Problems with Workarounds
A workaround is problem-solving to fix an immediate issue, with no effort to prevent recurrence of the problem. Steve Spear describes workarounds as guaranteeing aggravation.
Workarounds allow people to get work done now as they experience imperfect systems. Spear points out that workarounds prolong aggravation while they simultaneously hinder organizational learning and improvement. Spear and co-authors Anita Tucker and Amy Edmondson documented the actions of nurses in hospitals in a 2002 article that examines this downside, discussed in this 2016 post.
Spear explains workarounds and interventions to counter their negative impact in a short IHI Open School video, here.
Workaround example
This week, I experienced a workaround related to the reporting system in our current oral health improvement collaborative. Like all systems, our reporting system is imperfect though less confusing for collaborative members and easier for the collaborative faculty to use than in previous collaboratives.
On Wednesday, a user told me her Excel report file failed to load to the collaborative web app that aggregates and displays numerical data. I asked for her file and she was right: the file failed to load because the web app determined the size of the file was too large.
In this year’s collaborative, the monthly Excel file can be ‘large’ because we encourage teams to include photos of their work. For example, they can include photos of handwritten Plan-Do-Study-Act forms to avoid the waste of typing up their PDSAs.
Thus, relatively large files are now a feature of our collaborative work, which we had not experienced in previous years.
Rachel our collaborative manager had learned about the upload problem earlier this year. She had a workaround! Here it is: make a copy of the offending Excel file, delete worksheet tabs in the file other than the numerical data tables and try to load the file again to the web app. While this fix got the numerical into our database, the workaround added steps and increased variation in the Rachel’s monthly workflow.
Once I learned about the problem and the workaround, we had an easy fix. I learned that I can set an option in the web app’s code to increase the default file upload size. One line of code eliminates both the upload failure and the monthly workaround aggravation for the program manager and collaborative team members. Result: less effort for Rachel next month and a more reliable web app.
How to find workarounds
In our collaborative, I own the web app’s design and maintenance. Until a team members sent me thecomplaint message, I was oblivious to Rachel’s workaround for large files. How could I have learned about her workaround? I could take my own advice!
I’ve identified two methods to surface workarounds: (1) Regular huddles that invite staff to describe workarounds (described in the post that discusses Spear’s 2002 article) and (2) ‘Go See’ observation of work that looks for evidence of workarounds (explanation of Go See basics in this post). While daily huddles and ‘Go See’ may be easier for colocated staff who carry out multiple work cycles each day, I have the opportunity to adapt and apply these methods to my distributed, episodic work, too.
