Better Technology Decisions
1. Enabling your strategy
Process excellence is no longer just about standardisation, cost cutting, or quality. The key question now is ‘how is workflow strategy creating value and delivering benefit’?
In order to get best value for always scarce resources, before choosing and using new technology, the professional association must identify
- The problem that needs to be solved or the opportunity that can be created
- How a technological solution fits with the business strategy and objectives
- How a specific technology fits with the IT Strategy?
You can then make the business case for investment.
Example:
Association X identified clear issues with their ability to meet their strategy, a common issue in many professional associations over the last ten years.
- Departments holding their own records/running their own systems because of the unreliability of the existing central one
- Don’t know if event delegates are members?
- No single customer view?
- Running two or more systems.
They knew instinctively that they needed better technology and processes.
Example:
University Y needed to improve its process to identify and deliver ground breaking research. Their strategic objective was to improve their rankings so the problem was defined by their strategic objective. They had to:
- Facilitate flexible collaboration across and independent of disciplines;
- Facilitate discovery of research activity and outputs;
- Address inefficiencies in gathering information about research themes;
- Evaluate researcher attitudes to research theme knowledge engineering and exploitation.
2. Process
In a professional or membership association, workflow technology can coordinate dependent relationships/activities and orchestrate individual steps in a business process. Modelling and documenting what you want to achieve is important at the early stage. Business rules guide the logic of the model and the organisation’s strategy determines the business rules.
During this modelling process there are two key tips for success:
- Challenge existing ways of working, and
- Keep asking why?
Many professional and membership associations are very good at convincing themselves that they are unique, that ‘things have to be done this way’, when in fact they need to re-engineer out of date processes, behaviours and assumptions.
Once the vision is clear, a defined project methodology is required, either an in house version or an externally developed one that your business already uses- familiarity will help internal confidence and broaden understanding within the organisation
Example:
In the early days of the publishing revolution when publishers discussed their spanking new digital workflows, it was heresy to ask how these investments added to sales and many soon found that costs were down at the expense of growth. They had re-engineered the workflow, but not the product and consequently many small academic publishers got eaten up by larger more commercial operations. They were so focussed on the workflow that they didn’t think about their strategic objective.
The project management must be ‘fit for purpose’ and suited to the size and sophistication of the organisation and the project team. Reporting has to ensure ensure trackability and accountability, but should otherwise be kept to a minimum. If a report is not used by the people for whom it is intended, it is useless. Project software can produce beautifully detailed, gloriously coloured ‘artefacts’ which make everybody look good - but if you can’t see immediately what matters then change, reduce or simplify.
Before you make any decision about product, you should:
- Map - in detail - your existing processes around the opportunity or challenge for which you need a solution - identifying every action and decision point and the people who trigger and make those decisions
- Look again at the process from the members’ perspective- map their experience of the activity
- Cost the current process in as much detail as makes sense for your organisation
- Ask other organisations, like you and not like you, how they do it- that’s where the Associations Network can really add value to your thinking.
- Plan, what happens when, and what will be impacted by the project or changes. Flag all key dates and processes in order to build the project plan around it
- Be realistic in estimating work involved - people need holidays - testing is there because there will be issues, so allow time to test and learn, test and learn.
Make sure that whoever owns the plan understands the purpose and content, and not just the process
3. Product
Choosing the right product means you need to understand what your organisation needs and wants.
Your organisation runs rather like a huge piece of machinery, often with lots of complex processes. They aren’t always very visible. Many of them run in the background. The smooth operation of each is crucial to the smooth operation of the whole. They are all there to support the purpose of the “organisational machine”.
Few people if any will understand the detail of the entire operation; hopefully some key people will each understand the intricacies of the parts for which they are responsible. They are all “stakeholders” in the operation of the whole thing. Whilst it may be praiseworthy for a particular set of parts and processes to work really well, the whole thing is only sustainable, to deliver its purpose effectively and commercially, if on balance the whole thing works well together.
Example:
An aircraft depends on many connected processes. Its commercial purpose is to regularly and safely fly from A to B. The pilot has one view of its operation; the service engineer has another; the airline marketing department has yet another. Three very different views, all interdependent.
It helps to think about your organisation as running a huge set of joined-up processes, which deliver each of the services which your members require. In a factory, at the core of these processes is usually an obvious “production line” which takes in raw materials and produces saleable products, and connected to it will be sub-processes which source the raw materials, handle the purchase orders, raise the invoices, and so forth. In a professional association, the core processes are often about handling information and feeding it out to members, perhaps through newsletters, events or training sessions. There will probably be many small processes all running in parallel. Helping your organisation to work effectively is about streamlining and tuning these processes, a few at a time, so that they run at their best.
What does the Board want?
The Board or Executive want the organisation to meet the needs of its customers, and to remain financially viable. Of course, this is all happening in a rapidly changing world, so the organisation also has to be resilient and adaptable to cope with change.
This is underpinned by investment in IT, and whilst IT is often brought in to assist with resilience and adaptability, its rapidly evolving technology also becomes an extra factor in causing continuing change.
What does the business need?
The organisation depends on people – its members and its staff. Both sets of stakeholders need to have faith in its ability to deliver its services appropriately, with clarity and reliability. Keeping stakeholders informed and consulted is a key part of managing change effectively.
For this reason, at the heart of the “ITIL” good practices for delivering IT service is “change control”, and similarly at the heart of AGILE” good practices for IT development is “stakeholder engagement”. Professional IT contractors and service providers use these methodologies to handle expectations, and to deliver change in manageable chunks. This helps to keep a manageable balance between stability and agility.
