Article 5. Government Bureaucracies and Document Turn-Around Time
A few months ago a fired government translator of Islamic documents testified before Congress that she had been given a poor job performance rating and laid off. The reason she gave was that she had failed to follow her supervisor’s instructions to reduce the number Islamic documents she was translating and allow a backlog of documents to build up. The backlog was to be used by the supervisor to justify an increase in the number of translators. The more personnel that the supervisor had working for him the larger the salary he could justify.
This is a typical example of what I call a “turn-around” bureaucracy and how they operate. This is a common type of organization in US, State and local governments. In many cases the lack of concern for the people they serve is deplorable. In the above example the supervisor cared nothing about the fact that the entire nation was waiting for the translation of the Islamic documents to see if another 9/11 attack was imminent. Another more common example is when the public has to wait up to six months for a Title for an automobile.
There is a simple solution to this problem it requires a change of culture placing the emphasis on how many documents are processed rather than how many people are processing documents. The key here is in keeping good records; identifying documents processed, date received, date completed and duplicates on file. For the case of the translation of documents the records should also include the number of pages translated.
The approach in solving the staffing problem is to time-study the processing of several documents and determine a standard time at 100% rating for processing a “document” or “pages”. Next you determine the total time for an average month for processing the “documents” or “pages“ and adjust the time from the standard 100% rating to a 75% rating (adding 25% more time). You then convert minutes to hours and divide this total by the number of hours normally worked by the employees. This will give you the correct staffing level.
A weekly report should be sent to at least two levels of management. Included in the report should be the number of documents received and the number of pages received (if they vary with each document) and the number of documents or pages processed. A weekly productivity rating based on the standard at 100% should be indicated as a part of the report.
I have already related a second approach to solving this problem in Article 1. “Reforming Business and Government Bureaucracies”. When you reread it you will find the implementation of the Japanese management technique of “Work Improvement Teams” to be helpful. But I have found that in this case of document processing a simple weekly report will provide the necessary management visibility. Should management allow a large backlog to develop it is time to consider adding “Work Improvement Teams” and removing levels of management.
