In an interview with Crossing the Chasm author Geoffrey Moore, Chris Murphy at Information Week has a truly great article titled; Global CIO: How Gen Y Can Kill Collaboration Projects.
The article is written as a caution for IT executives not to be doing IT projects (in this case collaboration) for the wrong reasons.
For Business Managers in the small to medium enterprise, one comment made by Mr. Moore is something we often do poorly in managing technology. And I chose that comment as the title for this.
Design Process Backwards
Outside of technology, we can more easily look at this backwards view. New manufacturing line? New product? In these cases we have looked externally for demand or unmet needs and and considered methods and strategies that can tap them.
At its simplest, if you have 3 kids, and 2 dogs, that little two seat sports car is unlikely to be on the family car list at purchase time. You worked back from your requirements to what tool will meet them.
Yet when it comes to managing technology – we often put the cart before the horse when it comes to spending money or implementing a business process.
As an example, you are looking to create an IT Service Support Management process, that meaning the sequence of tasks and steps that start with a complaint of some type of IT service failure to its resolution. Rather then start at the beginning, ask yourself first – at the end of this process – what is the desired outcome?
That question then allows you to start from that desired outcome and work backwards through the steps required to reach that end result.
If you don’t work backwards and implement a process in a vacuum, what can happen?
You have seen it or heard it in your life – I guarantee it. How about a technical support call where getting you off of the phone as fast as possible seems to be what is happening. In this case the process was designed to get fastest phone time finished as possible. No desired outcome of fix the customers problem.
This can also happen when looking at particular tools such as customer relationship management (CRM) or resource planning (ERP) as well.
Someone decides that improving communications for customers is needed to stop customer defections, and new tools are purchased and processes instituted.
But?
Perhaps if a close look was made from the outside, it may have been found that customer communication and management is doing reasonably well, but on time and accurate delivery is so completely out of whack that customers defect.
Fixing the broken shipping or delivery process will have a far higher impact than trying to improve customer relationship and communication.
The SMB Takeaway
Start with your customer. Identify exactly what problem you are trying to solve, then work backwards to what technologies or processes are going to get you there. As general managers in the small to medium enterprise I am pretty confident that you already do this type of diligence with operations, manufacturing, or marketing. But you need to do it with IT as well.
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