Chapter 19

Preparing Your Organisation

In This Chapter

Assessing processes – not structures

Looking ahead to the future

Conducting a pilot test

Encouraging commitment to crowdsourcing

Understanding how far to go

Preparing for the unknowns

If you plan to make crowdsourcing a permanent part of your organisation, you need to start thinking about your organisation in a new way. Most people still think of organisations, large companies, small non-profit organisations and everything in between in terms of a hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy is the president or CEO. Below the top officer is a row of vice presidents. Below them, you find directors and project managers. Everyone has a place and all have a role to play in keeping the organisation moving.

When you start talking about crowdsourcing in a company, people think about the hierarchy and ask questions such as ‘Which part of the organisation chart will be cut and replaced by the crowd? Which part of the company will be outsourced?’ These questions miss the main point about crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing isn’t outsourcing. It’s not the activity of taking some division of the company and moving it to some place where the cost of labour is lower. Crowdsourcing, especially crowdsourcing that takes place within an organisation, is about rethinking how the organisation operates and using market mechanisms to create the scale, scope and capacity of different activities. Crowdsourcing is a way of bringing new talent into an organisation.

This chapter helps you look at your organisation and bring crowdsourcing into it. I show how to look at processes, and I describe how to develop crowdsourcing for these processes and how you can deploy crowdsourcing as a means of expanding your company’s operations.

Focusing on Crowdsourcing Elements of Processes

When crowdsourcing from within an organisation, you are the most creative and do the most good if you think about processes rather than organisational structure. Instead of looking at the organisation chart, look instead at the activities your organisation engages in and the processes it has in place in order to produce goods and services. By looking at the processes, you see points where crowdsourcing can improve your operations by increasing efficiency and adding skills that you don’t currently have in your company.

If you’re working with a large organisation, you’ll already have process charts. If you’re in a smaller organisation, think about drawing such a chart. Process charts show the steps that your organisation needs to take in order to function.

Airy owns a small business that makes leather accessories for women: purses, bags, wallets and belts. Her company has operated for about eight years and has six employees: two sales people in her store, a web master, a finance person and a worker who helps Airy make the products. The company expanded quickly, largely based on the clever and quirky nature of the Airy’s leather designs. However, revenue stagnated about three years ago. She considered adding an employee to expand her business, reasoning that if she could make more products, she might be able to sell more and increase her revenue. Airy, however, felt that she couldn’t take the risk, because her sales have been flat.

If you think about how Airy’s organisation chart would look, you may struggle to see where she might use crowdsourcing to improve her business. As things stand, the organisation structure is simple: Airy’s in charge and everyone reports to her. If, however, you look at the diagram in Figure 19-1, which illustrates the main process of her business, you can see that the process itself suggests the areas in which she can expand her business by using crowdsourcing.

Figure 19-1: The central business process for a leather accessory company.

In Airy’s case, she can employ crowdsourcing in any step of the process. She ultimately decided to focus on the design step and the sales step, because both are activities that can be improved by bringing in new talent. In the design step, she crowdsourced some of the product designs. By doing this, she expanded her product line and began to reach new customers.

After she’d crowdsourced some of the design work, Airy next brought some new talent into sales. To this end, she crowdsourced some marketing work. First, she hired some macrotask workers to test new products before she put them into full production. Next, she hired some other macrotask workers to handle customers after the sale. These workers kept the customers engaged through a blog and Twitter accounts. They circulated stories about how the products were used, offered fashion tips and handled any problems that customers found.

As the crowdsourced workers began to contribute to Airy’s company, they also changed the basic process of the company. She and her sales employees spent more of their time managing the process and were able to accomplish more than when they were doing most of the work. The design step of her process became a design curation step. In it, Airy selected the designs, both those that she’d created and those she received from the crowd, to create a product line. The sales step became a real sales and marketing activity that provided useful information to Airy and which expanded her customer base. Figure 19-2 shows how crowdsourcing changed Airy’s process.

Airy’s company became more sophisticated after she began to use crowdsourcing, was able to reach more diverse markets and showed a steady increase in revenue as the public began to purchase the new products.

Figure 19-2: The company’s production process after the addition of crowdsourcing.

Planning for the Future

Crowdsourcing isn’t a guaranteed way to achieve a better company and increased revenue. Neither of those benefits automatically comes from crowdsourcing. You can just as easily see your company collapse and your revenues decline. For crowdsourcing to be an asset to your organisation, you have to prepare your organisation for crowdsourcing, test the skills of your employees and co-workers, and make sure that the organisation can gain the benefits that crowdsourcing promises.

