In reengineering projects, many companies don't even bother to understand and document the current business process because they plan to obliterate it. Variations in how tasks are performed between workers and locations are written off as products of ignorance or poor management. The basic idea is that current work practices are worthy of respect. People do things the way they do for specific reasons, and those reasons should be considered when a company tries to move to a new process or system. It's tacit knowledge that can be transferred only by watching them, working with them and demonstrating that you understand their world.
Anthropologists use a variety of pretty straightforward techniques.
Some keep detailed project notebooks, recording what they learn during a period of observation. Others videotape work activity and analyze it in detail later. One high-tech manufacturer, for example, used ethnographic analysis to determine whether artificial intelligence tools would help customer service representatives solve specific repair problems over the telephone to avoid dispatching a service technician to the customer site. As the Japanese have been saying for years, spending more money early in the development of new systems and processes means spending less later to fix them. This is not a topic sequestered in the ivory tower.