The district service manager for Denver had just had his furnace repaired. The repairman, he told a meeting he had called, carried a portable radio and kept up a running conversation on it with other technicians, fixing other furnaces somewhere else.
His own people fixed photocopiers. They worked across metropolitan Denver, the rest of Colorado and eastern Wyoming, mostly alone, in other people’s offices. In the paper the anthropologist Julian Orr and the engineer Norman Crowfoot later wrote about the project, the employer is only “a major corporation” that makes photocopiers; both authors worked for Xerox, and a later paper by Paul Duguid places this “Denver Project” among Xerox’s efforts to support its technicians. The manager had just been on a leadership course with talks on “the power of artificial intelligence,” and wanted to know what such ideas could mean for service. Around the table sat his area managers, most of whom had started as technicians, and people from corporate research and AI.
The company’s official position, Orr and Crowfoot wrote, was “that a technician only need know how to read and use hand tools; direction of all activities is said to be provided by the service documentation.” It tracked the work through calls taken, calls closed, the time each took and parts used. The people in the room recognized that the technicians “have been more successful in doing their work than the corporation has been in telling them how to do it.”
Orr had studied the company’s technicians before. What one technician learned on a hard call traveled by talk, he had found. “War stories, anecdotes of experience,” served as the community’s memory, reaching colleagues who weren’t there. City technicians could meet at lunch spots and parts drops; rural ones spent long hours driving and rarely could. That kind of talk among technicians, he wrote, was “in fact discouraged by the corporation.”
So the furnace story caught on. An early question was whether managers would get radios too. A manager sometimes needed to reach a technician. A radio would also let a manager listen. Everyone at the first meeting agreed that monitoring would be a temptation, and “that if it was done even once it would seriously damage the utility of the radios for the technicians.”
Five work groups, initially 21 technicians, got radios for a six-month test that officially ended on December 31, 1991. Orr had to assure other technicians many times that managers were not allowed to use them. When managers began calling technicians on the radios, the district service manager ordered it stopped. Later the groups were allowed to vote on giving their own manager a radio, if a spare could be found. One group voted yes. A spare rarely turned up.
Whether it worked was harder to say. “There are no formal results,” the authors wrote; the effect could not be measured “with the tools available.” The technicians called the radios a great success, and some offered to buy them to make sure they could keep them.