Synaptus

This blog is part of Synaptus’ efforts to participate in the world of social marketing. We are also publishing an e-zine and updating our website to begin to actively participate in the conversation taking place on the Internet about the changes in managing organizations. In addition to continuing to partcipate as speakers and contributors to professional organizations, our marketing efforts are also expanding into articles. We know we have something to add to the conversation about managing businesses successfully today and we are working hard to get out there to contribute. There are two interesting lessons from this exercise.

One of the fascinating lessons that has been reinforced to me is how hard it is to do simple things. Betrand Russell once said, "Things are relatively clear until you try to explain them to someone else." This is very true in my social marketing efforts. To set up the blog I had to figure out how to publish a blog service. I had to learn the technical aspects about publishing, promoting, and providing an RSS feed to the blog. We had to work with our web developer to get a template set up. We decided to outsource to http://www.typepad.com  and are still experiencing some technical issues with our website developer with getting the blog to show up the way I want it to. From an e-zine perspective I had to find a publisher. There are issues around privacy and publishing and unsubscribing that all have to be managed. Then you have to promote and make subscribing to your e-zine easy. We decided to use http://www.intellicontact.com as our newsletter manager/publisher. On the web and our articles, we are still working on figuring out Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and article publication. And just now we are starting to reach out develop a community around the blog and the e-zine.

The new lesson is about the breadth of the outreach from social marketing. This is definitely different than targeted marketing, where you send a specific message to a specific audience. When you blog, you are reaching out to anyone with a browser and a search engine. The following is a list of people who have participated in my blogging experience that I might not ever sell to. But they have something to add to the conversation we are having on the internet.

Healthy Web Design: "Helping independent professionals who love what they do develop and build a successful website." Dawud Miracle has a wealth of information he shares around building your website, blogging, and finding your voice.

Heart of Business: Can you hear it beating?… When you want to make a difference, but need to make a profit.

Breathing Space: Home and Office Organizing: Creating space for who you are and what you do

Conscious Cooperation: "Conscious Cooperation" is about how the decision
to cooperate can drastically improve working communication and results in the construction industry and beyond.

Engaging the Disquiet: Helping men who feel something missing in their lives.

Inquiry365: A personal blog where Mona Grayson, a professional facilitator, will question at least one that has brought her stress each day.

Mindfulness Maverick: This blog is first and foremost a reminder to not take yourself too seriously in the overwhelm of work and second to give you real practical mindful tools to reconnect on what is most important in any given moment.

Your Ideal Customer:  Elisa H. Gillispie is just starting a blog where she writes about her business.

Project managers often fall into the percent complete trap when running projects.  Percent complete gives the feeling of making progress, but provides no value to the managing the project. In There is no such thing as percent complete, Johanna Rothman says:

"Percent complete makes no sense. Features are done or not done. You can count done features and see how far along you are. You can’t reliably count any percentage done."

This doesn’t apply to just software development, this is true in an type of project. The only questions about completion that matter to coordinating and managing the project are:

1. Are you done? Done means that the consumer of what you were working on knows you are done and you don’t owe them anything else for them to use it. You should mark the task as 100%.

2. If not, are you working on it and when will you be done? This allows the consumer of whatever you are working on to get ready to work on it.  You should mark these tasks as 50%.

3. If you don’t know, what do I (the project manager) need to do to help you answer #2? Are you short of resources, do you have unclear requirements, are you waiting on someone else’s work, have you even started on it? You should mark these as 0% done. You aren’t working on it until you are have the resources, requirements, prerequisites, and intention to work on it.

If tasks are too long, then the only way to show progress is to update percent complete on tasks. Try to keep tasks to verifiable pieces of work that are relatively short, probably two to three weeks. Reflecting a percent done just to demonstrate progress doesn’t provide any insight into the status of the project, doesn’t help coordinate work through the project, and artifically demonstrates progress. As project managers or executives with projects reporting to you, are you keeping track of percent complete or what is done?

Kevin Meyer over at EvolvingExcellence has a great article Lean Won’t Work Here. He points to an article in CIO magazine by Dean Meyer (no relation to Kevin Meyer) that describes all the reasons why Lean won’t work in IT. Dean (non Kevin) says:

Apply Lean and Six Sigma to a job that involves diverse tasks, relationships and creative problem solving (like what most IT staff do) and you may find you’ve created a very efficient organization that fails to accomplish its purpose.

