying hard in achieving the desired or necessary output is being efficient; here effort is a misleading measure. Often we hear the ineffectual worker, who has produced little in the way of identifiably positive output, defended with the implication that they gave it their best shot, in productive labour it is assumed that the expected output of a worker is imaginatively reasonable in the mind of the requester, in this case management. If for any reason the expectation is not met then the examination of that failure will highlight either a deficiency in the expectation, or the labour. Let us contend that the worker has been provided with all of the tools and the time necessary to achieve an outcome yet that outcome has not be realised, we must then conclude that either the worker is negligent for not having completed the task or the management is negligent for having miscalculated the outcome. The impetus here is to meet success with further expectation and the resultant will be failure since increased expectation without increased support will naturally lead to a point where resources such as intellect and time are expended or spread so thinly that they do not yield productive outcomes. Workers, being aware of the paradox of success (getting more work to do because you have been efficient), will naturally resist efficiency so as not to encounter greater expectation, this problem is solved by management through facilitation, providing a framework for success by valuing rational imaginative outcomes that are achievable and setting expectations accordingly whilst resisting the urge to overburden successful productive labour. We can identify in-work stresses and sickness days as indicators and directly related to the over burdening of staff, these outcomes act directly against efficiency and gains in one direction made by increased expectation may be negated and made costly by losses in another.

High output of low yielding goals – time spent producing what is unnecessary is just as wasted as time spent producing nothing at all. The mistake is to equate all outputs as equally valuable. Focussing on what generates value and discarding what does not, in education there is the favouring, by academics, of academic subjects, a sort of academic snobbery that causes a skewed appreciation and subsequent bias toward those disciplines and subject areas that are held in highest esteem. What is necessary is to provide for what the market demands, this is the nature of moving from a monopoly marketplace to a competitive one where the demand curve intersects the supply curve at a discovered equilibrium rather than a determined one, I could explain why that is important but I will leave it out since I confidently assume my audience ought already to understand basic microeconomics. I say moving from one marketplace to another since we are now, as I pointed out earlier, a business with competitors rather than a state funded social affect.

Why not cut back?

Combating the paradox of thrift, the belief here being that a business can save its way out of debt, this is intuitive but a falsehood, a person can save their way out of a debt but a business cannot (at least not by the same means). If we contend that person works 40 hours a week and earns £200 for that week, spends £80 on shopping and £20 on entertainment, gambles £50 a week on football and £75 a week on horses then they are in an increasing debt since their income does not cover their outgoings, the simple fix is to reduce their outgoings so that they can then pay off their debts. What is true is that their income never changes as a result of their outgoings; they will still have £200 per week coming in regardless as long as their working situation remains the same. A business is different in a very distinct and important way, incoming monies are contingent on outgoing monies, what is spent is spent with the rational expectation that it will increase revenue, this spend is in effect an investment rather than the frivolous waste of capital that the individual may experience by consuming goods. Eliminate or reduce the outgoing monies and by association (one that cannot be avoided), you retard the possibility of increasing incoming monies. The better option is wiser spending, putting monies into areas that have greater returns or greater possibilities of expansion and the realisation of surpluses.

Monetising fixed assets, the business has land, buildings and equipment that are all in need of maintenance, development and marketing. We may have for example a large sports hall that is barely used, a football pitch that is barely used, multiple ICT Suites that are heavily underused on all sites during daytime hours and a room booking system that lacks the capacity to deal with the complex needs of a diverse customer base in that it does not reflect either the production possibilities or the provision of technologies within its database, it merely links room to subject in a rather simple way. Interrogating this system yields little information that can be made usable when planning the provision of the correct technologies for the subject disciplines. Multiple examples of the problem can be found in the wake of the curriculum planning and initial timetabling that goes on before the year begins, this includes the relocation of ICT equipment to accommodate tutor needs carried out by Technicians responding to requests for technology that is not in use in another location, the horse-trading of rooms by tutors without consultation with the timetabling staff, the fact that rooms cannot be dynamically made available by holders of the booking when no longer required, the fact that tutors have no direct access to the timetabling system through a web page, the fact that just-in-case block bookings occur to reserve resource rich rooms that are not even intended to be used regularly; leaving the most technologically provisioned rooms unused, the fact that the most technologically provisioned room in the whole infrastructure is block booked by the exams department for infrequent and incomplete use (2 PCs apart rule for students) leads us to conclude that technological assets are growing rapidly obsolete without us first getting the best from them. Air conditioned suites of near new PCs are in particular problematic, these rooms have had £15K+ spent on them in the last 2 years and are very underused, one has small classes that rarely use the PCs when it can accommodate 25 PC users, another is nearly always empty when it has the same capacity and the exams that are run can be done on any PC on the domain (they are clones), both rooms also have under-floor heating as well as a seating area outside them. These are just some examples of wastage; there are more that could be discovered easily.

