Be Different or be dead

February 24, 2020

6 simple ways ‘CRAP’ can be cut from your organization

Source: Pexels

6 simple ways ‘CRAP’ can be cut from your organization.

The world is a noisy and cluttered place to live; so many choices and so many people exercising them.

Resources available are scarce and limited but demand continues to grow.

How can organizations — and governments for that matter — achieve their growth objectives with limits on the available time and money necessary to achieve them? And in some cases, not just holding the line on resources but reducing their availability?

Obviously productivity gains will offset the need to add some resources.
If the organization can realize a 10% increase in productivity, and growth requires a 5% increase in operations expenses, growth goals can be more than achieved assuming the targeted productivity savings are realized and are allocated to growth projects — spending productivity gains elsewhere is a waste and results in added costs being necessary.

But there are limits on how much should be mined out of expenses from productivity to fund growth.

Doing things more efficiently has its limits and it’s trade offs

Changing operational processes to drive cost out can impact customer service.
Costs of a re-engineered process might decrease but customers could be dissatisfied with the resulting way they have to engage with the organization — it’s less customer friendly.

And they express their dissatisfaction by buying less or by moving to another supplier.

Outsourcing call centers to remote regions of the world, for example, may reduce costs but could also reduce customer loyalty due to the new experience that customers have to endure.

And of course when productivity benefits are calculated, the opportunity costs associated with impaired service and lost revenue are rarely part of the analysis.

In my experience, the bigger play is not to focus on how to do things right — seek more efficiency — but rather to do the right things — be more effective.

Effectiveness is achieved when the right set of new programs is selected and is flawlessly executed to achieve the long term strategic intent of the organization.

Effectiveness is not just deciding on the new things you need to do

A huge part of effectiveness is not what additional to take on, but what you decide to give up — the current activities in motion you decide to stop.

It’s forced obsolescence — productivity applied on a macro scale (large projects or blocks of activity) as opposed to eliminating smaller pieces of the operations (a call center or product fulfillment process).

Forced obsolescence — cut the CRAP — is consciously eliminating yesterday’s relevance for tomorrow’s necessity.

Examples of forced obsolescence initiatives could include marketing programs established in the past to enhance a product line that are no longer in the crosshairs of the strategy. Or a planned HR system built to support acquiring skills and competencies that are no longer considered essential.

This is my step-by-step process to force obsolescence out.

1. Assign a senior champion

Appoint a respected and trusted senior person with a high tolerance for ‘pain’ and whose compensation is based on how much savings is actually realized by the cut the crap activity.

Avoid the mistake that most organizations make by assigning a mid level manager to the task. This communicates that forcing obsolescence out isn’t really all that important and like many other corporate programs, “it too shall pass”.

2. Take inventory

Inventory all current initiatives in the organization. It’s important that the list be complete in order to capture all of the activity consuming resources. I suggest that you set an annual expense threshold — say, $100K — and identify only activity that exceeds this amount.

The point is to isolate activity that consumes a material amount of resources and a threshold criteria is a meaningful way of doing it.

>3. Create a ‘keep’ list

Create a list of those initiatives that should remain because they all directly support the organization’s strategy.
Make keep list short, as there is a tendency to try and justify everything that is currently going on as vital to the future of the company.

This, of course, is hogwash and is merely an attempt for people to protect their position in the organization. If you end up with 100 major initiatives on the list, walk away. You are wasting your time.

4. Create a ‘cut’ list

Create a list of yesterday’s work that is no longer needed because it is not relevant to the strategy the organization has chosen.
Make the cut list long; make it tough to keep doing activities of yesterday.

As a guideline, you should have at least 3 cut activities for every keep activity; on a threshold of $100K that means you are cutting $300K in expenses for every $100K you keep — a 3:1 payback; not a bad place to start.

5. Finalize keep and cut lists

With both lists in hand, the senior leader must present and get input on both lists throughout the organization to get as much buy-in as possible.

Forced obsolescence will never get 100% support so don’t bother fretting over it. This is a challenging step as no one wants to give up what they’re doing. They have too much emotional equity in what they’re busy with.

So debate and listen then make the call on what needs to stay and what needs to go.

6. Prepare the CRAP execution plan

Develop a 6 month action plan to execute the cut list initiatives. Include firming up the annual savings and the organizational units that will realize them.

THE key step — close the loop by reducing their operating expense budgets and place savings in a special account that can be used to fund new initiatives.

This fund should be available to anyone responsible for introducing a new strategic program that is a priority.

And beware of those who possess the CRAP.

These ‘custodians of the past’ are people who are comfortable handling past activities; they enjoy them and they don’t want to change.

They are managers of irrelevance and are critical to the CRAP elimination process. If they are permitted to continue to do their thing they will infect others in your organization and prevent them from taking on the new direction.

