Putting the “Fun” in Fundamentals

One of the things that separates types of people is how they relate to process, both individually and as part of larger work teams. Even more so how people react differently to the  adoption of new processes that may be personally inconvenient in some circumstances, but promise “soon to be realized” improvements in other areas for themselves, team members and business owners.

I believe it is safe to assume that most people have been part of some effort during their careers to improve internal process, maybe kicked off with a team-building offsite retreat or a 30 slide power-point presentation by an outside expert brought in to fix performance and morale issues.  I also assume that many  people who have experienced such efforts are incredulous about their value and effectiveness. In many cross-functional organizations, optimized team performance (vis-a-vis better processes) is an elusive holy grail that everyone yearns for but few can actually find.

There is an oft quoted adage that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over yet expecting different results. People want processes  to fill the gaps that make their work lives difficult, even when they themselves are resistant to giving up autonomy of their own work patterns. The trick is not coming up with new and improved processes; rather it is getting people to embrace them.

Organizational leaders and change catalysts face a daunting challenge when deciding to invest time and resources in process upgrades.  Here are a few things to keep in mind that can help improve the process of improving process.

1. Mandated from the Top – Don’t excuse top leadership from conforming to newly defined best practices. Busy C-types are some of the first to eschew inconvenient, time consuming practices in favor of the personal ways of doing things that got them where they are, even if it means recording new sales contacts on the back of napkins and not directly in the new CRM system.  Employees hate double standards and will lose interest in anything that is not taken seriously by their superiors at the company. Leaders should not only play along, but publicly demonstrate their commitment to the chosen improvements.
2. Be Proactive, Not Reactive – Do what you can to determine a cohesive vision of what you are trying to accomplish. The actualization of something positive will eliminate the negative. Responding only to a list of broken processes can lead to disassociated initiatives and unmet expectations that things aren’t noticeably better right away.
3. Timeboxing Change – If process roll-outs are too small and frequent, they will come off as meaningless. If the vision is too broad and idealistic, it will seem unattainable. Take a chapter from agile project management and think about 2-4 week sprints that focus on addressing specific needs and issues.
4. Careful with Pilots – It is far to easy to tolerate ambiguous objectives and solutions when “its only a pilot.” The last thing you want is a bunch of people spending time on a half initiatives that never really get anywhere, but seem real enough to breed complacency that things are actually happening.  While there is a time and place for limited implementations of new processes, make sure that decision is driven by the clear need for phases and not a muddled sense that “we have to do something.”
5. Put the “Fun” in Fundamentals – Getting staff to embrace change, even when it can be inconvenient, is the key to success. They must be given time to adapt to new processes, and they must feel part of the shared vision of why its being done. This is beyond getting early adapters on board. It is about bringing the team together in ways that are engaging and forward thinking. Project management and team collaboration fundamentals are not overly complex, and there are ways of surfacing core concepts so that people of all types can understand and relate to them. This is probably the most ambiguous of my recommendations, but also perhaps the most important. For more information, please be in touch.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I welcome posted responses with other ideas for leading internal process improvements in work-place environments.

Back to the Client Side

On the eve of starting a contract with the national Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (www.JDRF.org)  as a PM  on a number of application customization and roll-out projects, I am struck at how genuinely excited I am to be once again plying my craft on behalf of a client organization, as opposed to a service related role defined by developing solutions as an agent for someone else. While I will miss the intensity and dynamic energy of the agency environment, I must admit a sense of eagerness to once again work from the other side of the fence.

I am also thrilled to have a second opportunity to approach the challenge of integrating  multi-channel constituent information for a caused based organization functioning at national and local levels. [I played a similar role for JFNA (then called UJC) in 2007-2008]. It is interesting to see how the technology leaders of a few years ago have developed, and how the understanding of relevant best practices have evolved. I look forward to getting back into the mix.

Long standing charities have  engaged in direct response donor relationship marketing for decades, developing personnel and data management processes to support mail, telephone and, more recently, email marketing. The convergence of constituent relationship data coming from so many sources, including event attendance and volunteer participation, has pushed the flexibility of the standard database technologies deployed in the 90’s and 2000’s. Compounded by a whole new set of interactions from organization sponsored social web activities, effective and efficient data management for these large charities is a major challenge.

