http://www.nitinparanjape.com/maxoffice/internaldoc/Personal productivity and organizational efficiency whitepaper.doc

Extraits:

Total Quality and personal productivity
All organizations are always striving to increase profitability by enhancing quality in all areas of business management. Depending upon the type of industry, a wide variety of management techniques are available to improve quality and efficiency on an ongoing basis.
The underlying process is a fairly simple one.
1. Understand how a particular set of activities is being performed (for example, the manufacturing process or the claims reimbursement process or supply chain).
2. Find out areas of improvement or bottlenecks
3. Find ways of minimizing effort / automating activities / improving processes
4. Implement the improved method across the organization
5. Repeat this methodology on an ongoing basis

Unfortunately, this well known and proven method of improving quality is NEVER applied to something which is probably the most common activity across all employees – working on their PC or laptop using productivity software like Office.
Why is this area never audited, why has nobody tried to find better ways of managing day to day work which thousands of employees do ?
The answer is very simple. Everyone thinks that they are already working using the most efficient methods! Unfortunately reality is much more disturbing.
In reality, the chances of finding the most efficient method by using by trial and error is almost zero in the long term.
In short, everyone is working … work is happening … so nobody thinks there is any cause for alarm.
The negative impact of working in a non-optimal manner is completely overlooked in corporate circles worldwide.

The myth of basic and advanced
Many users and educators often tend to difive features and training programs as basic and advanced. However, they don’t realize that each feature has a relevant purpose for which it was designed.
Classifying users as basic means they will never know about features which are thought of as advanced, even though they may need these to complete their work efficiently.
In reality, a feature is neither basic nor advanced. It is either useful or irrelevant to a given person’s job profile. The problem is that most training approaches never even attempt to map the job profile and feature set.