Workplace Engineering

One of our advisors gave John this:

“I am a bootstrapper. I have initiative and insight and guts , but not much money. I will succeed because my efforts and my focus will defeat bigger and better-funded competitors. I am fearless.

I will be a fervent and intelligent user of technology, to conserve my two most precious assets: time and money. My size makes me faster and more nimble than any company could ever be.

I am a laser beam. Opportunities will try to cloud my focus, but I will not waver from my stated goal and plan—until I change it. And I know that plans were made to be changed. I’m in it for the long haul.

I pledge to know more about my field than anyone else. I will read and learn and teach. My greatest asset is the value I can add to my clients through my efforts.

I am the underdog. I realize that others are rooting for me to succeed, and I will gratefully accept their help when offered. I also understand the power of favors, and will offer them and grant them whenever I can.

I am a guerrilla. I will be persistent, consistent, and willing to invest in the marketing of myself and my business.

Most of all, I’ll remember that the journey is the reward. I will learn and grow and enjoy every single day.”

Successfully outsourcing can result in considerable cost savings and performance and capacity improvements for an outsourcing organization and can provide opportunities for economies of scale that would be otherwise impossible.  If an organization could achieve all of its goals by itself there would be no need to  enter into business partnerships and the outsourcing industry in particular would be much smaller than it is today. Ten of the pitfalls an organization faces are:

1. Poor Planning
2. Marry in haste, repent at leisure
3. Faulty Financials
4. Underinvestment in the Transisition
5. Brain Drain
6. Passive Agressive Teamwork
7. The Tower of Babel
8. It doesn’t last
9. Losing the wood for the trees
10. Unrealistic expectations

These pitfalls can be avoided through planning, insight, and a commitment to communication and sustaining the change that comes along with a successful partnership.

Off to the Corenet Global summit in Orlando today. I’m really looking forward to seeing my old friends from the corporate world and hearing about their successes and challenges in transitioning new technologies, practices and work-styles into their organizations. Here’s the pitch for the summit:

At the CoreNet Global Summit in Orlando, we will look ahead - to what the future of the workplace will look like, where it will be located, and how it will function. We will explore leading edge innovations and new ways of creating the next generation of workplaces, such as:

Portable Architecture

Telepresence

Third places

Collaboration spaces

And more

I’m going to be trying my hand at blog journalism and cover the conference.

Need somewhere new to work in North Plano? You might like to try the largest independent book store to open in Texas in a long time.

We have another local independent bookstore that we stopped going to because it ultimately wasn’t a place we liked to shop, so we were really intrigued to see whether another independent book store could deliver. Legacy Books opened yesterday and I found a place that I really want to hang out in.

They have Peets coffee for the caffeine addicts, wine and beer for the Euro web-worker (me), some great places to go read and work including a six big bench tables all in a three storey store that has a vague “Crate & Barrel for books” aesthetic. Wifi isn’t working yet, but Lorna, the manager, assured me that it will be operating in the next few days.

My favorite part though is the island cooking demonstration counter near the cafe. We packed the kids off to play with Junie B Jones in the kids section while AM and I watched a British author give a demonstration of Mexican cookery (how bizarre is that?). Best of all she sounded exactly like AM’s aunty Doris and told people off in her best English headmistress accent for talking. I nearly wet myself I was giggling so much. I half expected to be told to stand in the corner.

Best of all, the whole place is am incredible example of a great concept, thoughtfully put together with real attention to detail and executed exceedingly well. The parenting books are actually IN the children’s section, there are sculptures in the art and travel sections, you can watch and listen to the cooking demonstrations on a big screen TV among the cookery books upstairs and the web bar is next to the business books. They cap this off with friendly, attentive and surprisingly knowledgeable staff and wrap it up in a light and airy space.

I’ve not checked to see if their website is as well executed, but you can see it at www.legacybooksonline.com.

The failure to meet unrealistic expectations can have a huge detrimental impact on a business partnership. Business partnerships and outsourcing relationships in particular are complex, lengthy, involve considerable change and require both personal and organizational investment to be successful. Lack of understanding, over ambitious promises and lack of preparation and rigor can all lead to expectations that are not matched by reality.

Knowledge, preparation and communication are the answers to unrealistic expectations. Developing a deep and structured knowledge of your processes, needs, performance requirements and your partner capabilities drives realistic criteria. Deep preparation leaving little to chance ensures that scenarios are thought about and surprises are reduced. On-going, honest and clear communications ensures that everyone is on the same page and there is little room for unrealistic expectations.

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.

Unless there are clear tangible and intangible benefits from the new arrangements there can be a significant tendency to revert to old ways of doing things.

Investing the time and energy to make the partnership and the relationships with in it are the only prescriptions for ensuring that the change holds and continues to deliver value. Using Prosci’s ADKAR stages of change can provide an effective gauge of personal and organizational progress in a transition

• Awareness - Identified that a change is coming
• Desire - A willingness to change (have decided to support the new over the old)
• Knowledge - knowing how to change
• Ability - implementing new skills and behaviors
• Reinforcement - maintaing the change once it has occurred

(Adapted from “Employee’s Survival Guide to Change by Jeffrey M. Hiatt)

It’s quite a time consuming and resource intensive process to find and transition in new ways of doing things. It is the small interventions all the way through that ensure that the change becomes as embedded as the old way of doing things.

Even within supposedly single industries with common training structures, regulated activities and well defined professional organizations there is a surprising amount of disagreement over fundamental definitions of an object, service or performance. 

Turnaround or response times are a key item in many outsource partnerships, yet the start and finish point can be a major point of disagreement. For a customer, the start point may be when they first picked up the phone and had an informal conversation, for the help desk when the work order was actually entered, for the maintenance manager when they got it and the ultimate performer when they were asked to do it.

The possibility for confusion and disagreement around definitions, standards and service levels are enormous. Although reference to recognized to standards endorsed by IFMA, OSCRE, BOMA or other institutions is a great start, time must be taken to develop an agreed set of performance criteria that can be measured and actually reflect a common understanding of the operation or service.

Introducing a new partner into an existing environment or creating a whole new environment out different parties coming together to form a team creates a new dynamic that needs to be worked through to enable the team to perform effectively.

Without knowledge of how involved the client team should be in the day to day running of the operation, there may be a tendency to stay out of the expert’s business. Until there is a problem, that is. 

With pressure from above of dissatisfaction from the recipients of the service there is huge temptation to intervene directly to resolve the problem and become highly directive. Where the partnership was set up to effectively just out-task items or just use the labor of the other party this may not be such a big deal. In partnerships where the goals are more wide ranging, potential strategic benefits can be quickly lost.

In fact, these behaviors are the result of people using “common sense” to fill a vacuum and make an ambiguous situation workable. Preventing this needs management tools that work. 

Understanding and agreeing escalation processes, decision rights and mechanisms for correcting poor performance is critical as is understanding and agreeing the objective criteria for measuring performance and ensuring that a mechanism is in place to collect and share them with the people that need them.