Posts Tagged ‘collaboration’
Alignment to the Core
Let’s start by being very clear. For any business everything must ultimately align to the success of that business, period. That being said we can now focus on how all of the various pieces that make up that business must align with each other. At a high level, it is obvious that all business activities must support each other for the business to be successful. However, what I have observed over the years is that alignment is easy to get lost in the multitude of daily pressing details that we must deal with. This thought was best captured in Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In this book there is one diagram that has stuck with me over the years because it is direct and simple. It is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 Covey’s time management matrix
For more information on Covey’s teachings look here. In this diagram we see Quadrant I as the place where most of us spend much of our time. Quadrant II is where we need to spend most of our time. We need to manage our time such that we can spend more of it thinking about planning, relationships and collaboration. Spending our time here is where alignment happens. We won’t spend any time on Quadrants III and IV. We are wasting our time there.
So what else do we need to consider when aligning our business operations? I argue that we must first understand that all things technology can best be represented as a circle bisected into two parts. One part includes the tools; the hardware and software that enable our business to function. The other part includes how those tools are used to deliver real benefits to our business. Each of those parts is dominated by very different states of mind. Historically, IT has focused on tools and the business users focus on their application. There is overlap for each group as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 All things technology and interest groups
The overlap between the interests of those two groups is important. The end user group must understand the tools well enough to know what can actually be accomplished in a reasonable period of time and the IT group must understand the needs of the user group well enough to deliver useful tools. Orchestrating the communication between these two interest groups is an ongoing activity between end customers of the tools and those people who must deliver those tools to the marketplace. It is a painful and inefficient process constrained by the financial interests and negotiating positions of each group. It’s beneficial to each group to make this process more effective.
We must also consider the methodologies that are needed for the alignment of business improvement work. For this we will focus on two of the most representative methodologies for their respective interest groups. For the tool provider group we will use RUP, or Rational Unified Process, as the most used (in its multiple variations) and for the end user community the BPM-based methodologies. The overlap diagram is shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 All things technology and improvement methodology overlap
The key difference here is that BPM is about addressing what business processes are needed and the functionality of the tools each business needs. On the other hand, RUP is focused on the effectiveness of software development. Delivering business process improvements will consist of new capabilities delivered by some combination of revising the current tools used by the business, buying new software and writing new software. Neither BPM nor RUP alone is suitable for doing that, so managing the overlap between those two families of methodologies is crucial.
Finally, there is the overlap between those groups responsible for the day-to-day operation of the tools and those responsible for their daily application. That overlap is shown in Figure 4. 
Figure 4 All things technology and daily operations
The group responsible for the delivery of those technology tools to the business, either internal IT or external, hosted providers is represented by the ITIL, or IT Infrastructure Library, framework. The group responsible for the daily use of those tools is represented by the various continuous improvement frameworks, such as Six Sigma. Each of these groups needs some framework around which to manage daily operation and incremental improvements. Again, managing the overlap of these two interest groups and their frameworks is extremely important.
In each of the cases above, managing the overlap of the various interest groups is a matter of ongoing communication. That communication must happen within an oversight group composed of representatives of each of the interest groups with shared vocabulary and skills inventory. None of the groups need to be experts in the other’s fields but they must commit to understanding the basic needs and issues. This can be a challenge in most organizations but it is vital if the business wants to improve.
Alignment is important and complex. It requires a commitment from a business’s leadership to insure ongoing communications between the core groups within the company. It requires a commitment to include vendors, external service providers and other external stake holders in that collaboration in a meaningful way. So how do you do that? The options are growing every day. There are portal frameworks, like SharePoint and WebSphere. There are peer-to-peer tools, like Groove and Notes. There are Web 2.0 tools, like Huddle and Zoho. The list goes on. Regardless of what tools you use, the ongoing collaboration between the consumers of technology tools and the providers of those tools, both in improvement activities and ongoing daily operations is vital.
Thanks for your attention. Stay tuned…
Using of Social Networking for BPM Project Communications
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Update: 9/15/09
Just in: Hard data on the use of social media by executives. Get the study here. You can also download the document on our Files page.
My thanks to Suzanne Adnams. Her profile is here. See her blog here. She has been the most helpful contributor to my research.
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I recently posted the same question to a number of LinkedIn Groups as I have already posted here in my own blog. See “Using Social Media to Communicate with Executives“. There have been few responses to my question. However, I have received a few responses. I also received feedback during networking events that I found useful. I just responded to a recent reply and wanted to share it here. It has helped me to clarify my strategy and may be useful for you as well.
