Working With Interruptuions

Vignette 1: The Small Office - Hotel Training Centre (Rouncefield et al., 1994)

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Cooperative Arrangement

Small group of workers (manager plus three other employees). Location within a site and close co-location. Focus on the different forms of ‘interruptions’ from different sources. Interruptions are both an integral feature of their work and its generation. Interruptions are contrasted with ‘routine’ paperwork.

Representation of Activity

The activity and the outcome of the interruptions becomes represented in the “massive volume of paperwork”, generated by the office. Interruptions come from phone calls, the front desk and from clients and other hotel workers. Interestingly, workers see the interruptions as the main activity of their job yet they are interruptions to the paperwork that is generated by them. The paperwork representations contain a lot of repeated information but this duplication is a lot to do with the different purposes and destinations of the various documents.

Ecological Arrangement

smallOffice

One worker sits at their desk doing paper work while the phone rings and a client arrives at the front desk.

Coordination Techniques

Workers must coordinate doing various paperwork tasks with dealing with the interruptions that come from various sources - telephone, front desk and so on. This involves deciding which types of paperwork can be interrupted, how long different tasks take and so on and coordinating this with different times of day and notions of the likelihood of outside interruptions. Workers must also coordinate with one another to decide who should deal with a particular interruption, who is in the best or most appropriate position to deal with it.

Community of Use

Inter organisational group of workers in a hotel training centre small office undertake various interactions with outside clients.