How do you know when the gap is too big to jump?

Ever watched a motorcycle jump?  Ever wonder how guys like Evel Knievel knew how far they could go? How fast they could make the jump?  How to tune that motorcycle so it would support repeated efforts to break and rebreak records?  Was the cycle the secret to success or was it more a matter of mind over matter, training and instinct?

Many businesses face the same challenges as they try to accelerate the pace of change, embarking on transformation initiatives that often demand that their people bridge frighteningly huge current-to-target state gaps. The price of failure is as catastrophic to a business as those motorcycle jumps are to the daredevils who attempt them.

Is technology the secret to success? Methodology? Only partly so — Objective measures of the size of the gap (a catalog of differences between the current and target states of process, technology, data, and business model) will only get you so far. Project phases can be designed to address this, and the classic stuff of project management can certainly help. I call this the hard science side of the equation.

However, for both the intrepid cyclist and the daring leader of an audacious business transformation, success is both an art and a science.  Just as a jumper has to factor in the strength of crosswinds, the nuances of posture and the internal state of mind, transformation leaders need to address the following questions, which speak to the art of success:

• Does your organization have a framework in place to foster change (communication, collaboration tools; a training framework)
• Is there a formal framework for facilitating alignment among stakeholders with different needs?
• What is the state of employee engagement at your company? Who is burned out, checked out, counting down the clock to retirement? And who is revved up and raring to go?
• Are there wounded bodies still littering the canyon from your last attempt to jump a big gap?
• Do you have realistic expectations of the business input required to support a technology-driven transformation? Do you have a backfill strategy?
• Have you defined success in business terms, or are you just eager to “put in a new system?”

When considering anything unprecedented or record breaking, don’t put all your faith in science—and don’t devalue the many human factors that are very much a part of the art of success.

A More Agile Approach to Project Management for 2013

It’s been a while since we’ve done an annual wish list for project management, and while we are a few days into the new work year, it’s not too late to think about some PM rules to live by for 2013.

Fluidity is key; rigidity can stifle project progress. Traditional frameworks call for a priori definitions of roles and responsibilities. In many highly successful organizations, models have been shifting toward more collaborative structures. Efficient teams are being built of all-rounders instead of silo’ed specialists. Such a staffing model provides more opportunity for agile workload balancing over the lifecycle of a project, and may enhance the team’s ability to bring the project in on time.

Managing your stakeholders expectations is more important than managing your project team. Let’s assume you have a skilled team and a well written project plan. Should you be spending most of your time micromanaging and tracking the status of their every move, or would you add more value by communicating more often and more directly with your stakeholders? Let’s stop considering communication a “soft skill” and recognize it as a key enabler of project success.

Change is not a necessary evil. Typically, the project management framework views change requests or change control as a negative, but the level of agility required for most businesses to survive make changes in scope a GOOD thing from a business perspective. Classic project management provides a framework for executing scope changes, and good project managers embrace the change requests, calmly, cordially, and without an attitude of tension or disdain.

Collaboration tools are no substitute for interpersonal interactions with your team or stakeholders. Email alerts, project portals, tablet apps that give visibility into project status are all great tools. but sometimes the best way to stay on top of progress is still to walk around with your issues and tasks lists, cruising by cubes and offices to get status updates in the context of informal conversations. The upside is it allows you to keep a finger on the pulse of the people who are important to your project, and it promotes better engagement. A phone call to remote team members is always appreciated. This is especially important with key executives. Firing off email requests for status is not the hallmark of a good PM.

Less is more. Lean thinking is everywhere these days (and I’m not talking about post holiday diets here). In the entrepreneurial community it’s all about minimum viable product. Agile methodology has pushed projects in the lead direction, with each iteration being a minimum viable release of sorts. In 2013, let’s think about minimal project structure. Rather than adding to a methodology, think more about what we can strip away to do it better, faster, cheaper.

Will you be able to see the Black Swan?

Pity this poor project manager. He never saw the black swan coming.

Couldn’t see it through his magic green colored glasses.

However, projects do not suddenly overrun their budgets by 200% without any warning signs along the way. The following project managment traits are among those that are likely to lead to the epic project failures known as black swans.