Identify these folks and manage them: either reassign them or, if they are unwilling to move to the future, exit them with dignity from your organization.

Cut the CRAP will save the world. If we don’t expunge today’s unproductive and wasteful activity, we won’t have the resources to take on the new initiatives necessary to advance organizations and societies.

Taken to its ultimate conclusion, the obsolete will rob the world of growth and limit our possibilities.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.24.20 at 06:33 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

February 10, 2020

3 proven ways to make an easy and affordable business plan

Source: Pexels

3 proven ways to make an easy and affordable business plan.

If you can answer 3 questions, your business plan will beat all others.

Unfortunately, many organizations don’t develop a strategy to guide them into an unpredictable future; they rationalize the current planning process to be too complicated, time consuming and expensive.

And they’re right.

Numerous people gather in a room for a strategic planning session. Subject matter experts descend of the group and try to impress everyone with their detailed knowledge of the many governing factors that need consideration in the strategy building process, and many days are consumed — in my experience wasted — to get the strategy perfect.

Normally the services of a third party firm are used to both facilitate the session and provide expert content to the plan direction and efficacy. This is a clever way of avoiding having the people responsible for the strategy’s success taking ownership of the direction taken by applying their own opinions and good judgement.

The planning team is presented with material, they ask questions about various aspects of it and in the end most of the time they agree with the results of the analysis and direction proposed.

But at the end of the day, the traditional planning process takes so much time and energy, there is insufficient time left to develop how the plan will be executed in the trenches by real people. And the planning team is left with a strategy that may make sense on paper, but can’t be executed effectively because there was insufficient time devoted to implementation.

Get insanely focused on execution

Given that eventually any strategy or plan must result in action, the best planning process is predicated on the premise: keep it simple, get to the gut issues quickly and ACT.

Minimize the strategy direction setting time; maximize the implementation action planning time.

Loosen up on strategy development; tighten up on execution.

The strategy-building process I developed was necessary because although the field of experts who could help me develop a theoretically pristine direction was wide and deep, the number who actually could help in plan execution was close to zero.

The process I developed was simple, fast and time efficient. And unlike its brethren, it used the knowledge and experience of the planning team members rather than going with a third party planning expert — added benefit was the team building that went on during the process.

My process — the strategic game plan — was based on discovering the answers to 3 questions; the answers defined the strategy.

Growth — HOW BIG do you want to be?

Most planning processes end with financial results. They calculate the growth results of executing the strategic direction chosen.
My process starts with your growth intentions, and builds the strategy from HOW BIG you want to be. The reason is simple: more aggressive growth goals require a more aggressive — and risky — strategy, and more moderate growth goals need a more incremental — and less risky — strategy.

The traditional planning approach forgets that there is an extremely tight relationship between revenue growth and strategic intent; my strategic game plan doesn’t and that’s what makes my approach DiFFERENT than others.

Customers — WHO do you want to SERVE?

You have a goal to grow revenue 25% annually over the next 36 months. The next question is where are you going to get it? Where are you going to invest your scarce resources of time and money.

It boils down to selecting a group of customers who collectively have the potential to generate the revenue you have decided to go after.
To get the right answer to this question requires an intimate understanding of the various customers you serve.

You can’t choose the customer group to generate the revenue you covet if you don’t understand the propensity of your various customer segments to buy from you — discover their secrets and success will follow.

Competitors — HOW will you compete and WIN?

It would be nice if you were the only provider of products and services to the customer group you’ve chosen, but that’s not likely to be the case. There is likely to be healthy aggressive competitors targeting the same customers you want to target, so the challenge you face is to determine how you will differentiate your organization from all others you will be competing with.

Why should people choose your organization when they have other choices available?

What makes your team special in view of the alternatives available?
HOW will you compete is intended to explore the competencies of your organization that you can exploit to gain competitive advantage, with emphasis on how you can be positioned in the customer group you’ve chosen as the ONLY one that does what you do.

By answering these 3 questions using the expertise of those in the room you will have your business plan quickly (less than 3 days) and inexpensively (a personalized experience for your team). And it will be owned by every person who has contributed to it which means execution will follow.

if you want your business plan to be easy and affordable, this is the way to do it.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.10.20 at 02:06 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

January 25, 2020

How interdepartmental collaboration can be improved in cool and unique ways

How interdepartmental collaboration can be improved in cool and unique ways.

There’s a BIG problem in how businesses work today—a problem serious enough to stop work productivity dead in its tracks.

Yet, few seem to be aware of it, let alone find a solution.

Business departments are not collaborating as well as they should be.

“Yeah, no one’s working together but we’re still selling well and meeting KPIs. I don’t see what’s wrong here.”

