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"Hello, I'm Jill Schaefer. Is this still a good time to get together?"

"Hi, I'm Angus McDermott. Sure, this is fine." Angus shook hands with Jill and motioned for her to pull up a chair next to his desk. "After all, you said you needed for me to have some work to do, and there's no shortage of that right now!"

Jill had contacted Angus a couple of days ago for the Step-by-Step session. Angus worked in the Supply Department as one of a dozen people handling supply orders.

"So I understand you wanted to watch some of my work, huh?" Angus said.

"Yes, that's right. You can think of me as someone new to your department, and you want to walk me through actual examples of your work. Before we start, would it be OK if I learn a bit about your background?" Jill asked.

"Sure."

Angus went over his work experience. He had been with Worldwide Apparel for one year, starting out in the supplies receiving area. Angus had earned an associate's degree from the local community college. He has been working as a Supply Specialist for the last five months. Angus was also taking some computer courses in the evening.

Jill jotted down a few notes about Angus' background. She also drew a very rough sketch of the work area, with notes to remind herself what it looked like. What struck her immediately was how noisy and busy the office was. Angus' small cubicle was part of a group of twelve cubicles in the same immediate area. The cubicle walls were only about four feet high. Every one of the twelve Supply Specialists could see each other.

Angus wore a phone headset, and had two computers in front of him. About ten or so post-its were attached to his computer monitors. He also had several laminated schedules strewn about his desk.

Jill further explained her role for the session to Angus. "One thing that some people expect is for this to be an interview. Well, that's not really the case. It's best if you can think of me as someone new, trying to learn from you how to do your work.

"As you walk through an example of your work, please go ahead and tell me what you are doing. Don't worry about getting into too much detail; I'll let you know if we should cover something else.

"Angus, I've already done three of these Step-by-Step sessions for this project, and the thing that surprises people most is that I really do want them to show and tell me about actual instances of their work. Don't worry if you think something doesn't seem typical. We will have Step-by-Step sessions with several people in your department and in others at Worldwide Apparel."

Jill went over a few more points quickly before ending the briefing.

"So, please go ahead and walk me through an example of how you handle a supply order."

"OK. Well, since this is the beginning of the day, I first go to my priority queue on the current supply system."

Angus initiated a program that allowed his PC to emulate a terminal for the old mainframe system. The black screen prompted him for his logon. He looked at a post-it on his monitor for the password. After going through a few menus using the 'F keys' on his PC, he came to a queue under his employee ID. He went down one screen on his list, and pointed to one of the items.

Jill scribbled notes furiously as Angus stepped through the work.

"OK, so now I see that we still don't have that special order of linen requested by the Custom Shop. Boy, Mary Beechum is not going to like that!"

"Just now I noticed that you scrolled down the list to get to this item first. Why was that?" Jill asked.

"Well, when I came in this morning, I had this note sitting on my chair," he said. Angus raised his eyebrows and held up a hand-written note to Jill. It read,

'Must have order status! Please see my email.
- Mary B.'

"I see," Jill said, still taking notes. "Can I get a copy of that note?"

"Well, I don't want to seem like I'm complaining about Mary," Angus said in a good-natured way.

Jill responded reassuringly, "As I mentioned earlier, the notes that I share with the team and anyone else at Worldwide are going to be anonymous. We'll make sure we scrub anything that directly points to you. If you'd like, we can photocopy this, and use a black marker to scratch out Mary's name, OK?"

"Sounds good."

Jill wanted to nail down more detail of the steps of the follow-up on this order. "So did you check the email that Mary sent?"

"Yes, you want to look at it?"

"Just walk me through what you did after you saw the note."

"Well, first of all, this kind of note is not that unusual. We have people all the time trying to get our attention however they can. At first it bothered me to have so many people trying to rush me, but you get kind of used to it after awhile.

"People are supposed to send in a form to expedite old orders, and that's supposed to show up on one of the old system's screens, but…"

Jill felt that Angus had wondered too far from the actual work at hand.

Jill pleasantly but firmly asked Angus, "Well, can you tell me more about what you are doing with this particular order of Mary's?"

"Oh, yeah, sure. So I take the note and go over to my email program." Angus used shortcut keys to flip his view over to the email. "And I go to my inbox. Since I know the name of the sender, I click on that column, and the list gets sorted by name. Then I see 'Beechum', and double-click on the message to read it."

Angus double-clicked the email item. As expected, Mary's special order for linen #534-899 was urgent, and already a week late.

"So what do you look at when you read this?"

"Not much, I just scan for the item number, the description, the due date, and how late it is."

"Nothing else?"

"No, not really. The other stuff is usually someone just letting off some steam," Angus smiled to indicate he has learned how to cope with the pressures of the job fairly well.

In the email, Mary Beechum had written a couple of paragraphs about why the order was so urgent. She explained that a large customer who already had been upset about previously late shipments would probably no longer do business with Worldwide if this custom order did not get finished soon. Mary wanted to be sure this order for special linen was escalated to whomever needed it to get this material from Worldwide's vendor.

"Could I get a copy of that email?" Jill asked.

"Sure, I'll print it out."

Jill made a quick note to herself, 'How to escalate priorities?' She reminded herself, however, to keep her notes focused almost exclusively on what she was actually observing, and not her questions and ideas.

"So, Angus, what happens next?"

"Well, that's when you came in this morning, so I'll go from there. At this point, I still need to check my priority queue. Sometimes Karla gets wind of something that has to handled first, so I have any items flagged by Karla at the top of my queue."

Angus hit the F7 key to go back to the first screen of the list.

"Well, we don't have anything new flagged by Karla today. So we'll go back to Mary Beechum's order.

"Hello, this is Angus McDermott."

Angus motioned to his headset to indicate he just received a phone call.

"Hey, Frank, how are you doing? Yeah, I think the Rams are going to win the big one this year, too! Has your boy Wayne figured how where he's going to school next fall?"

Jill wondered how long the chitchat with Frank would go on, and when would Angus take care of Mary's order.

"… sure, Frank. We'll send over those paper clips. -- Probably be at your secretary's desk first thing tomorrow. See ya'!"

Jill asked, "Who was that?"

"Oh, Frank Bottom, regional sales manager for the western district. We used to go to school together."

"What did he want?"

"Just a carton of paper clips. He goes through a lot of them reviewing sales invoices and contracts, I suppose."

Angus then went to the logoff screen for the old mainframe supply system.

"So now I'm logging off the old Supplies system, and going to the PINCUS web system."

Jill and Angus sat and waited for about half a minute as the mainframe system slowly exited, and the simulation of a mainframe terminal closed.

"Why does the terminal program shutdown?"

"Oh, I have to shut it down. I can't open up my web browser with that program running. This old PC would crash right away."

Jill was somewhat stunned, and asked another question, "Why couldn't you use the web browser on your second computer?"

"Oh, that's because the other computer is connected to the outside Internet. We have to keep that separate for security reasons."

Jill made a note of that, including a question, 'Why not use the firewall?' She thought of bringing that up now, but realized that doing that would be getting the Step-by-Step session off-track. She had to be sure to maintain her role as someone learning Angus' job, not someone solving problems right now.

Wanna Hanberry had told Jill and the team that if they started offering help, the person describing their work would lose their focus on doing their actual work. Wanna kept emphasizing for Jill to think of herself as an apprentice. The person that did the work was the master of the work that Jill had to learn. Besides, the more that Angus revealed these kinds of problems now, the more Jill and her team could solve their problems in the long run.

"Now I'm going to bring up the new PINCUS system on the Worldwide web server. This handles really common office supplies such as Frank's paper clips."

"Why doesn't Frank or his secretary use this system?"

"Well, they could I suppose, but Frank says his secretary hasn't gone to training yet for it.

"Hello, this is Angus." Angus smiled at Jill and again pointed to his headset, indicating he had another call.

"Yes. Did you send an order for that? OK, you used the SO-17A form. Did you send it through intra-office mail? Yeah, they seem to be a day late. Hey, look, I bet we'll get that this afternoon, you'll get your envelopes soon enough. Thanks."

Before Jill's two-hour session with Angus was over, she guessed he had taken about thirty phone calls. She also guessed that only three of them were very important. Most calls taken by Angus involved routine supply orders that supposedly should be handled by forms or software already in place. However, as Angus mentioned several times, people forget how to use the software. Or people say they haven't gone to training.

Angus did resolve Mary Beechum's order with a phone call to the supplier of linen #534-899. He used the mainframe Supplies system to modify the order status to 'Special Priority' and to indicate it was being shipped. However, Angus did not reply to Mary's email. When Jill asked how Mary would find out about the status, Angus smiled and said, "Oh, if it's that important, you can be sure that Mary will be leaving me another note on my chair soon!"

Jill left the session with about 12 pages of notes in large scratchy shorthand. She also took with her two emails, two orders, three screen prints, and a photocopy of Mary Beechum's handwritten note. On most of these items, Angus used black marker to cross out names and any detail considered confidential.

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