Recently, I was at an American Marketing Association luncheon were I talked with a young lady with firsthand experience. Her firm studies and advises clients on the topic. Based on what she and others have told me I now have a working model to use in my business. I segment my marketplace into two distinct groups. The first group is manufacturing and manufacturing related service companies (my primary market). The other group is composed of service companies not directly connected to manufacturing, like marketing, sales, technology services, etc (my secondary market). For the primary group LinkedIn is the most used tool, Facebook is occasionally used and Twitter isn’t a player. Even LinkedIn is used only in a fairly passive way. My secondary market is somewhat more active in social networking because there is a higher percentage of younger leadership.
Consequently, my strategy is simple. For me social networking tools can be somewhat useful as marketing tools but not as communication tools during engagements. In an era where senior executives have email enabled phones, plain old email is still the best choice for project related communications. Social media will be reserved for marketing related activities. I am already using collaborative technologies for engagements so there is nothing to change in that area.
Actually, this strategy is a confirmation of what I already believed. I just wanted to gather enough information to be more objective than just my “gut”. However, if I get a landslide of responses tomorrow to the contrary I do reserve the right to rethink my strategy. Given the level of responses so far I don’t anticipate any landslides.
For context the forum response is shown below:
“Mike – you raise a very interesting question, and I suspect from the lack of responses to date that there aren’t any clear answers to your dilemma, and that others may be posing the same question for the same reasons. I don’t have a clear answer to your question, but I do have some observations.
Fundamentally, there may be a disconnect between the role and function or ‘social’ technologies versus the type of service that it enables. To me, the disconnect is aptly illustrated by the confusing use of the terms ‘social media’ and ‘social networking’ – which I believe to be two different, but related concepts.
We can see the challenge through attempts that many companies have had to introduce collaboration software (eg. Sharepoint) into their environments – even though everyone thinks its a good idea, getting everyone to use it is another matter! If organizations have this level of difficulty getting participation within a relatively controlled workgroup (ie. employees), I don’t think there’s much chance of achieving compliance with a group of independent, external clients.
If you want to use this type of communication within your business, you may want to pursue ‘social media’, which in my definition is focused on promoting, marketing and branding your business/services to constituents. As these technologies mature, and become more pervasive in their use within business, then gradually there will be more uptake at a senior level. For now, though, the ‘closed’ two-way communication that would be appropriate for executive clients relating to specific work does not fit into the ‘open’, one-way communications that is typical of social networking and social media interactions.”
Your question would fall into what I would define as the ‘social networking’ category. If I may paraphrase: How can you use new forms of communications provided by social networking services such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. as part of your communications strategy and plan with executive sponsors? The answer, as simplistic as it sounds, is that these channels are simply extensions of any normal communications plan, and need to be considered in the same light. If the constituency with whom you are dealing uses these services, then there may be an opportunity to integrate those into your communications, but that’s a big IF. For the most part, most business-focused activity will take place via professional-level services such as LinkedIn, with Twitter or Facebook perceived as primarily personal/recreational services. None of these, however, are designed for the type of business communications that you are considering. Although it would be possible to create a FB page or a LinkedIn group specific to a given project, and limit access to that information to only approved members, it is much more challenging to get executives to change their habits to use it.
Supporting IT and Business Alignment
MOF alignment diagram
IT infrastructure, applications and data storage have become inseparable from the implementation of business process for any modern business, regardless of size. Any company that wishes to improve their business processes must work with whoever supports their IT infrastructure very closely. As a result, there has been an increasing emphasis in the IT world to be more responsive to their customers. Several “frameworks” have emerged in recent years to help IT organizations do just that. A framework is a set of policies and business practices that forms the basis for the business processes of the IT organization. These standard frameworks can then be extended or modified to suit the needs of each specific company. Collectively these frameworks are referred to as the field of IT service management, or ITSM.
While our SLRSM methodology is not an IT framework it needs to accommodate the client’s IT organization and any ITSM framework or business practices it is using. To accomplish several ITSM frameworks were reviewed as to how they would interact with our methodology. They were COBIT 4.1, Val IT, ISO 20000, ITIL version 3 and the Microsoft Operations Framework version 4. We will be writing a white paper providing a comparison of these frameworks from a pragmatic, mid-size manufacturer’s perspective sometime in the future. For this post we will limit our perspective how the SLRSM methodology should map to them.
