“I believe in these guys and they believe in each other. The biggest thing for us is never quit.”
– Dave Martinez, Washington Nationals Manager
All of our engagements are about three distinct areas of organizations; people, processes, and technology. Our clients hire us to work through all of those dimensions to achieve a business objective.
In that context, I want to start a conversation about “how” we execute on those three dimensions. One of our core values is we hire interesting people who are interested in change and I’ve written often about how as individuals and as a company we are agents of change.
I’d like to stipulate that we do work in these three domains with every client. What I am concerned about is that we are not consistent in the way that we approach our client relationships recognizing that all three domains need a strategy and an execution plan. I think on the technical side of our business we are extraordinarily well documented, consistent and virtually every consultant within Tahzoo operates within a common and consistent framework. However, when it comes to people and process, we need more well-developed methodologies and execution plans.
I’ve always been proud of how good we are at building relationships with our clients. Over the years we’ve become quite good at mirroring the corporate culture of our clients. These “connections” have enabled the change management processes but we should not be deluded into thinking that building strong personal relationships is our change management process. We need to be way more thoughtful and structured about how we are going to drive organizational change and assist our clients with designing, leading, and implementing change.
On the process side, we have excellent Business Analysts and Functional Consultants who work very well with our designers and engineers to design and build a state of the art systems. We document the “as is” and the “to be” state quite well. But that isn’t sufficient when we are driving large scale organizational change. Not only do we need to design the “as is” state but we also need tools for rationalizing the ROI of the change and then a plan to drive wide-scale adoption of the new methods and procedures.
As a company, we do many things very well and we need to continue to evolve our thinking and methodologies. I am raising this with each of you today to begin a companywide conversation about change management and how are we going to evolve the people process and technology aspects of our engagements. The combination of Sites and Docs coupled with the DAM/Aprimo workflow tools is leading us down this path regardless. We can’t just be good at implementing systems against business goals, we need to be good at leading change in all three dimensions.
Remember, rarely is the technology that is the impediment to success… it is the people, process, and change management issues. I believe we can be the agents of change that our clients need to push through and make the most of their investments.
Let’s go be great!
Brad