Example:
Agile models for producing improvements in software use a series of short iterations (over a period of months). They achieve change in small manageable steps, each of which is tested, and delivers some clear form of business value at each step. There are clear consultations with key stakeholders between each step.
Keeping control of quality
Maintaining control of quality during a project is a balancing act between three primary forces, Time, Cost, and Scope. Time is the available time to deliver the project, Cost represents the amount of money or resources available and Scope represents the range of features that the project must tackle to be a success. These act together to influence the Quality of what the project delivers. Each iteration of a project is an opportunity to examine each of these three, to achieve the quality you want. Being able to make informed evaluations and decisions at each iteration requires the project manager to maintain good contact with relevant stakeholders and with the “business owner” for the project.
Example:
Time, Cost, Scope – “Adjust for quality”
In the Agile approach, a “backlog” of desired features is drawn up, and then, for the start of each development cycle, a number of the highest-ranking features is selected to be developed in that cycle. These are usually chosen on the basis of providing the greatest business value at the time. This ranking of the next desirable features to work should be decided with the development team on the advice of the “product owner”, who in turn makes sure that the needs of all the necessary stakeholders have been considered.
Drawing on the input of stakeholders to arrive at an ideal list of features is sometimes called Co-design. There are some fine and inexpensive technology tools available that can help with that sort of consultation, such as IdeaScale (www.ideascale.com ), which opens up these lists to invited groups of stakeholders for commenting and rating, or the offer of further suggestions. Consultation can be as simple and low-tech as getting stakeholders together and brainstorming their suggestions with Post-it notes and Flipcharts. A blog can then be a helpful way of feeding back to a wider stakeholder community the findings of that group, and giving opportunity for further comment. This consultation needs time-boxing, to avoid slippage and endless “feature-creep”. All this will help in arriving at a prioritised backlog, for a development team to start work from.
In essence, a transparent stakeholder consultation gives the breadth of users and consumers a voice, and can help the product owner ultimately to make insightful choices about priority, helping them to balance time/cost/scope decisions from an informed business perspective.
4. People
Don’t think about putting your team together only on an institutional department basis! It is critical to have the right mix of talent, skills, aptitude and attitude so that they can work across the business, increase collaboration and get the results you need.
There are obviously technical skills required -competence with systems structure, integration and technical specification, information expertise on collection, analysis and use of data, creation of data warehouses and production of management dashboards and management information.
Business and strategy champions will be the providers and users of information. Less obviously, but equally important, you need communication, management and governance skills
Finally, the presence of senior management is essential to demonstrate the importance of the project and maintain motivation and momentum. Leadership buy-in is always required for approval or sign-off but demonstrable visible support from the very top throughout the project life-cycle is essential if the project is to deliver for the organisation.
Use your best people at all levels in the organisation, protect their jobs, provide back fill, and use their business knowledge and experience to develop tender documents, project plans, and implementation. This will result in career development for them and high-quality inputs and outcomes for the association.
Use different people at different stages of the project, short-term secondments, as well as longer assignments, to build understanding of project and how it will change ways of working across all different departments and levels. This will enable the business to start to absorb the change by osmosis as well as via the more formal communications and planning.
Make sure that people on the project maintain links with ‘business as usual’ teams, to maintain a ‘real view’ of what is happening on the ground and what the project is designed to address. Retention of learning, experience and knowledge in the business via these links will complement the input from an external partner.
If you aim to keep a consistent core project team structured around on the purpose of the project, tit will work more effectively across the business and make it easier for those who are dipping in and out of the project to engage. You will also avoid issues where specific departments are seen as exclusive project owners and other departments do not engage.
Example:
‘Fit for the customer:
A large, global professional association set up a new project to map and improve their customer journey. The project buzzword = simplicity
The unexpected outcome was that because the kept asking why, and challenged the existing processes they exposed poor customer processes, bottlenecks and weak links.
The mapping was developed by the people involved in the activity and the IT team drew the picture that the business described
The language was straightforward- eg visit office, not F2F interaction
The language was recognisable to everyone involved- i.e. not just the people who put the process together but their teams and peers
The simplicity meant that the points at which things needed to be measured were visible, to identify gaps and enable handovers.
5. Tips for your next technology decision
- Create a clear simple business case which articulates the opportunity or solves a problem
- Share the business case so everyone knows what is being done and why
- Find a way to priortise what the business wants and needs
- Demonstrate leadership support for the solution chosen and the implementation approach, all the way through the project, not just when the contract is signed
- Put the best people from all parts of the organisation on the project, use it as development for them and the people who step in to backfill their roles
- Challenge scope creep! Anything may well be possible but focus on what is necessary to solve your problem and exploit your opportunity.
- Review, plan and measure success against your strategy, not just against project milestones.
- Always be able to answer the ‘Why’ question.
Example:
UNIVERSITY Z Assessment and Feedback project
Our mission is to make our students must be more employable. If we have a better quality of assessment we can implement and demonstrate that much more effectively. So our technology project is to review the workflow which assesses our students and records their achievements.
References:
1. About K2 Consulting: www.k2consulting.uk.org
2. Jisc: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/about
3. Jisc: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/business-intelligence/change-management
4. Jisc: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/enable-your-staff-to-work-with-digital-technologies
5. Jisc: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/collaborative-online-tools
6. Jisc: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/understanding-your-data
7. Jisc: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/project-management
8. Co-design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWgJlwTDIRQ
9. Co-design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OZsdJgoMK4
10. Co-design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNtnwjN7juI
11. IT service management and change management:
12. http://www.agilealliance.org/the-alliance/what-is-agile/
13. IT service management and change management:
14. https://www.axelos.com/best-practice-solutions
