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Enhance Productivity
First, some context. We are talking about
enhancing the productivity of
office workers
using software tools
such as Microsoft Office.
Any office worker, in this day and age, spends
at least four to five hours a day working with
software tools. But, are these hours being spent
productively? Could better use of these tools,
and thus, this time, have a major impact on the
entire organization? To answer these questions,
we need to understand the nature of work done
using these tools.
Our studies have shown that the work done using
software tools can be classified into two broad
categories: operational and analytical.
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Operational work, such as: |
Analytical work, such as: |
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Handling Email, Making presentations,
Formatting reports, Uploading and
copy-pasting data, formatting documents,
checking or comparing data, correcting
data entry mistakes, creating repetitive
reports for someone else...
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Finding trends, Forecasting, Assessing
performance, Finding areas of concern or
improvement, deciphering good or bad news,
interpreting information visually, refining
business processes, preventing mistakes,
analyzing and mitigating risk
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is mundane, but necessary. |
can do much more for an organization |
We have further discovered that office workers
mostly use their tools for operational work.
Very few people use them for analytical work;
most are not even aware that the same tools can
be used for analytical work.
Our most revealing discovery is this:
in most organizations,
office workers make use of only 5% of the
potential of their software tools, such as
Microsoft Word, PowerPoint or Excel.
This can be detrimental in two ways:
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Lack of knowledge of the
tools can cause office workers to take more time
than needed in performing operational tasks.
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Lack of knowledge, and
lack of time due to the reason above, prevents
office workers from using or even learning about
analytical operations.
Simply by improving their
mastery over these day-to-day tools, office workers can
significantly increase the speed at which they perform
operational tasks, providing them with the time they
need to successfully execute analytical tasks.
This is what we call
Enhancing Productivity
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