Integrated Management Systems

I've been doing some work recently for a client to implement an Integrated Management System. "What's that?" I hear you say... Contrary to what you might expect, it's not a computer system - it's a system in the style of a Quality Management System like ISO9001, or an Environmental Management System like ISO14001. The IMS takes the common parts of systems like these and creates a uniform approach across the organisation. (The standard we were using is PAS99:2006.) The team created some quite pithy insights to explain it to the really busy client personnel (and I mean REALLY BUSY!):

"A way to communicate 'how we do things around here'" "A way for the Senior Management to communicate their expectations." "A way to ensure the equitable satisfaction of all stakeholders as the business grows and evolves."

The components are simple:

1 - Communicate expectations from a very senior level executive. 2 - Create a formal process and organisation by which the IMS will be governed. 3 - Create a framework for its content that allows people to find what they need. 4 - Figure out what content should be included. 5 - Divide-up ownership of the content, to ensure it is created by the right people. 6 - Create an over-arching review process to ensure that the IMS content is integrated across functions 7 - Implement a document management system that allows broad read-only access to documentation, and limited publication rights (OK, there is a computer system component). 8 - Launch. Re-launch. Re-launch. etc.

Yes, you guessed it, the hard part is getting the organisation to accept it, adopt it and provide the content. I'll blog a little more on this in future, as there's some neat content insights I want to share...what goes in it, and how to organise it. -- Philip Greenwood

Data Translation - ETL tool

I've been looking for a good data translation and migration tool for use on both static and dynamic data - I often have these issues with my Enterprise Transformation projects. I confess, I still think that Excel and my collection of MS Access scripts are good for many jobs, but today I saw a demo of a really good special purpose tool for 'Extract Transform and Load' activities - and it's open source! The tool is from an outfit called Talend - they have commercial versions and consulting services too. -- Philip Greenwood

Stage Gate Dramas

Each time I reach a stage gate, in the usual melee of near misaligned leadership, I find myself wishing I'd asked some questions earlier. I thought I'd share some of them - a kind of catharsis, if you like:

• Who makes the decisions around here?
• How are decisions made around here?
• Who is the design authority?
• Do you understand the commercial impact of this decision?
• Who is going to bear the cost of this change?
• How will you know when we're ready?
• How will we know when we're ready?
• What happens if it doesn't go to plan?
• And who will do that?
• Will you included that in the ... log?

Can you hear yourself asking any of those at just the right point? Maybe next time I start a new stage, I'll reflect on this post and ask them earlier!

UPDATE: On reflection, and in response to some comments along the lines of 'you should know better than to leave it this late', I realised that I do know better, and I do ask these questions much earlier! Perhaps the real answers don't reveal themselves until they are tested? (Particularly the first few questions).  Is there a more artful way of revealing the answers?  Yes there is - it's much less transactional...that will be the subject of another post...

Thanks to Denis in particular for prompting this update.  Sorry I didn't publish your comment, but I do value it!

-- Philip Greenwood

Typepad Jailbreak

It's been a while; that tends to happen when I get busy. Coming up on this blog...I plan to migrate to a new blogging platform...sometime in the next few months. If it all goes pear-shaped, so long. Otherwise, see you on the other side.

How the nominalization of change found its home...in the White House

I find myself playing with the word 'change' again.  The problem with the word "change" is that, through the evolutionary process of language, it has recently been nominalized (changed from a verb to a noun), and it in the process it has taken on a whole raft of generalization.  Some examples of where 'change' used in business:

• Change as in behavioural change - somehow influencing the folks in the organisation to alter what they do.
• Change as in organisational change - re-organising the reporting lines of the organisation to try to alter the way it performs.
• Change as in project change - modifying the scope of a project to alter what it delivers.
• Change as in asset change - modifying the assets being used in controlled fashion.

I'm sure there are many more...but my point is that outside of politics, it's generally a good idea to use an adjective when you use the word 'change'.

But inside of politics 'Change' has found a home...in the White House!  Barack Obama found a beautiful influencing tool in this word by appealing to our general dissatisfaction with the status quo. It's so generalized, that includes the word 'Improvement' somehow!  It's interesting to me how the most vague words carry the most power:  Freedom, Justice, Equality, Right, Value, Quality,  Prosperity, Prudence (dear Mr. Brown)...all must be spelled henceforth with a capital letter to signify that they are being used to manipulate.

-- Philip Greenwood

Strategic Creative Problem Solving - The N-Gage Process

What's been happening at Beaufortes?  Big changes!  We've been working through our backlog, and come up with something pretty special:  The N-Gage process - and we're looking for test problems to validate it.  It's a tool for strategic creative problem solving.  Did I say it was special?   This is what it is:

• A step-by-step process for innovating to solve problems that are resilient - problems that have been around for a while, and have resisted attempts to solve them.

• Each step in the process is straightforward - the power of the process comes from their diligent, progressive application.

• It can be applied by individuals, and it is particularly brilliant for use by teams, because it builds alignment and engagement.

• It is based on insights gained from the field of cognitive psychology - it help tackle the problems created by 'cognitive biases' - the intellectual short-cuts we all take because of the way our brains are structured.

It stems from the insight that there are four things that make problems 'hard':

1. Opacity - you can't see into the problem to understand it
2. Polytely - the solution to the problem must address multiple goals.
3. Complexity - there are many components to the problem that interact, possibly creating a system with 'emergent behaviours' - unexpected, unpredicatable outcomes.
4. Inertia - many people must change to implement the solution.