• Logging more new issues than we are closing every week, but the status is still green.
• Never challenging task owners who keep saying they will have it next week, let’s just slip the due date and keep the status green.
• Calling the strategy tasks done so we can start logging some effort as complete against all these development tasks, so we can still say we are status green, and % complete is aligned to % budget consumed.
• Let’s get a conditional signoff on the requirements doc so we can start development as planned on Monday, and stay status green.
• We’re running out of budget so let’s not provide any training materials, and just give the users a walk through, so we can keep the budget status green.
• We have a few process workarounds to define, but let’s go live as planned so we can keep the status green.
• Key stakeholders are unavailable, but let’s change the design anyway so we can stay on schedule and keep the status green. 
• We’re burning the midnight oil cranking out code, and we need input on a design workaround, but no one is available, so let’s make a unilateral decision so we can keep on schedule and keep the status green. 

While its true that sometimes heroic effort can keep a project on track, it usually takes more than optimism. The true mark of good project management is not  keeping status green in the face of evidence to the contrary, but early identification and escalation of risks so that the executive sponsors and steering committee can make adjustments to scope, budget and timeline in a way that facilitates the path to success.

Are you Paralyzed by a Hoard of Big Data?

Lured by the promise of big data benefits, many organizations are leveraging cheap storage to hoard vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. Without a clear framework for big data governance and use, businesses run the risk of becoming paralyzed under an unorganized jumble of data, much of which has become stale and past its expiration date. Stale data is toxic to your business - it could lead you into taking the wrong action based on data that is no longer relevant.

You know there’s valuable stuff in there, but the thought of wading through all THAT to find it stops you dead in your tracks.  There goes your goal of business process improvement, which according to a recent Informatica survey, most businesses cite as their number one Big Data Initiative goal.

Just as the individual hoarder often requires a professional organizer to help them pare the hoard and institute acquisition and retention rules for preventing hoard-induced paralysis in the future, organizations should seek outside help when they find themselves unable to turn their data hoard into actionable information.

An effective big data strategy needs to include the following components:

1. An appropriate toolset for analyzing big data and making it actionable by the right people. Avoid building an ivory tower big data bureaucracy, and remember, insight has to turn into action.
2. A clear and flexible framework, such as social master data management, for integrating big data with enterprise applications, one that can quickly leverage new sources of information about your customers and your market.
3. Information lifecycle management rules and practices, so that insight and action will be taken based on relevant, as opposed to stale  information.
4. Consideration of how the enterprise application portfolio might need to be refined to maximize the availability and relevance of big data. In today’s world, that will involve grappling with the flow of information between cloud and internally hosted applications as well.
5. Comprehensive data security framework that defines who is entitled to use the data, change the data and delete the data, as well as encryption requirements as well as any required upgrades in network security.

Get the picture? Your big data strategy isn’t just a data strategy. It has to be a comprehensive technology-process-people strategy.

All of these elements, should of course, be considered when building your big data business case, and estimating return on investment.

Big Data + Small Process Thinking = Disappointing Results

Big data is in the news this week.  In a recent Forbes article describing the hidden opportunities of big data, Albert Pimentel Chief Sales and Marketing officer at Seagate quoted Mark Dean, an IBM fellow and director of the Almaden Research Center as saying, “Computation is not the hard part anymore.”  As with most big technology transformations, one of the hardest parts is always getting the process and people part right.

Big data has the potential to position businesses to outperform their competitors, as described in a recent McKinsey article that dubs big data the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity.  As businesses race to implement big data technology, there are some serious business process transformations that need to take place to fully leverage the investment in any big data initiative.

In the Big Data-driven approach to business transformation, the most important business processes are those that relate to Customer Experience Management across all fronts:

• Manage customer loyalty
• Manage customer value
• Manage customer relationships
• Manage customer feedback

These processes cross the more  traditional high level process siloes of “Manage Sales, Manage Marketing, Manage Customer Service, ” which were usually organized along departmental lines.