Ultimately, crowdsourcing demands that an organisation improves its ability to manage work. It has to manage that work without some of the usual tools that conventional organisations have. The organisation won’t have all the workers in one place, for example. It won’t have a single schedule to structure the day. It won’t have a common lunch room or water cooler where workers can learn about their colleagues and begin to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of each other.

You start preparing your organisation by identifying places where you might employ crowdsourcing. Generally, you do this by looking at one of your business processes and asking simple questions such as ‘How can I improve this process, and what kind of talent do I need to achieve that improvement?’ Initially, you ask this question in an abstract way without worrying about where you might get that talent and where that talent might fit.

When you’ve identified the steps in your process that may benefit from crowdsourcing, you need to determine how to connect the crowdworkers to the business process. To do that, you need to recognise that crowdsourcing involves management of crowdworkers, and that you have to find suitably skilled and talented people within your organisation to manage the crowdsourcing work.

Have a clear point of contact for your crowd. Not only does the crowd need to have a clear reporting line – a single person who gives it direction – your organisation needs to know who’s communicating with the crowd. Few things confuse an organisation more than allowing it to think that anyone can communicate with the crowd and give it direction.

When you have managers in place, you need to start creating statements of work – describing the activities that the crowd will do (see Chapter 11). As you complete those statements, you can start to call for a crowd and begin a trial run.

Navigating a Trial Run

After you identify the tasks your organisation can crowdsource and prepare the statements of work, you’re ready to conduct a trial run. A trial run will teach you many invaluable lessons. You may, for example, discover that you need to revise your statement of work. You may discover that your organisation can’t easily manage crowdsourcing. You may find that the particular talent you need isn’t easily found on the crowdmarket. You don’t want to make discoveries like these after you’ve committed to using the crowd in your daily operations. Trial runs are important – don’t ever think of leaping into production without doing one.

You can usually try three kinds of trial run. You can try crowdsourcing for:

A single product or order. This type of trial run’s usually the simplest. You decide that you’ll create a single product. You hire the crowd, make the product and test the result. (See Chapter 15 for more on testing your results.) If things go well, you go ahead and expand your use of crowdsourcing.

A single customer or market. This kind of trial run’s probably most useful when your organisation’s providing a service rather than a product. You choose a single customer and create a crowdsourced process to serve that customer. Again, you do the work and test the result (using the ideas in Chapter 15). If things go well, you expand your use of crowdsourcing.

A finite time. Crowdsourcing work for a single product or a single customer is often not enough to show how crowdsourcing’s really going to change your organisation. You obtain more information by creating a full crowdsourced operation, running it for one week, two weeks or a month, evaluating the results and then making your decision.

When conducting your trial run, monitor these three things (following the ideas of the cycle of continuous improvement in Chapter 15):

The crowd: Does it have the skills your need? Is the crowd working properly? If you can’t assemble the right crowd and the right work, then you need to use conventional workers.

The process: Is it providing the goods or services you need? Is it working well? If not, you need to make corrections and do a second pilot run. If you can’t produce the right results, you need to return to the conventional way of working.

Your organisation’s response: How are other workers engaging with the crowd? Are you seeing any resistance from members of your organisation? Is crowdsourcing causing part of your organisation to malfunction?

As you work on the pilot test, you may need to adjust other parts of your organisation. You may need to change the person who’s managing the process that now includes crowdsourcing. You may need to find a way of better coordinating the work of the crowd with the work of the rest of your organisation, because the crowd may operate on a different schedule than your office does.

If you’re incorporating crowdsourcing into several steps, such as in both marketing and sales, you may want to do your trial runs one step at a time. Identifying problems is easier if you change only one aspect of the process.

Building Commitment

As you start to crowdsource, you need to build commitment to crowdsourcing within your organisation. While some people immediately embrace crowdsourcing, many do not. They quickly reject the idea and conceive reason after reason why it should fail. They claim that workers can’t be trusted, that crowdsourcing won’t produce quality results or that it will undermine your position in the market. You can’t dismiss these ideas with a wave of your hand and expect them to vanish, and you also can’t expect that everyone will eventually see the value of crowdsourcing. You have to build commitment.