We've been testing the N-gage process on a diverse set of problems, and it is ready for wider exposure.

Right now, we're looking for real client problems to use as case studies.  The criteria for application are as follows:

• The problem must be persistent...that is, it's been around a while.
• The problem must have resisted attempts to solve it.
• The solution must be valuable enough to support the application of at least 3 days of work for the team to solve it.

If you have a suitable problem, or might like to introduce this approach to a client who has a problem, then please contact me - by phone or email - and I will be happy to share a video presentation with you about the process (it's about 1 hour long, so be prepared).

- Philip Greenwood

Are you in control?

It's been a little quiet at the Beaufortes blog recently, so first, our apologies.  We've been working on a large internal project that will have far reaching changes...we'll announce it in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned!  But during my research for that project I came across a very amusing set of TV programs from ABC Australia, called The Gruen Transfer.

It turns out that in shopping mall design, the Gruen Transfer is the moment when the shopper starts responding the "scripted disorientation" - that is unconsious stimulii, such gently sloping floors, environmental sound, iconic images (say, the Eifel Tower), associations from previous advertising etc.  Further research led me to this rather interesting article by Brain Walsh, called Media Literacy for the Unconcious Mind.   It turns out that a massive amount of our behaviour is due to unconsious scripts, determined by other people, being played out!   

So what script(s) are you following?

-- Philip Greenwood

Project Leadership Perspective

I came across this article at Times Online.  Amen!

It's interesting to me how quickly the much loved and much taught project management skills associated with methdologies, estimating and planning become almost irrelevant as projects scale-up - and as they start to contain human behaviour /organisational outcomes.  I'm not sure this article recognises that insight, but it's certainly on the right course.

-- Philip Greenwood

Project Dogma?

I saw on a blog somewhere a couple of interesting definitions that have been cropping up in my thoughts recently.

Methodology + Mindlessness = Dogma

Methodology + Mindfulness = Excellence

How many project methodology graduates have been taught to use a hammer, and then see nails everywhere? In fact they lose the ability to see anything else!

Do you see your project through the filters of the methodology you are most familiar with? Can you see your project outside of these filters? What fresh insight might this give you?

- Jason Bates (I'm back)

Tags:
methodology, Project+Management, Perception, Dogma

Tales of the Unexpected: "Stop Spending"

The brainstorming session was going full tilt; the CEO was participating on one of the teams, and they were considering the question “What should we stop doing”?  It’s a sneaky, consultant-style question, and to give credit where it’s due, he was participating in the spirit of the affair.  So when the CEO suggested: “stop spending”, nobody batted an eyelid, and the facilitator wrote the suggestion down; the brainstorming rule of ‘list first, edit later’ was in play.

The teams finished listing and edited their lists; who knows why ‘stop spending’ made it through to their short list? Maybe it was because the CEO suggested it, perhaps each team member found their own way to rationalise it - maybe both.  Clearly ‘stop spending’, taken at face value, has the near-term consequence: ‘go out of business’.  If you’ve ever seen a business mess up their procure-to-pay process, you’ll get some idea what ‘stop spending’ means – within months, the business will grind to a halt. ‘Stop spending’ means ‘no supplies’, ‘no marketing’, ‘no travel’, ‘no expenses’ and ‘no salaries’, and it would have the same effect – but dramatically quicker! 

We gathered the teams for the feedback session, and when the CEO’s team proposed this suggestion, the workshop descended into confusion.  The consultants tried to qualify the statement:  “Stop unnecessary spending”, they tried…“Stop discretional spending”, they suggested…“Stop non-direct spending”, they proposed.  The roar from the CEO came from the back of the room: “You see, everybody puts words into my mouth!  I said ‘stop spending’, and that’s what I mean!”

Let’s be charitable and assume the CEO was making his points intentionally:

One principle of brainstorming is that you should list first and edit later; this helps to include creative, off-the-wall, ideas into the mix, and to stimulate further ideas – in this context ‘stop spending’ was perfectly acceptable.  Of course it should never have survived the editing process, and perhaps it exposes another problem of group work – the absence of cogitative, reflective thought that can occur, where all members of the group rely on each other.  (Perhaps it also reveals how politics exists in all organisations.)

This anecdote also shows how hard accurate communication is:  People often discount, or re-interpret things that don’t fit into their own expectations; the primary function of our neural networks, the structures in our brains, is pattern matching.  The difference between language’s ‘surface meaning’ and ‘deep meaning’ allows this confusion: deletions, distortions and generalisations being the primary culprits; assumptions created by the need to fill-in deletions and generalisations being the other major culprit.  In our time-constrained world, everyone uses these three linguistic tools in order to be efficient, or in meetings, to gain a share of the voice, but often the results are the opposite!  They lead to loose communication, and loose communications allow easy pattern matching to fill-in the blanks…and our pattern matching is correct frequently enough to easily fool us into believing that it’s correct all the time.

The solution, we’re told, is to communicate at the level of the audience – which implies, to some extent, that mind-reading is possible.  But of course we read minds all the time: When people speak, they also observe their audience to understand whether their messages are received and understood, and responded-to - some more than others; this is the key skill of the excellent communicator:  Know your audience, and seek active feedback.

— Philip Greenwood

Tags:  Spending, Procure+to+Pay