There is an allure for interactive project managers and producers (well, at least for me) to work on the jazzy front end design applications, such as online community portals and killer ipad apps.  As I concluded in an earlier post (The Other CSI Myth), the effectiveness of even the most creative and innovative interactive strategy is only as good as what goes on behind the scenes and the data level. Admittedly, a few years ago this was a black hole for most of us working in the IT management of non-profit organizations in the then current state of web technology.  Only a few years later, it seems the main players have kept attacking the problem, and the maturation of partnerships between applications like Salesforce and Convio have closed the gap considerably.

Success in this arena will still necessitate an elegant orchestration of multiple software services, third party vendors and significant infrastructure choices – and by no means will it be easy. I am ecstatic to join a strong team at the JDRF with an ambitious vision of how interactive technology can facilitate deeper relationships with constituents and stakeholders of all types.

If anyone has related experience or insights to share, please post below.

Subjective Objectivity and Vice-Versa

One of my favorite roles as project manager is being the communication conduit between strategic, creative and technology team members, helping to find synapses within production domains, languages, and even ways of thinking. In the trenches it is fun to huddle with the appropriate resources and figure out the best technical implementation of a new or particularly sophisticated user interaction. In brand management the role can be used to facilitate structured strategic planning that is rooted in a realistic tactical roadmap.

From a PM perspective, success in this role lies in one’s ability to understand and articulate multiple business paradigms – seeing the discussion from a (strategic / creative / technical) – centric point of view and translating dialogue between them so everyone is on the same page. From this vantage point, a PM can also be used in tight support with a BA to manage team understanding of project requirements.

This ability to see a project simultaneously as a brand position, creative campaign and technical build requires experience with each individually, and a producer’s view of the world that ties together all aspects of a program. It can be enhanced with a disassociated awareness of one’s own natural communication patterns and how they interact with the patterns of others. (check out www.actualme.com).  This is not stuff you can learn in PMBOK.

The Other CSI Myth

For anyone who remembers 80’s television, there was this show called Quincy that starred Jack Klugman as a pathologist who did forensic investigation into murders. I always had a special place in my heart for the show because my father worked as pathologist at the time and, when asked what my dad did for a living, I would say “he’s like Quincy, but without the solving murders part.” Back then, Quincy was often the only forensic investigator  people (especially kids) had heard of.

Fast forward about 20 years and most everyone knows CSI from the multiple TV dramatizations involving super sharp crime scene investigators using ultra cool technology to solve murder cases and bring perps to justice. Many have also heard that there has been a rise in unreasonable expectations from real people who assume their local forensics teams are staffed and equipped like the shows. There have also been spikes in enrollment in CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) training enrolments.

There is another, more technical myth which seems to be one of the root causes of the “un-reality” portrayed on TV.

The cast usually includes a techno-digital savant who can get anything done through a computer. They whiz and quip their way through impossible searches and triangulations – invariably uncovering a piece of data that helps the good guys win.

“I need a list of all buildings downtown that have southern facing exposures that were built between 1950 and 1960, and used the unique building material found on the vics shoes to seal the roof.”

“One minute, Boss.”

“A whole minute? You must be slipping!”

Maybe I’m stating the obvious, but those random pieces of data are not all sitting around in databases that talk to each other, no matter how talented the person doing the searching – no matter how powerful the computer system being used to to the search. I don’t know what’s more crazy, the idea of public city plans integrated, indexed and codified with that type of information for the past 50 years or the on the fly API creation to extract cohesive data from unknown databases (assuming they are all even online) in a minute or less.  NOT that I have any problem with creative license, I just want to call it out for the sake of emphasizing the role of data strategy as the driver for achieving desired front end interactions.

I can just imagine the aha moment when the people at Epsilon realized, “Hey, we hold all this data. Why not build an agency around it (http://www.epsilon.com/Purple@brepsilon/p32-l1).”  Again, it is not enough to own the right data, its data also control of the warehousing structures that must grow and adapt to ever-increasing complexity of user requirements. And with so many local and SaaS computing solutions and data entry points, only the enterprise level seems to have a shot at unifying the structures well enough to enable true capitalization of business intelligence.

The paradigm of single, unified, all-knowing data systems has not proven workable, yet everyone is clamoring for true connectivity. [It must be true, I saw it work on TV…]. I do believe that whatever solutions emerge in this area for small to mid-size companies will come from those who treat data strategy as an input to creative strategy and not the other way around.