I've been meaning to write this post for weeks as I've been following the middle east revolutions. It is remarkable to think about how information disseminated in a one to many fashion can change the world. Newspapers, town posts and other previous one to many communication vehicles were controlled by few privileged people. Today, anyone can publish a message to thousands, even millions of people.
The value of this capability became apparent in the past couple weeks. Freedom of speech isn't important because we need to hear from the fringes of society. Freedom of speech is critical because we might all be thinking the same thing. Recognizing that fact, is revolutionary.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Tools or People?
Breaking issues into the categories of people, process and tools seems to be gaining momentum in my workplace. This construct is simple to understand and provides an intuitive implementation approach. Simply build the team, then fix the process and finally apply the technology to maintain the improvement.
This proved itself useful in the early days of business automation. implementing systems without first solving process issues can lead to massive pain. Implement an enterprise system like SAP or Oracle without proper planning and you can shut down a business. Today however, business leaders are less willing to spend years planning and implementing large systems. The market you are trying to address has often changed by the time you get the planning complete.
Skipping planning process altogether leads to automating the existing process, which is often far from optimized. People only solve the process challenge they have the ability to influence. Processes get exponentially more difficult to change as they start crossing more organizational boundaries. As a result, they tend to sub optimize. These sub optimizations then become a barrier to people later trying to build a truly optimized process. Ask anyone trying to deal with decades old workflow tools like lotus, sharepoint, and you'll hear about how ingrained these processes can become.
Yet, there are still situations where we have to solve the people, process and tool issues at the same time. I propose that the combination of LEAN resources, a process owner and an Agile trained systems leader can work in conjunction to solve all three at the same time. Anyone else tried this?
This proved itself useful in the early days of business automation. implementing systems without first solving process issues can lead to massive pain. Implement an enterprise system like SAP or Oracle without proper planning and you can shut down a business. Today however, business leaders are less willing to spend years planning and implementing large systems. The market you are trying to address has often changed by the time you get the planning complete.
Skipping planning process altogether leads to automating the existing process, which is often far from optimized. People only solve the process challenge they have the ability to influence. Processes get exponentially more difficult to change as they start crossing more organizational boundaries. As a result, they tend to sub optimize. These sub optimizations then become a barrier to people later trying to build a truly optimized process. Ask anyone trying to deal with decades old workflow tools like lotus, sharepoint, and you'll hear about how ingrained these processes can become.
Yet, there are still situations where we have to solve the people, process and tool issues at the same time. I propose that the combination of LEAN resources, a process owner and an Agile trained systems leader can work in conjunction to solve all three at the same time. Anyone else tried this?
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