WHAT IS FUNCTIONALITY BLEED?

Functionality Bleed exists when one resource is performing the roles and/or responsibilities of another who is assigned this activity. We measure functionality bleed in number of hours doing work outside of the resources assigned scope of work. Functionality Bleed can burn out employees, create resentment between employees and management, and can create general disarray in an organization.

BACKGROUND

It’s rare to speak with someone who has not experienced functionality bleed in their workplace at one time or another. Leading an organization that doesn’t suffer from bleed requires strong program management and involved leadership. It is created organically in most cases when business services or processes change, or when technology changes. It can also be a result of out of date training, or turn-over in a long period of time. Employees that care about the organization recognize what needs to get done and naturally someone takes on all activities. Think back to your own experience, can you honestly say you’ve never done someone else’s job? Or done activities outside your defined role? It would be remarkably rare if you hadn’t.

Take yourself to an imaginary company, in a general customer support role. You perform your duties as outlined daily and are good at your job. Now imagine a process change or tool implementation to support a new activity. Things are moving fast, there’s training, change control, go live, and new activities that are divided up. The team responsible for managing this new tool and the activity can’t handle all of the work, and the nature of the work leads it to your team. You may inadvertently performing this new work and not ever say anything because you think it’s just part of the new system or process. If management doesn’t know they may not ever find out. Now, take any time your performing this new work away from your current responsibility. Depending on the impact your existing responsibilities are now suffering in one way or another. Sometimes employees do this over and over as business and process change and never speak up about it. Or as leaders we hear it but fail to quantify its impact on the org and the employee. If this situation sounds too familiar, read all of the outcomes and case study example below.

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Example

Standard FTE is generally on 40 hrs. per week but arguably productive 80% of that time due to breaks and PTO. Let’s assume we get (on average) 32 hrs. out of this FTE per week. Let’s also assume a two week vacation period, and 8 paid holidays. This leaves roughly 48.6 weeks in a year totaling 1,555 hrs. annually.

If we are talking with employees and find they are performing duties outside their responsibility, we quantify. Let’s assume it’s 2 hours per week. Now, there are two potential outcomes; they are working 2 hrs. of over time per week, or doing 2 less hrs. of their responsibilities.

Outcome 1

Let’s assume the employee is a hard worker and extremely dedicated, they just add it to their workload and nothing slips. The issue here is that they are costing you overtime, which depending on the employee, may be more expensive than having the person who is supposed to be doing it, do it. If the overtime rate is $45 per hour, and the employee they are covering only makes $25, you are simply paying $20 /hr extra. If they are hourly, you’re paying an extra $4,374 annually being paid out. In addition, you’re paying the other employee for not getting that work done. This is also just the financial impact. There’s a chance this employee is slowly building resentment against the employee they are covering, leading to a less than ideal work environment. They may also be holding onto feelings towards their leadership for note being aware or enforcing everyone perform their assigned duties. In outcome 1 we would quantify the financial impact and find that difference if any in dollars annually. If they are both salary you may not have a direct financial impact. The other impacts we would find in employee satisfaction survey scores.

Outcome 2

The other outcome is that they are doing this extra work and their primary responsibility is suffering because of it. Also, any work they may not be getting done, may be being performed by yet another person. This chain of functionality bleed may go on and on. The results can vary, from low customer satisfaction, to additional FTE being needed to cover work not being performed, to long turn around times for a service. In addition, this may lower the employees performance ratings, or perception by leadership and colleagues. Even though they are busy, they are not getting their assigned work done. Potentially leading to performance issues, and even disciplinary action.

Summary

It’s hard to know which outcome is worse, and in some cases you see a combination of the two. Either way, there is no positive outcome possible. You end up with a variety of issues.

DIAGNOSING FUNCTIONALITY BLEED

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Outline Roles and Responsibilities

The first step in diagnosing functionality bleed is to establish a list of all roles in the company and gather the comprehensive list of roles and responsibilities that go along with each. If this total does not culminate in a list of everything your company does, someone is doing extra.

Typically we would speak with folks in the groups we’re working with as this check normally comes in process analysis. If you do not have a list of roles, accompanied by comprehensive roles and responsibilities you leave yourself vulnerable to functionality bleed.

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Measure Performance

Once we have gotten the roles and duties worked out, we’ll want to see if there are ways to measure. Either through goals and objectives, KPIs (key performance indicators), or other reporting. These can be team and/or individual based data points, hopefully both are available.

Reporting and measurement in general are passive ways to see functionality bleed in action. Either one person or team are over/under performing, and it cannot be easily explained or compared with overall work volume. Data can be a good barometer for this type of issue.

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Quantify Effects

With the expectations, and the measurements available we should be able to see the effects and quantify them into meaningful estimates. Once the true impact is available in terms everyone can understand it should be possible to measure the value that correction can place on the organization and employees involved.

We use the data, roles information, and potentially survey information as a baseline against the data resulting from improvements. Over time there should be noticeable change corresponding to predictions we can make during the solutioning process.

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Continuous Improvement

The last step is to bake in changes to the organization that do not allow for this to easily happen again. Things like regularly scheduled 1:1’s with leadership, quarterly and annual review processes, clear goals and objectives, and feedback loops.

Not only will these program management changes help cure any potential functionality bleed moving forward, but should provide extra motivation to employees who may now receive more insightful involvement from leadership.