As Kevin (not Dean) points out, the problem is that Dean is fundamentally wrong. The to pillars of lean are to reduce the time to customer value and respect for the individual. The problems the article highlights are not problems with lean, but with the application lean.

The problem is not just that the management of many organziations don’t understand the point of lean, but that the consulting firms helping them don’t either. These resulting disasters further muddle the lean story. It’s no wonder that an industry that has this understanding has satisfaction rates below 30% with their service and fails to deliver projects to their customer up to 70% of the time. From the standpoint of Pragmatic Process Improvement, you have to focus your efforts where it will benefit the business. You can’t view process improvement distinct from value creation and human interactions. Despite what Dean Meyer represents, lean is completely aligned with both of these pillars.

Ram Charon is interviewed by Workforce about the nature of leadership in organizations.

"the work gets done from a meshing of the parts of the organization. When people work together, that is by design a social system. Leaders need to understand these relationships and how people communicate—they need to understand the social systems. If you don’t know how they work, you can’t be successful. That’s new to the 21st century."

It is no longer sufficient to define strategy and map processes. Organizational leaders need to develop effective methods of understanding the social systems that make up their businesses. If this sounds like psycho-babble or Kumbyah to you, then the challenge is in finding pragmatic ways to get a handle on the way people communicate when they work together. Lean, Six Sigma, BPR, and other process improvement efforts unleashed a wave of productivity from organizations between 1950 and 2000. The next wave is in improving the way people innovate, coordinate, learn, and commit.  Does this sound like psycho-babble mumbo jumbo to you? What are you doing to find ways to get a handle on the creating productive collaboration in the social systems that make up your organization?

This past weekend I helped chaperone a trip of 11 and 12 year old girls to the State basketball championships in Griffin, GA. We ate at a few fast-food restaurants while we were there. There was a striking difference in the quality of the service at Chick-fil-a and at Wendy’s.  Even though the prices are higher, the coaches and parents agreed that when they go to a fast food restaurant they will drive out of their way to go to Chick-fil-a.

What leads to this striking difference? I don’t think it’s the processes. I’m sure both companies have well documented processes for all aspects of their stores. I don’t think it’s the technology. While Chick-fil-a’s technology may be better, it can’t lead to this striking of a difference. I went out on the Internet to do some research.

Dan Cathy is the president of Chick-fil-a and the son of Truett Cathy, the founder. He says that Chick-fil-a’s exemplary service begins with hiring the right people. Same small town, same talent pool to draw from, they must have a much higher cost to get good people. It probably eats into their profitability to attract better talent. So is it good business to make sure you select people that will help your business set itself apart. According this article over at Fast Company, between 2001 and 2004 sales increased 40%, to $1.53 billion, and the number of locations jumped from 958 to 1,160.

Employee selection and placement requires defining the qualities of the right people for your business, then selecting for candidates based on these qualities. Don’t underestimate how critical this is or people may be driving out past your store to pay a higher price to your competitor. What steps is your business taking to make sure you are getting the best people for your business?

At a time when competitive forces have forced Pfizer to reduce its workforce by 10%, it is also facing pressure to move faster than before with less than before.  They are responding by moving to a "just in time" approach to talent. Instead of hiring for specific jobs descriptions, they are establishing an employee selection and placement system based on competencies. Travis Sinquefield over at Disorganizational Behavior points to a recent article from Workforce Management.

"In recruiting, this means Pfizer, which used to hire candidates according to job descriptions, now evaluates what competencies the candidate demonstrates

…

Similarly, Pfizer is focusing on developing employees based on competencies rather than grooming them for a specific role, he says. "

Travis points out that:

"When you hire a person based on the job description to be filled, you will probably end up with someone who has the skills to do only that job. Instead, Pfizer is taking a different approach, creating a flexible workforce where people with the skills and competencies needed can be moved into a position where those skills will be of value."

Without a clear understanding of the competencies needed in your organization, your employee selection process will select based on job skills and hope for a good fit. If you based your employee selection, employee placement, and employee development processes on competencies, you can develop a more agile workforce. This interchangeability increases the businesses ability to respond to the market without having to add as much overhead. Do you have a clear picture of the competencies needed in the jobs in your organization? How could you implement this concept in your business?