Software For Management

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GufMa-J8cI&feature=related

Not being successful, in this case in completing projects, seems to inspire longer hours, more meetings, rationalizations… all sorts of things, maybe anything but a change in process. Changing how we communicate and collaborate with the team improves accountability and saves time…so projects can be completed on time.

Needed is a performance management tool that enables you to manage performance at the:
1. Business (including Strategic Plan and BI) level, at the
2. Project level (screenshot below), and at the
3. Individual, human resource level… all within one application.

I’d like to share another thought about the role of comfort in business.  I’m often struck with how often it functions in an orthogonal, if not opposing, manner to working strategically and winning at the game of business. Hm… first sentence and I already wrote that to nicely. How about saying it this way: “Be very careful about doing, or supporting others doing what’s comfortable… check that it really is aligned with working, managing strategically, with the end goal in mind… otherwise it may mean you or they will not survive.”

For a similar perspective, check out Alan Webber’s book, Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business without Losing Your Self.  It seems that when we lose the sense of being in touch with survival needs, we get feeling insulated, we rationalize not needing to adapt, not needing to respond, not needing to take the extra steps.

This last week I was peering at a man’s face, as his body lay crumpled on the street, his eye fixed wide open, someone feeling for his pulse, someone else calling 911.  He had walked across a busy highway at night, instead of walking the extra 50 feet down to the light ahead of us.  He didn’t survive, but he did what was comfortable… until it suddenly wasn’t.

I worked with customers from two different governments this week.  Both are slow to get even basic strategy tracking and resulting action plans implemented.  Both would be dead on the street if they had to face a car bearing down on them.

So ask yourself this: How nimble is your business, how much does doing what’s strategic, what ensures survivability, rank over comfort?

Bottom Line:

Staying in touch with the need to survive is a great antidote to over-emphasizing comfort in how we engage in life at work.  In fact, losing touch with survival needs makes us all too complacent, protective and non-adaptive in a world that often rewards the one who adapts the quickest. Be aware of the role of comfort in your work style and the work style of those around you.

I have been swamped with a large international project for the past few months, and blogging as well as a few other things, have all had to take a back seat. One thing I have been interested in writing about it seeing how people manage and translate information into a preferred work style.

In the past I’ve talked about how important follow-up is to the employee feedback and review process.  In fact, it’s possibly more important than most of the review.  Without a follow-up process, the value of the review quickly evaporates.  Today, I just wanted to share a quick thought as it applies to performance management.

If you think about it, follow-up is critical to employee reviews, but it’s equally as important to strategic planning and performance management. Follow-up, buttressed by some type of assessment or measuring process is key to anything we expend significant resources on to produce a change .  That’s true whether the follow-up is a general assessment of “What worked” and “What didn’t”, or if it is tied to specific outcome metrics (ex. Improve % of customer retension, increase % of website activity, etc.)

Stephen Gill, in an earlier blob – Describes an apt metaphor, characterizing our approach to measuring the impact of training and other “improvement” activities to playing golf in the dark – can’t accurately tell where the pin is, don’t know how close the ball you hit is to the pin and after while, you don’t care…  http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2653383/39418883

I see that regularly in training efforts.  And on a broader scale, the analogy of investments in business and performance improvement look like playing golf without a clear assessment of the changes we make in swing or clubs.  Instead, we approach our efforts more along these lines: As long as we are still on the fairway and the game is still ongoing… we keep playing, and hoping for the best.

If there’s money in the bank, we keep playing.  Actually as the game rolls on, whether there’s more or less money in the bank, we in fact do develop theories about what “made the difference.”  The conclusions usually aren’t based on measurements, but on a perceptually based (not fact based, but much much less work to construct) opinions.

This puts us at risk to look like the story of the blind men describing the elephant by their immediate experience.  Notice how strongly we all react to others having conclusions that aren’t fact based… the conflict over the health care bill being one good example.  Assessment, and the facts that come out of it, can save you time and money, not to mention face.

Bottom Line:

Performance Management needs follow-up, which needs metrics in the worst way, otherwise it’s subject to false conclusions based on perceptions rather than facts, inactivity or just expensive, poor return on investments in “performance enhancing” activities.

Do yourself a favor, limit the performance investments to what you’re willing to invest in following-up and I bet you’ll like the results.