The big issues…

Failure to see the big picture, the implication being here that the narrowness of concern for an individual department or component part of the structure causes wastage in another area. I will highlight 2 examples of where a strategy and its subsequent manifestations may seem individually rational but also cause greater loss when applied to an overall outcome, 1) subsidisation, we receive a fixed amount of revenue per student dependent on what course they do with us, we spend money on all students in externalities to their education provision such as heating the building, maintenance, security, entertainment etc.. Over the last few years we have seen a decrease in these spending areas, the student no longer has anywhere to go at lunchtime and there is no entertainment provided. One particular area of concern is in transportation, the charging for buses, this may cost us student numbers, and therefore large revenues, this is for the sake of savings made in smaller areas by persons with narrow focus. If for instance a student can pay nothing for a bus to another institution and has to pay £20 a week for a bus to the more local institution then they have experienced an influence that changes their dominant strategy (being in the first instance a more rational decision to travel less distance for the same ends if available). 2) The second example I will use is that of consumables linked to assets that are purchased from a different budget, ink and toner for printers are charged to the individual or department but the printers themselves are bought by the ICT Services department, if a printer is a cheaper model it will almost always be wasteful, this wastefulness is not the immediate concern of the purchaser since they have, by buying a more wasteful model, increased their own capacity to purchase other items. By this misaligned logic the purchaser may cause the institution to lose money over time, now multiply that waste by a large number of printers and also apply it to other items such as uneconomical electrical goods and the like and we may come to realise that devolved budgeting without informed oversight is inherently wasteful.

I don’t need to know what you do as long as my expectation is that you are the right person, can do it in good time, and correctly. Engaging me in it not only wastes my time but wastes yours also in the fact that you now have to communicate unnecessarily. I may believe that engaging me is an affect of your power and for the purpose of sharing responsibility in the case that the outcome is undesirable, safety in numbers. Unproductive communication is inefficient, meetings are not the best ways to disseminate information, they are the best way to engage with expertise rather than power since power tends to make a monologue of meetings it is simply dissemination and therefore wasteful when other methods are better (email for example). Lateral meetings yes, informative meetings no.

What to do?

Standardisation, too many influential persons choosing to complete similar tasks but in differing ways, this applies to all departments and all persons. There is a lack of standardised process in certain areas where decision makers have the choice of what products or systems they use to produce data or course materials, some use Moodle whereas some choose to print, some use CELCAT whereas some choose to use a shared or replicated spreadsheet, some use recording format extension AVI while others record their video evidence in MP4, some photocopy then hand out and some email, some use google drive while others use their Network drive (crazy people keep everything on a USB stick), some use databases while others use spreadsheets, some use PowerPoint presentation software when others use web based software etc.. Businesses generally do not do this, they instead attempt to standardise their system usage so as their workforce becomes better able and more likely to express expertise and are easier to train then support.

Engage the expertise, the institution has a number of expert individuals in a number of fields, we have highly trained and highly motivated individuals that are experts in their disciplines yet they are more usually marginalised by power or the lack of it. For example we have a web developer who is not used as a web developer, instead he is the supervisor of a small department of staff who all hold higher qualifications and have more experience than him; so therefore have need of him as a co-worker but not in a supervisory capacity, we have a marketing department that does not engage the Art department in artistic matters nor utilise their photography or design skills, we have 2 experienced business tutors yet they are not engaged in the business of this business nor consulted in view of its matters, we have systems that desperately need modernisation and the individuals with the skill sets to do so but they are prevented by other more influential individuals who can resist change with power for the sake of comfort, so end up doing so. MIS may have been advised prior to the adoption of SmartAssessor that it was unnecessary and wasteful, not just in monetary terms but as a process of human labour, because other avenues could be explored such as making REMS available online instead, power spoke louder than expertise at a cost of £30K+. Management were advised by ICT Services that CELCAT was both inefficient and unnecessary since other means are available for timetabling and reporting timetabling, power spoke louder than expertise to the tune of £8K per annum. Finance were advised that using SAGE rather than Symmetry would be more cost effective and closer to industry standards, Symmetry costs £18K a year; there are many more examples of where this has happened from the ICT stance alone.

