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THE SCOPE OF REWORK

Except for refried beans, the flavor of most food does not improve with reheating. Yet, in the corporate life of marketing a significant portion of the workday is spent on rework and we expect that quest for perfection to yield better results. Faced with a multitude of options and a panorama of information, rework has become so much a way of corporate life that it is now adversely affecting the bottom line.

Scoping the scope

A short time ago, we finished a project that involved a client n the entertainment field that was somewhat unhappy with their media agency’s performance. However, since the relationship went back nearly twenty years they wanted to investigate the circumstances before taking any drastic action. We were hired to resolve the situation.

The circumstances were as follows: Fees, based on a scope of work, staffing for that scope and salaries at industry norms, had increased by over 60% during the last three years. Despite this increase in compensation for FTE man-hours (up over 50%), the number of entertainment releases associated with the work had not increased at all. Yet hours devoted to planning, national and local media buying and research had all increased by from 30-60%, with research at the low end and local buying at the high. Agency morale was at an all time low, while turnover was at a high and careless errors added to the confusion on a daily basis. Communication between client and agency was poor and getting worse amidst a flurry of accusations on one side and innuendo on the other. The system (based on scope of work) that by all counts was supposed to be working was breaking down and people and the relationship were breaking wit it. The client was making one last honest attempt at fixing the situation before embarking on an agency search.

Micro mismanagement

Below the surface of all this frustration, we found a cauldron of crisis management. The client was asking senior agency management for new formulations of old work on a daily basis and management in an effort to satisfy the client was responding. Directors were involved in tactical rework rather than strategy. While planning consumed roughly one third of the time of staff on the account, actual strategic development was below 3%. Directors, Associates, Supervisors and Planners were all involved in tactical rework. The average number of times a plan was revised was twelve, with a high of nineteen. Since there were 24 projects a year, that amounted to a considerable amount of effort (more than one new plan in all its mutated forms every work day). Of the 30% TOS in planning a year, we estimated that over 60% of that was rework. The situation was at its worst in local buying

Rework has a way of trickling down. In media, one of the most detailed oriented areas of work is local negotiating. Buyers could conceivably deal with well over one hundred individual markets with a wide array of dayparts, program specs, commercial lengths and negotiated costs, not to mention timing and rotations. One small change in a budget at the planning level can quickly multiply into a multitude of revisions at the local buying level.

After considerable investigation it was found that the client’s new media and marketing team were bringing new disciplines and improvements to the strategic planning process. These improvements, however, when introduced into the old system necessitated that every plan be redone in detail, all numbers recalculated all the way to the local level. This was a classic case of micro mismanagement and misunderstanding.

Reworking the bottom line

As a solution, we began by comparing the flurry of activity with standards we had established in our agency resource model. This allows us to place a range of daily work activity against elements in a scope of work, which in turn drives agency compensation and ultimately the final work product itself. Having established a set of standards for work and rework intensity, we would then be in a better position to make improvements in the way work flowed in this particular relationship. After making the necessary allowances for category idiosyncrasies and stylistic nuances, we first suggested that the client and agency adopt an Extranet service to communicate with one another in a manner that was easer to track. This introduced a series of easy to fill in forms that tracked even the smallest changes in planning budgets and automatically reworked plans at a top-line level. This allowed client and agency to meet on a weekly basis and communicate with one another from a common piece of sheet music. This in turn cut down on rework detail by more than 50% and freed up senior agency people to make the more strategic contributions they were hired to make. More strategic work meant closer face-to-face contact between client and agency, which was sure to reduce misunderstandings.

As a consequence, agency fees fell more into line with client expectations, senior agency people were now doing the kind of work they were best at, morale among the more junior people increased, while turnover decreased. Errors due to carelessness in the tedious rework process virtually disappeared. In short the situation got better, once everyone realized that the source of the problem was rework. Unfortunately, rework is often well hidden in the scope of work and therefore difficult to identify and calculate its adverse affects.

At last count, the client was fully satisfied and in fact consolidated all of its billings from other divisions (more than doubled) with the media service agency. Needless to say, a happy ending.