Workplace Engineering

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.

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.

Execute, execute, execute!! The Economist has a great post on Obama’s earnest army. It contrasts the McCain campaign with its focus on traditional political campaigning and Obama’s relentless and highly focused machine.

For all its pretensions to be about “you”, the Obama campaign is strictly hierachical and impressively disciplined.

I’m an expat living here and feel fortunate to have great friends on both sides of the political divide and a ringside seat as the election has unfolded. It is really hard to not be impressed by such a focused (and well funded) mash-up of old school and new school leadership, culture and technology:

• Applied Social Networks - online forums, accessible downloadable information, on-line and real world collaboration opportunities……all focused on a very clear objective
• Supercrunching - action oriented mining of huge databases of information to drive action
• Crowdsourcing - sophisticated technology enabling campaigners to easily organize themselves to pound the streets and keep important voter intentions and tracking databases scarily current
• Detailed scripting at all levels - foot soldiers are told what to say and they say it
• Clear and unambiguous leadership - Obama stays on message, his team stays on message (well mostly) and when they don’t it gets drowned out

The result is a huge, focused army of unpaid supporters that is on-message, disciplined, working phenomenal hours and relentlessly getting one vote at a time.