Workplace Engineering

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I bought the audio book and think I need to by it in print too. The whole idea of turning your business/organization/industry into a platform is incredibly compelling. Kind of wish I’d read it before starting my business.


View all my reviews.

I just cannot stop watching this video. What an incredible vision from Microsoft. This is the kind of future I want.

Zen Habits post A Minimalist’s Guide to Using Twitter Simply, Productively, and Funly: is really helpful to anyone like me who’s been trying to figure out how to engage with Twitter….

“Twitter is like a river … you can step into it at any point and feel the water, bathe in it, frolic if you like … and then get out. And go back in at any time, at any point. But, you don’t have to try to consume the entire river — it’s impossible and frankly a waste of time in my eyes.

So that’s how I approach Twitter these days: I’ll just jump into the stream of incoming tweets and see what people are saying. I can ignore them or follow their links or reply if I want. Then I get out of the stream. I don’t try to read everything I missed, and if I miss a lot of stuff, I’m OK with that.”

I think this advice could apply equally to all the corporate information my clients have to keep up with. There are some core performance KPIs that they need to be on top of all of the time, but much of what passes an executive these days is just the flow of the corporate river.

(See the rest of the post in Zen Habits.)

There is a temptation to over measure and get lost in detailed performance metrics and lose sight of the overall objectives of the partnership. After taking the time to develop detailed processes, understand key quality items, benchmark and then developing a complex algorithm linking pay to performance that a mad scientist would be proud of, performance stubbornly refuses to budge and great expectations are dashed.

This temptation to measure and set targets for everything the greater the possibility that they will influence each other (in possibly not fully understood ways) and  prevent major gains in any one area. In statistics, this is known as “regression to the mean,” for the poor individuals managing or performing in this scenario it is a classic no-win situation.

It can also be tempting to set arbitrary standards because they seem to make sense at the time. The percentage is the biggest villain here. 98% performance may sound great or 99.99% may sound like perfection. When that becomes a target for missing mail for an organization delivering 100,000 letters a day to a business, it means that that means 99 can go missing each and every day. Reality checks are critical when setting targets.

Both of these problems can be avoided by taking a step back to clarify objectives and what actually needs to be measured and then give that balanced scorecard a healthy dose of reality.

Chris Spagnulo in Commons Blog reports that according to a survey 40% of CIOs are indifferent to the quality of software they produce. Chris rightly reports that the costs of failed software in a business are tremendous. I’ve heard horror stories of automated bank account payment systems pulling a monthly payment from an account more than ten times in one night due to a glitch and key systems dropping out on a whim.

I hadn’t quite realized how lucky I’ve been to work with a few of CIOs and IT professionals that are fanatical about quality and understand the that a workman is only as good as their tools, yet based upon personal experience I can’t say that these statistics surprise me.

Perceived poor cost performance can be the result of a lack of understanding of the true costs with providing a service or operation, additional costs that occur as a result of managing a partnership, a genuine difference in costs or increased awareness and visibility being mistaken for an actual increase.

Very often and organization has not taken the time to fully evaluate and apportion the true costs associated with providing a service internally until the time comes to have that service or operation provided by someone else. As a result, there may be limited insight into the overhead and administrative costs associated with the service and for some organizations, internal pricing may obscure the true cost of the service itself.

Understanding the fully loaded costs of a service or operation gives real insight into the true cost structure, what savings can and cannot be expected and then provides a suitable benchmark for measuring success over time. It will also help identify where the true costs are and allow the partners to develop an effective plan to improve performance in the right places.

Remember that fully loaded costs include administrative and overhead costs in addition to the costs of providing the service itself.

More detail on the process for securing a vendor partner

Pre-qualification (finding suitable parties). This is where an industry consultant can be useful in identifying potentials based upon an understanding of the work, processes and performance criteria. Depending on the size and complexity of the work, this process can take several rounds or happen pretty quickly.

Document preparation. The processes, performance criteria and overall goals established earlier in the process are turned into formal scope of work documents, business requirements, performance metrics, inventories, staffing lists that form the basis of the procurement exercise.

Out to bid (or RFP). Packaging up all the documentation into a standard form, adding contractual terms, building a pricing list and then sending it to pre-qualified bidders. 

Return (of the bids). During this period, the potential suitors work through the documents, ask questions, clarify requirements and generally build a hopefully compliant proposal. This stage culminates in the return of a bid.

Place Order. Once returned, bid documents need to be evaluated and compared. A clean package of outgoing documents containing easy to understand and unambiguous descriptions, criteria and requirements increases the possibilities that the bids will be directly comparable. Pretty quickly front runners will emerge and the team will move to tighten up and negotiate requirements, offers, counter-offers etc. until the favored bidder emerges and a contract awarded.

Start work. Once an order is placed, there is a period of time when both organizations prepare to actually do business with each other. Again, the level of complexity and scope can influence the time, extent and energy. This is a period when the contracting organization can do a lot to ensure the proper integration and success of the new team.

Not understanding the basic fundamental activities, resources and performance criteria for an activity or function make it difficult for a potential partner to be successful. Unrealistic expectations and lack of knowledge of the procurement process can lead to a poorly executed exercise that at best means that the parties need to rework their agreements very early or at worst results in a disastrous relationship that is unwound in acrimony and sometimes with the help of the lawyers.

Understanding and allowing the time to go through a proper selection process increases the chances that the resulting relationship will be successful for many years. Organizations have different methods and processes that they undertake to search for, find and then contract with a partner. Most successful ones contain the steps of

• pre-qualification
  
• document preparation
  
• out to bid
  
• returning of bids
  
• placement of an order
  
• starting work in one form or another.

Under pressure to achieve a quick result, the temptation is there to short circuit the process or negotiate with a single party. Unfortunately, the absence of clearly defined steps and milestones that can be monitored and measured can result in a long and drawn out process that is ultimately unsatisfactory to all concerned.

Liam Tung reports in CNET on August 14 that HSBC may be considering an iPhone fleet:

Global banking giant HSBC is considering ditching the BlackBerry and adopting Apple’s iPhone as its standard staff mobile device, a move that could result in an order for some 200,000 iPhones

Although he goes onto write that HSBC state the decision has a fairly low priority at present and it is part of normal business to evaluate different technologies, it is pretty telling that a large financial institution would even consider switching.

One of the things that HSBC (and Apple) would need to consider is how would Apple deal with a batch order for so many phones? Even for a company of Apple’s size and considerable supply chain management skills, this would be a huge order with some pretty tight service level agreements.

According to Phill Martin, deputy chief executive of the National Association of Church Business Administration in Richardson, Texas, church administration is a critical. If you thought keeping track of employees, partners, customers and vendors was difficult for a firm, think of the mega churches. Angela Shah in the Dallas Morning News, Sunday August 10, gives an amazing insight into the challenges of managing the congregation of mega churches and a company, Fellowship Technologies, that has grown up to meet that challenge.

According to Shah, 5,000 children attend the children’s ministry at Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano and families check in at 32 kiosks. In addition to attendance management, Fellowship technologies measures the kind of metrics that tell the church how involved their congregation is with the church. Many of the companies us consumers, employees and partners deal with have Business Intelligence and CRM systems. How many of us have a relationship that even comes close to the one these churches are able to achieve?

I do recognize the irony that the focus of this blog is the workplace; that the first post would be on a Sunday and the story a vaguely religious theme.