If happier and more hard-working employees, significantly improved work performance, and increased revenue are things your business doesn’t need, then you can forget about fostering innovation.

I trust you are in the majority of leaders who want to see his or her business succeed. If that’s the case, I urge you to read on and find out what’s really disrupting interdepartmental collaboration—and how you can fix the problem.

The silo mentality

Silos are used in farms to separate different types of grains from each other. They’re wonderful inventions of machinery for agriculture, not so much for businesses.

The silo mentality can seep into business departments and affect teamwork and collaboration severely. How this materializes is that departments start to hoard valuable information and become reluctant to share it across the company.

This could happen for a multitude of reasons including power struggles, lack of belief in other team members, and poor communication practices.

The silo mentality is a serial killer of work performance.

It destroys trust and relationships when employees are reluctant to communicate with each other. Businesses cannot take advantage of golden opportunities because they don’t have enough data to make informed decisions.

Customers lose faith due to deteriorating customer service and product quality.

The problem is, it’s tricky to find out if the silo mentality is plaguing your business until something bad happens.

There are several telltale signs to be aware of in determining whether your team members are affected by the issue.

Fragmented decision making

Teams in silos make decisions for the sake of their respective departments rather than the company.

Departments want the best for themselves and don’t see a reason to address the needs of other business units.

Lack of responsibility leading to a blame culture

There is no clear indicator of who is responsible for what in completing company tasks. Project responsibilities float around departments without any sense of ownership.

If something does not go as planned, it’s always Employee X or Department Y’s fault, never themselves.

Non-existent innovation

Businesses may find themselves stuck in a rut innovation-wise. IT systems are still working on Windows XP. Department heads find themselves working overnight on stacks of paperwork.

There is seemingly a resistance to adopting new technologies and innovative systems that make work easier and more enjoyable.

Resistance to change is such an ever-present problem in businesses that the Harvard Business Review has an article on how to overcome it… back in 1969.

Incoherent company vision

Executives and department leaders have different views on how the business should move forward. For example, the sales team is demanding a new CRM tool but the CEO sees no reason to since sales are already going through the roof with the old CRM.

In other words, there is a clash in vision between the ones at the top of the organizational chart and employees who are doing the majority of the work.

Now that you know what’s causing the silo mentality, what can you do to overcome it and inspire collaboration across all business units?

Build a culture of empathy

Empathy is the key to effective interdepartmental collaboration.

You should encourage teams to take on the role of other departments for a day or two. By learning about other people’s work, your employees will be able to look at their colleagues from a different, more insightful perspective.

They can even pitch in ideas from their own experiences to solve the problems of other departments which is one of the most cited benefits of good interdepartmental collaboration.

Can you make someone who is not empathetic, be more empathetic? Of course not.

But, you’re building a culture, not forcing individuals to change their personalities. When you establish a culture of empathy, employees will collaborate by themselves with other business units, no matter who they are.

You don’t need to herd them around like sheep — that’s the power of good company culture.

Tell employees why it’s important to collaborate

Give your team members a clear and relevant cause to be passionate about — why should they collaborate?

When your employees are passionate about the vision and purpose you bring forward, they will collaborate.

The best way to drive this motivation is by telling your team members what they stand to gain from collaborating well with other departments.

It could be fat bonuses, extended leave, a higher chance of getting promoted. Whatever it is, make the purpose of collaboration important and reward employees for their efforts.

Revamp communication procedures and policies

If you’re reading this, your company’s communication procedures are likely to be outdated and inefficient. It’s time to change.

Remove all the dumb rules that impede collaboration in the first place. One common rule that should be banished forever is being able to contact other employees only at a certain time in the day or with a certain communication medium (read: emails only). Never do that.

Don’t be afraid to embrace technology. There are tons of collaboration technologies today that help your employees communicate and collaborate a lot faster than back and forth emails. Slack, Trello, and Jira are some examples of tools that are being used by many leading companies today to great success, which your business can pick up.

Make sure the workstations are working properly and glitch-free, so they support the tools you use for your business needed to enable efficient collaboration. The last thing you’d want is a piece of shoddy software with features that are merely nice-to-haves.

Communication policies should also be revamped depending on what your business needs.

Generally, communication policies should facilitate open and non-hostile interaction between employees while also enabling the free flow of information between departments.

For example, your policy can clarify who to contact in urgent times or how team members should communicate with each other daily (e.g. team chats or face-to-face meetings?)

Lead by example

The final tip is arguably the most important solution in overcoming the silo mentality.

Leaders must embrace whatever change they want to see in their companies. If you want your team members to practice the pillars of successful collaboration, you should be doing the same. Always lead by example.

Inspiring collaboration across all business departments is achievable only if you overcome the silo mentality that is affecting communication and information sharing.

Practice the tips mentioned above and your team will be working seamlessly with each other in no time.

