HOW TO FIND BEST PRACTICES RIGHT AT HOME
Hello fellow Bloggers!
Transformation of IT driven by a coordinated process framework approach (such as ITIL, CobiT, and CMMi) just plain makes sense. Sometimes (lots of times) we just need to get our heads up out of our own gopher holes and look around (outside of IT) to see what others are doing that can help us.
HOW TO FIND BEST PRACTICES RIGHT AT HOME
For example–lessons learned from the ERP adoption curve finance endured might have real benefit as we transform IT from silos to enterprise workflow.
Speaking of workflow–who executes that better than the supply chain folks?
Best Practices for Pro-active Compliance with standards? How about HR or finance, or our own internal audit?
Quality and efficiency? Who in our organization has leveraged Six Sigma or Balanced Scorecard?
Portfolio Management? Other parts of our business must make investment tradeoffs, who does it best?
Customer Service, setting and meeting customer expectations, and service catalogs? How about our own sales, customer service, and web enabled sales functions?
You get the gist.
Now before everyone groans (read more work) there is an 80/20 approach to this. Interview with a short list of questions–
What were the key challenges you faced? What were the business value drivers?
How well did your planning and strategy address them?
How did you keep focus on them, and prove their value in an incremental way? Did you audit results in any way, and if so was that valuable?
How did you get and keep key executive involvement and funding for the duration of the project?
What was the magnitude of the organizational change, and how did you manage it?
Did you require an effective communications strategy, if so how did you execute it?
In general–
What were the greatest surprises?
What were you naive about going in?
What do you wish you had done differently given what you know now?
What kept you going throughout the tough, dark hours?
That would take no more than an hour per interview–and I guarantee you would have mined diamonds. PLUS–you would spend time meeting with your customer, better understand them, improve your relationship, and MAYBE they would give you some feedback on how you are doing.
Remember–Early on, Henry Ford visited a meat rendering plant, and watched the carcasses go by suspended on hooks and chains. The original Model Ts rolled down the assembly line–suspended on hooks and chains…
Success to You,
Don
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