Start building commitment to crowdsourcing from the moment you decide to try it. Work with the rest of the organisation to explain the benefits of crowdsourcing, addressing individuals’ concerns about how they’ll benefit from crowdsourced workers and how they’ll be able to do new things with the new process.

The time at which you hold a trial run (see ‘Navigating a Trial Run’ earlier in this chapter) is a good point at which to address employees’ doubts and to build commitment. You can start a trial run even when some people in the organisation may not be thoroughly convinced of your ideas. You can’t, however, start full production if you have a lot of doubters in the organisation.

In the trial run, make sure that you have a means of addressing concerns that members of the organisation may have. If someone’s concerned about quality, have a way of comparing crowdsourced work with work produced by conventional means. If someone’s concerned about timeliness, be sure to collect data on how quickly the organisation’s working. Hold a group meeting after the trial run to review the results and discuss the impact of the new ways of operating.

A good way to bring crowdsourcing into your organisation is by creating a small group that does special projects. As the rest of the organisation sees value in the projects, you can move crowdsourcing into other units. Also, should the project fail, you can quickly end the special group and let the organisation return to its old ways.

At the end of the day, you may not be able to get the kind of commitment that you want. You may have someone in your organisation who just doesn’t like crowdsourcing and thinks that it can’t be trusted. In such a case, you need to ask two questions before you proceed with crowdsourcing. Firstly, is the crowdsourcing process working properly? If it is, then the objections of a single individual may not be that important. Secondly, are the people who are objecting to the process in positions where they might thwart or disrupt the crowdsourcing? If they are, you should consider your options.

Knowing the Limits

Not everything can be crowdsourced. Not everything is good to crowdsource. If crowdsourcing doesn’t improve your business process, then you shouldn’t use crowdsourcing.

As you make your plans, you may come across three different reasons to use conventional processes rather than crowdsourcing. You shouldn’t crowdsource if:

Crowdsourcing doesn’t bring in the talent you need. You can’t always find the talent that you need in the crowdmarket. Some kinds of workers simply don’t go there.

Crowdsourcing hurts quality or quantity. Crowdsourcing can easily lower the quality or quantity of goods that your process produces. This kind of problem often occurs when you do sophisticated things that need to be monitored constantly. If crowdsourcing isn’t working well for you, it shouldn’t be part of your organisation.

Crowdsourcing makes things too complicated. If you need to give more to crowdsourcing than the benefits you get back from it, you shouldn’t crowdsource. Effective crowdsourcing generally requires managerial skill from your organisation, and you can easily find yourself devoting more to management than you receive in return.

For some activities, you spend more time planning and managing your crowd than you get in return. In such cases, the conventional way of doing the work is better than crowdsourcing. Microtasking is the form of crowdsourcing that most commonly has this problem. You have to expend a great deal of effort to plan, deploy and test a microtask project, but in some cases you won’t achieve enough benefit to justify the work.

Bracing for the Unknowns

Things don’t always go the way you planned, especially when you crowdsource. Crowdsourcing expands the capacity of your organisation but it demands more managerial work from your staff, management work that’s based in crowdmarkets. Since crowdmarkets can deliver unanticipated problems, you need to be braced for the unknown.

When you introduce a new crowdsourced activity to your organisation, you may see three different kinds of problems:

The crowdsourcing process may not work properly.

Your organisation may resist the introduction of crowdsourcing.

Your organisation may resist the product of the crowdsourcing (and would have resisted that product if it had been produced conventionally).

Of course, you can’t anticipate everything that might occur, but you can make yourself ready for potential problems. As you and your organisation explore crowdsourcing, you need to be prepared to have:

Plenty of trial runs. Try as you might, you won’t learn everything in a single trial run. You may find that you’re going to be testing crowdsourcing for a long time.

Plans to adopt crowdsourcing step by step. When you try to do too much at once, you may create problems that you can’t easily debug. If you take as many as three new crowdworkers on initially and the process isn’t working, you may not be able to find the fault quickly.

A way to easily fall back on conventional means. If crowdsourcing isn’t working, you have to be ready to go back to the old ways. Of course, if your organisation knows that it can always return to conventional methods, it may not put all its heart into crowdsourcing. Still, it’s a good idea not to jump into a new process without having a safety net.

Readiness to exploit new opportunities. Plan for unexpected success as well as unexpected trouble. You may find that crowdsourcing works well, that your organisation likes it and that you should adopt more crowdsourcing as quickly as possible. Be prepared.