What actions will be taken based on the actionable intelligence that big data provides? Initiatives across departmental siloes must be closely orchestrated or the customer experience will become chaotic and confusing. Marketing campaigns have to be coordinated with activities across all customer facing roles in the organization. Effective enterprise program management is critical to this successful coordination. Marketing has to be thought of less as a department and more as a shared business responsibility.

When trying to leverage big data, it’s important to step back and answer critical questions before moving forward on multiple fronts:

• What strategies and processes do you use to influence customer behavior on your website, in your retail outlets, at virtual and real time events? Are they working synergistically, or are they are crossed purposes?
• What change management principles do you apply to shift customer attitudes towards your company, your employees, your products? Are you fully leveraging the power of third party change agents, or only applying  traditional, direct influence measures?
• Are our processes too rigid to allow us to be a world-class, big data-driven organization? Should we concentrate on defining broad strokes strategies instead?

At the end of the day, the most successful businesses will be those that harness the power of big data and big process thinking to outrun the competition. More food for thought on the intersection of big data and big process can be found at:

• Process Excellence Network
• Dashboard Insight
• Forrester

Crowdsourcing BPM?

One reason that global business process improvement and organizational change management initiatives fail is that they are driven from the perspective of a single business unit, usually the one closest to headquarters where the project sponsors are. Until recently, the other alternative was to painstakingly audit the similarities and differences across multiple business units in multiple locations, and piece together something that meets everyone’s needs.

As an alternative, the Center of Excellence for a particular process area can provide a light framework that prevents crowdsources input from across the organization.  The RACI chart is a great tool for setting some crowdsourcing boundaries, and safeguarding against anarchy. The goal of any Center of Excellence in a particular area like Supply Chain, Finance, IT or Customer Service, is to develop reliable, predictable, repeatable performance, no matter who is doing the work or where in the world it is being done.

Many businesses already crowdsource input from their customers with a variety of survey methods and incentives, but many still struggle with how to effectively pull together and act on the input from their global employee base.

With the adoption of collaboration tools such as Microsoft Sharepoint, and Microsoft Lync, process and organizational change initiatives can be driven from a single center of process excellence, but they can crowdsource improvement input across multiple process owners, process participants, and what we have always called the “process customers” – those who receive the value added outputs of any discrete business process.

The toolset provides broad opportunities for both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.

• Use Lync within your organization for scheduled voice/video meetings that allow collaborative authoring of process documentation.
• To bridge the difference in timezones and keep the ball rolling between these sessions, Sharepoint offers rich capabilities for collaboration on working documents and drawings, which can then be officially published to the broader audience by the Center of Excellence.

No one likes plain vanilla anymore

More and more businesses are seeing the sense of trying to adhere to “plain vanilla” implementations of packaged software applications, without customization to the application code. It’s cheaper on the implementation side, and certainly cheaper to upgrade uncustomized package applications.

This guiding principle is often articulated in the kickoff slides, and all the key stakeholders and executive sponsors nod in agreement.

Here’s what usually happens next.

Analysis begins. Implementation team business analysts work with designated subject matter experts (SMEs) to gather the business requirements that will be used to configure the application.  They are adamant that their job must be performed exactly as it is performed right now. The SMEs are like ravenous foodies, seeking to outdo each other with requests for  ever more exotic ice cream flavors of the day, while your plain vanilla implementation is melting away, because no one really likes plain vanilla anymore.

How can you get this under control?  Intervene early and police ruthlessly during the analysis phase. Add the following expectation-setting statements to your kick-off slides, right after you articulate your plain vanilla guiding principle:

1.  All customization requests must be reviewed and approved by the steering committee.
2. Potential process workarounds will be explored before any customization requests can be approved.
3. There may be more business process changes than there are customizations to this application.
4. We will provide training on both new business processes and new procedures for working with the new software.

Statement 4 becomes a difficulty if you have not assigned responsibility or budgeted for the effort involved in documenting new business processes, and building and delivering the process training. This is typically not part of the scope of the software implementation vendor’s responsibility.

To prepare for adherence to the full set of guiding principles, you need to develop internal business process/change management capability, or budget  for outside help in support of any major system implementation. Failure to do so puts the success of your software implementation project at significant risk.