— Lisa Michaels is a freelance writer, editor and a thriving content marketing consultant from Portland. Being self-employed, she does her best to stay on top of the current trends in business and tech. Feel free to connect with her on Twitter.

• Posted 1.25.20 at 05:55 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

January 13, 2020

Why business process change should come before spending more money

Why business process change should come before spending more money.

Politicians are the most egregious offenders of believing a problem can be solved by simply throwing more money at it.

Their strategy is to capture the hearts of voters by promising to throw billions at a problem they feel is important. If the number one voter priority is health care, for example, the candidate-in-waiting promises to double spending on it as the solution.
Obviously, if you double down on health care spending you’re going to make epic improvements, right?

Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.

Most difficult problems can rarely be solved by more spending; they’re systemic issues at play that need to be fixed before deciding how much resource to apply.

Throwing $250 billion at health care for example, without changing the way it is practiced and delivered, won’t solve the essential problems.
Nor will doubling the annual budget on billing eradicate the errors made on customers’ bills — in fact it will only multiply the number of mistakes made.

Rewarding ineffectiveness with additional resources is crazy — may as well put your money into a boat.

And the craziness isn’t limited to the world of politics; most organizations have a tough time avoiding the trap of trying to spend their way out of a problem.

Rather than creating a new system for some reason some people think that increasing intensity or muscle power will somehow make things right.

It won’t.

A current system that doesn’t deliver what is expected must be replaced with one that does and should never be the recipient of lavish spending.

Re-creation, rather than making incremental changes to an existing system, is vital and is the only real solution when it comes to problems that have persisted for many years.

The process involves these seven steps.

1. Dedicate ONE person to be accountable

System problems are not solved by committee; there must be single finger accountability assigned and it should be to a senior leader in the organization who has a reputation of getting tough things done.

Far too often a mid-level process or systems manager is charged with the role of making the required changes and they fail because they don’t have the influence and currency in the organization that’s needed to sell the change to all the people with a vested interest in not seeing any change through.

2. Ask the customer how THEY want it to look

What? What do they know about systems re-engineering; about what an efficient system looks like?

Well, they may not have specific academic credentials, but they definitely know how they want to be engaged with an organization.

THEY know how the systems should “feel” so if you care about making it easy to engage with customers, listen up.
Informal focus groups are great ways to get input to help shape your approach to reinventing systems and processes.

Ask the customer how they want to be treated and follow their answer — keep the systems analysts away until you have squeezed out all the customer advice that you can.

3. Define the desired outcomes

What does “perfection” look like in terms of the results that the system must produce? Define the key outputs — a hip surgery in 2 weeks; a product delivery in 24 hours; same day service repair.

Start anew and build the system with no preconceived notions that come from the way things are currently done.

And be cautious about benchmarking best in class and copying their solution to the problem you are experiencing.

Whereas their approach might have some applicability and thus redeeming value, make sure you are responding to what your customers are telling you and not a best practise that worked for someone else.

4. Flow chart it in a simple form

What is needed is an extremely dumbed down version of the new system; simple is good, simpler is better.

And the main criteria to follow is to minimize the number of handoffs as possible.

Obviously, the greater the number of handoffs, the greater the likelihood that mistakes will happen and desired outcomes jeopardized.
Systems experts sometimes overly complicate their work, so be prepared to hold them back.

5. Examine how components of the current system could play into the new one

Even though you are starting with a clean slate and building something new, look to salvage pieces of the existing system(s) that can be integrated and not lose sight of what your customer wants.

Where you can avoid reinventing the wheel do it. But be careful to not be guided by the way things are currently done; replicating components of the current system that may not be particularly effective wont solve your overall problem.

6. Create a ‘straw dog’ version of the new system

Synthesize the brand new elements you have created for the new system with the keeper elements of the current one to produce a draft version of the new system.

Rigorously evaluate what you have created. Beat it up and try to expose weaknesses using customer input and the desired outcomes as criteria.
If the customer satisfaction criteria is less than 10/10, go back to the drawing board to make system revisions until it’s 100% perfect.

7. Get customer approval

Finally, when you think you’ve got it right, take the new system back first to your frontline teams and to the customer for their sign-off and approval.

How many organizations would even think to get customer acceptance? Right. Very few if any.

Internal stakeholders are usually consulted as the system acceptors and are expected to speak on behalf of customers, and whereas they might have a useful opinion on whether customer expectations would be satisfied by the new design, there is only one way to know for sure.

Engage them in the decision making process and ask them point blank if they approve the work; if it’s a “NO!” go back and revise it again.

Systems that don’t work should never be candidates for additional funding, they should be put on the chopping block and axed in favour of new vibrant approaches with a heavy dose of customer input and control of the outcome.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 1.13.20 at 04:09 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink