Newspapers and Technology March 2000

Improving deadline performance
at your newspaper

By Tom Arnold and Carmen Lamar
Special to Newspapers & Technology

You know the scenario:

You get to work and read the pressroom report -- 30 minutes late starting the press last night, waiting for plates from editorial.

You've built a good 20 minutes of slack in to your press schedule to accommodate something like that, and your crew might even have been able to make it up. Then a smashed blanket on unit three caused another half-hour of downtime, and your metro edition was 40 minutes late.

Then the mailroom called for a restart because they didn't get enough papers. Add in some inserter jams from the grocery store insert, and the last bundle went to the dock an hour late.

Now the phones are ringing off the hook in customer service, as subscribers complain about missed deliveries and late papers, and some have even cancelled. Not again!

So, whose fault is it, anyway? Finding someone to blame might be your first reaction, but it isn't likely to lead you to a solution. You can look for accountability. But if "accountability" is just a code word for "Who's going to take the heat this time?" then don't expect lasting progress in dealing with missed deadlines. If people fear that every problem needs a scapegoat, then you'll have a hard time getting accurate information about problems.

Finding the real causes of deadline problems is a piece of detective work that takes you through the intricate system of the processes of your newspaper. You need to find out what's going wrong -- not just "who's screwing up."

Let's begin with some concepts.

It's not just about departments

Departments don't create a newspaper. Processes do. The core processes that create a newspaper and deliver it are editorial, advertising, production, and distribution. Those processes require cooperation from people in different departments. For example, the press crew is responsible for an important part of the production process, but they can't do the makeready without information from advertising about the need for color positions and the size of the paper. Plates can't be made until editorial releases pages. Ads may be held up by an advertiser's bad credit. Waiting for the layout of the paper can hold up editorial.

External and internal customers

Your newspaper is a system of interrelated processes, and each one depends on the others. Throughout the system, each process -- and each worker -- has to treat the next process as the customer.

Those internal customers have specific needs regarding what they receive and when. The system is complex, and few people see more than a portion of it. People know how to do their job, but do they really know exactly what their internal customers need and when it is needed? If the internal customers don't get what they need in the process, then the external customers, your readers and advertisers, won't get what they need either.

Lack of feedback

If people deliver their work late, it impacts deadlines. Errors impact deadlines, too, because someone has to take the time to fix them -- and it's often not the person who made them. Unless something goes dramatically wrong, errors often are fixed quietly, unnoticed by the people who created them. Many of these errors occur routinely, due to lack of understanding of internal customer requirements. This is especially true when one department hands off materials and information to another. There's little feedback built in to the system.

Processes lead to results

On-time delivery is a result of a process, and so is a late paper. Chances are that both are happening at your newspaper, and that you cannot control the occurrence of either. If a process is out of control -- if it varies from person to person, machine to machine, day to day, or product to product, then the outcome of that process is also out of control. You can't reliably predict how things will turn out.

There's variability that you can't control, like those West Coast ball games that go into extra innings. Events like these do not cause the majority of late newspapers. Nobody is rushing to document a dramatic event. More likely, someone is looking around to find a lost story -- what a friend of ours euphemistically refers to as "those late-breaking cranberry recipes." Or maybe equipment broke down. Or an advertiser sent an ad in late. Just about any department in the newspaper can cause deadlines to slip.

What to do about it?

When it comes to improving deadline performance, you can build more slack into your deadlines, but your newspaper will become less competitive. Editorial content may not be as fresh, advertisers may have to comply with earlier deadlines, and your press and mailroom productivity may decline if you allocate longer blocks of time for the same work.

You can grab your fire extinguisher and run to put out today's fire -- fix a mistake, make up for lost time. You succeed at some and fail at others, but your efforts today will have little bearing on what will happen tomorrow and the next day.

The alternative is systematically to gather data and start looking for root causes of the problems that cause missed deadlines. In the next issue we'll talk about how some newspapers have done just that.

Tom Arnold and Carmen Lamar are principals of Summit Media Partners, L.L.C., management consultants to media companies. For more information visit their Web site at www.summitmediapartners.com.

March 2000 NT Contents

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