Adopt new technology, because everybody else is doing so. Web based application and enrolment forms, web based prospectuses (rather than the thousands of unused paper based versions currently situated outside the HR manager’s office). Putting any form or information onto a web based platform reduces costs, information directly inputted to web technologies is immediately available for use and alleviates the need for it to be manually entered by an admin at a later time, and this can reduce mistakes as well as costs. Web platforms can be tailored to meet the needs of the applicant, are easily modifiable and reduce the outlay on printed materials which go out of date as soon as the course begins. Departments are bulging with paper records and forms, there is no reason that this could not be reduced through digital means, scanning and emailing documents after signing is just one example where a printed copy per student would be reduced to just the original needing retained for auditing purposes.

What to avoid…

Discipline, it is all very well to make discipline the cause of all staff but without imbuing them with the tools to correct undesirable behaviour makes them impotent, ineffectual and likely to not carry through their mandate; this leads to staff shouldering the blame for bad behaviour and that is a distraction from the fact that bad behaviour exists. To change the dominant strategy of a group or individual requires the use of either or both incentive or punishment, this is classic game theory. Both tools affect dominant strategy by introducing external pressures, there is no other way to modify the outward expression of an inner will than these levers, sure a person could suggest certain strategies but those strategies will fall into the camp of one or the other of these tools I have mentioned. The scenario is like this, the learner smokes in a no-smoking area, they are challenged by a member of staff, they respond negatively, what happens next is the decision of the staff member whether or not to appeal to a tutor or a member of management. The problem with the appeal for punitive measure is that it is directed toward staff members that are more concerned with retention than discipline, these students represent our revenue. The problem with incentive is that we have none, there is nothing to offer the student and any offer might be construed negatively in that it may reinforce an idea that unreasonable behaviour gets rewarded; this does nothing to combat the problem. The upshot of the situation is that tutors and support staff do not get involved, or pretend not to notice, this is what happens when you have no tools in your toolbox, you cannot do the work; ergo, the work does not get done. The more diligent staff members may, in their frustration, cause themselves to make bad decisions and pose a threat to the student, that is unhelpful and unnecessary (since some of our students require specialists to deal with them rather than untrained general workers).

Responsibility

Power speaks loudly, time and again the power of an individual promotes personal preferences over rational method, there is a responsibility and a cost born in industry to injecting personal preference into a process and thus making it less efficient that is discovered in the measure of that business’s throughput. If for any reason the preference of a supervisory individual lowered the overall revenue of the Coca-Cola company without credible reason (such as H&S, government legislation, union interjection), then they would face the consequences of their action, it does not seem to be the case that this management takes any punitive measure against members of itself or its lower orders (middle management) when the fruition of their decisions proves more based on personal motivation than on company goals. Whence comes the motivation to take responsibility and be proactive for a workforce that continually stands witness to OFSTED reports of deficient safeguarding yet also continues to see the prominence of those persons in charge of that area continue unmolested? Whence comes the impetus to embrace change on the part of the workforce that stands witness to wastefulness and archaic practices? A person printing a phone-book’s worth of handouts at a photocopier for 20 minutes does nothing to encourage the use of Moodle as the defacto tool of student curriculum material and information dissemination. A good example needs to be set and change must be by example from top to bottom.

This institution has local significance, no single individual or group should be allowed to halt its progress toward viability and survival through their preferences or adherence to outmoded thinking. Freud said that the stupidest thing of all was to continue to do the same things the same way yet expect something different to happen. We have had restructures and redundancies, we have had the dissemination and devolvement of responsibilities, we have had wage real wage reduction and belt tightening and we have had messianic leaders and contracted advisors. None of them helped us, they were either as vultures to our decaying flesh or we took their advisement and binned it in our hubris. It is surely time for something else!

Paul Simon Wilson