Task-based opportunity assessment
Detailed descriptions of the tasks and skills that represent a company’s core competency are one of the most important resources a company can own.

Explicit repertoires of tasks provide a unique basis for opportunity and loss analysis. Using these repertoires, employees, teams and managers can state the expected result of each task and identify—and quantify—any performance discrepancies. Analysis can specify the safety and regulatory consequences of failures and can ascribe root causes and identify skills deficiencies or other sources of performance failure that produce the losses.

The resulting roll-up from all tasks in a work area represents an opportunity to recover the money left on the table because of performance failure. Analysis of categories, such as "maintenance" or "compressor maintenance" cannot produce the same specificity.

A company can use Strategic Repertoire Development to identify costs of failure in performance of tasks and pinpoint the appropriate actions to take to correct each performance discrepancy (such as training or supplying different tools or schedules); estimate the cost of those actions; and perform a ROI analysis.

Traditional analyses by activity or job classification cannot make the link between specific failures and corrective action. And because of that, they can make no assessment of the cost of correction.

Staff sizing decisions—Strategic Resource Allocation™
Consider the situation of a manager who is told to "reduce staffing 30 percent." Using traditional methods, that manager would pull up accounting information to look at payroll by groups such as "clerical" or "professional staff." The manager would determine what constituted 30 percent and cut the appropriate number of personnel. Most officers or managers will testify to the subjectiveness of decisions based on this information.

Management can use the information provided by repertoire analysis to make more rational staffing decisions. Comprehensive task lists provide a complete description of an organization’s work. By supplying additional information to determine the criticality, value, skill component and expendability of each task, managers can produce a rational basis for task prioritization. Prioritized tasks can also furnish companies with the information necessary to make staffing decisions which match an individual’s skills and task responsibilities to the critical work. For more information see Strategic Resource Allocation.

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