Last piece of advice: at your go-live party, serve two flavors of ice cream.

Plain vanilla for the team(s) who favored the process workaround route. If they were really good, give them a choice of toppings. For the others, give them exactly what they craved. They’ll fall into line on the next implementation.

Keeping the Black Swan at Bay

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review highlighted some alarming statistics on project failures. IT projects were overrunning their budgets by an average of 27%, but the real shocker was that one in six of these projects was over by 200% on average. They dubbed these epic failures the “black swans” of the project portfolio.

The article ends with some excellent advice on avoiding the black swan phenomenon, but the recommendations focus on two areas:

• Assessments of the ability of the business to take a big hit
• Sound project management practices such as breaking big projects down into smaller chunks, developing contingency plans, and embracing reference class forecasting.

We would like to add to this list a set of “big project readiness” tasks that offer additional prevention of your next big IT project becoming a black swan.

Project Management Readiness: If you don’t have seasoned PMs with successful big project experience on your team, you need to fill that staffing gap either permanently or with contract help for the big project. Yes, you need an internal PM even if the software vendor has their own PM.

Data Readiness:  Address your data quality issues now, and establish data ownership and data governance before you undertake the big project.

Process/organization/change management readiness: Are your current business processes well documented? Is the process scope of the big project defined correctly? Are process owners clearly identified?  Do you have the skills and framework for defining how the software may change your business processes, organization structure and headcounts? If not, you run a significant risk of failing to achieve anticipated ROI for this project. Do you have a robust corporate communication framework? Do you have the resources, skills and experience to develop and run training programs in house?

Let’s face it: experience matters. If you’re already struggling to recover from a technology black swan, you are at considerable risk for reproducing the same level of failure if you don’t undertake a radical overhaul of your approach by identifying and addressing every significant weakness in the areas noted above.

We have developed a project readiness assessment model that can help you understand your risks and develop an action plan for addressing them before you undertake anything as mission critical as an ERP replacement, CRM implementation,  legacy modernization or other mission critical technology project. If you have a big project on your radar (or already underway), contact makewaves@edgewater.com to schedule a pre-implementation readiness assessment.

How does your company handle major change?

Although many large technology initiatives fail because an inadequate or inefficient change management framework, many companies still lack a consistent approach in supporting their employees and external stakeholders through major system implementations and other significant business initiatives.

 

 

There are many reasons for this.

• The roles and responsibilities for communication, training, and monitoring performance remain vague.
• The approach varies from department to department.
• Information is pushed out once in the wrong format (usually by email) and not made available on a portal under version control. We see this often in companies that have an immature or outdated collaboration style.

We’ve put together a short poll on change management approaches. Please take a moment to tell us how your organization handles major change, and share your thoughts in the comments.

Five keys to thriving during hypergrowth

When your successful strategy pays off and you find your business in a period of hypergrowth, keeping everything moving forward in alignment (instead of spinning out of control) is your biggest challenge. Here are five keys to sustaining your success:

1. Work smarter, not harder – review your business processes and look for ways to eliminate tasks that don’t add significant value, or automate manual handoffs.

2. Great tools are always a good investment – you can’t sustain hypergrowth with yellow pads and Excel spreadsheets. Put more power into the hands of key users, so they don’t have to rely on IT for queries and reports.

3. Keep an eye on profits while focusing on growth. Sustain your sales momentum, but eliminate waste and manage your profit margins.  Make sure you are getting maximum value out of your marketing efforts, as well as keeping an eye on your cost of goods sold.

4. Bureaucracy strangles growth – your backoffice organization should avoid imposing cumbersome processes on the parts of your business that sell, produce and deliver your products and services. Use effective collaboration tools to cut the middlemen out of your business processes.

5. Choose meaningful KPI’s. Less is more–they aren’t KEY performance indicators if you have a list of 20 KPI’s  for one area of the business. Hypergrowth KPI’s differ from downturn KPI’s.  

If you are in a rapid growth phase, what are you tracking now? If you are hoping to achieve hypergrowth what are your KPI’s? Leave us a comment.