Cobit alignment diagram
The most obvious touch point is the alignment of IT and business requirements. That alignment is core to all of the frameworks. We have included several examples of diagrams shown in documents provided as part of each framework. In each framework, business alignment and collaboration are emphasized repeatedly as foundational elements. This illustrates that the IT world has become much more sensitive to their customers in recent years. That wasn’t always the case. For years, IT organizations isolated themselves from their customers. While CIOs and senior IT management were certainly sensitive to their business counterparts, the IT organizations as a whole did not have a culture which focused everyone on their customers. I remember first hand a number of resignations which occurred after I asked some developers to spend more time with their customers and understand their business issues (not StrAIT Advisors and a long time ago). Some of these islands of isolation still exist. Unfortunately, that will probably be true for some time to come.
So how does the SLRSM methodology address this alignment issue? The keys are in the team formation and the phase reviews. First, the team must be formed to include both manufacturing and IT staff. The simulator and collaborative tools used to execute the project force a structured approach to identifying and quantifying opportunities for business process waste reduction. The phase review process forces that team to articulate details about the identified opportunities and how to address them to the senior management sponsors of the project.
ITIL alignment diagram
As the SLRSM methodology winds down and the “torch” is passed to the client’s continuous improvement team (which should be most of the same people) that alignment is also continued. As a result, the alignment of IT to the client’s core business issues becomes a greater, ongoing part of the company’s culture. It’s important to remember that the client’s continuous improvement process includes both business groups and IT groups, each using the appropriate business processes. For example, the business operations group may find that a Six Sigma DMAIC methodology is best suited for them and the IT groups may find that business process built around ITIL works best for them. Both of those approaches require communication and collaboration with the other.
The relationship and collaboration between IT and the client’s core business groups is a key requirement for any project to be successful regardless of what project methodology is used. It’s our intent to encourage and enable that aspect of our client’s culture.
I hope that you found this post useful. Until next time…
Using the Internet for Sensitive Collaboration during Projects
Revised 8-4-09
I want to post some comments on how I see the use of the Internet to collaborate on and with sensitive information. First, I am sensitive to the “cloud”, i.e., the use of web-based applications and data storage. I use it to provide our website hosting, SharePoint portal and our WordPress blog, including reference files. I have accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. I have tried an assortment of tools for blogging (and I need to delete most of those sites) before settling on WordPress. I am looked into Ning and others. I have accounts with Google Docs and Office Live Workspace. And while some of these spaces could be useful I decided to do something different for StrAIT Advisor collaboration needs.
Let’s review StrAIT Advisor’s needs. Our engagements will be fast and when completed, there can be no lasting footprint in the client’s infrastructure. Our engagements typically consist of one of us working with a small team of the client’s people. We will discuss and collaborate on the client’s business processes and value stream (for more information about value streams click here). In both of those scenarios, we will be exchanging messages, documents and drawings that may clearly identify the client’s competitive strengths and weaknesses. The client will assume that none of that information could be accessed inappropriately. Given that I have run IT organizations and been accountable for a company’s cyber security in the past, I am extremely focused on security and best practices. To minimize our client’s risk, we will primarily use the web as the infrastructure for pipes. That means we use appropriate security tools to enable sensitive information to be transported over the web in peer to peer connections but not be stored there unless in an archive located in very secure storage where we know that we can “hug the data”. That is an old IT expression indicating that the user knows positively where their data is located physically and is comfortable with its security.
Accommodating team members with busy travel schedules is another need. Those people need to work in airports even if there is no wireless connection and work at 30,000 feet in the air and traveling at several hundred miles per hour. It will be years before the global transportation industry provides connectivity everywhere. Until then, a peer to peer approach solves this problem. Since most laptops have hard drives that vastly exceed the business needs of most people, the extra storage requirements needed typically don’t represent a major issue.
I have included a simple diagram from our overview presentation to emphasize my point. In that diagram the black arrows indicate the peer to peer connections using the “cloud” and the red arrows and database symbol indicate the archive storage. For the peer to peer collaboration we prefer to use Microsoft Groove. Groove can trace it family tree back to Lotus Notes which came out in the late 1980’s. 
We are satisfied that the security built in to Groove is sufficient to meet the security needs of our engagements. The archived storage can be supplied by the client’s own infrastructure or our SharePoint server. We will try to accommodate our client’s wishes if there are different architectural preferences as long as the same security needs are met and we can reuse our components and don’t have to build a customized solution. Every engagement is different.
I hope this post clarifies why we made the decisions we made. Please let us know what you think. Thanks for your time. We will talk again soon…