Make your company likable to your employees

Here are some good reasons why:

http://dailyinfographic.com/11-incredible-reasons-to-have-friends-at-work-infographic

Why do we change our passwords every 90 days?

I consider myself the enemy of unexamined practices, and password policy practices haven't been updated since the late 90's.  Here are some articles to read and consider:

http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/blog/post/password-change-myths/

http://www.sicpers.info/2010/03/why-do-we-annoy-our-users/

Origin Story

Let's say you found out today that a new Spider-man movie is coming out, and it's a reboot of the franchise, with a completely new cast taking on the roles of Peter Parker, Mary Jane Watson and J. Jonah Jameson.  Now you, being the huge fan you are you talk your significant other into going to the theater on opening night to behold the new spectacle.

Now here's a few things you already know before the lights go dim:  1.  There's going to be a normal teenager and 2.  That person is going to get bit by a spider, an action that will bestow upon them all the positive aspects of spiders and none of the negative ones (they won't, for instance, capture people in a web and eat them, you hope).

How do you know that there will be a spider bite?  Because that's how the process of becoming a spider-based meta-human begins.  The origin story is already ingrained in the minds of people coming to see the movie, and the shared familiarity of the story can lead to more efficient story telling.

To begin an honest assessment of your current business process, you must first focus on the origin.  How do customers find you.  When they go looking for your product, what are the most likely avenues they will take?  You can't always control these factors, but the ones you can control, you should, and this starts with the ringing of the phone, or the submission from the website.  The experience the customer has when looking to engage your company will be a lasting impression, so don't mess it up.

A few business principles come immediately into play here:

1.  Provide a single point of contact for customers and suppliers.
          The more times you pass the baton, the higher the chance that some one is going to drop it.  Eliminate transferring of calls from person to person, waiting on hold, waiting for a callback.  Always work to shorten the 'hops' from customer and his destination.  In this you'll be  optimizing their experience without them even knowing it!

2.  Merge your swim lanes
         Make sure your call center, web submissions and walk ups all get funneled into the same  optimized workflow.

3.  Simplify the steps
          If you take the "0 for operator" off of your incoming phone system, your customers and vendors may secretly hate you.

There are many more we can apply to this step, but we'll cut it short here for the sake of readability.  The takeaway is that you need to nail down your entry process first, because in a 'move data upstream' world, you'll be helping every process that needs to occur after.

Business Design Principle Number 1: Design the process around value adding activities.

Business Design Principle Number 1:  Design the process around value adding activities.
If you've never read the story of Baron Von Steuben you owe it to yourself to at least check out his Wikipedia page.  The man was a General in the Revolutionary War, and the man understood the importance of process.  He was given the task of turning untrained militia men into a force that could stand up the British Regulars.  He implemented changes to the American military structure that be came the "manual" on how the American military operated and trained for the next 50 or so years, and was famously quoted as saying ,"You say to your soldier, 'Do this' and he does it. But I am obliged to say to the American, 'This is why you ought to do this' and then he does it."  Even from the beginning of our country, American's had to know the "why".

In business, value added activities are the "why".  When creating a process, the target is the Cost, Time, and Quality that you deliver to the customer.  Often processes that have been in place for long periods start to pick up activities that don't help achieve these goals.  The most common cause I have seen in this area is when a permanent policy is put in place to address a transient issue, usually because that issue caused a significant headache the one time it occurred.  So the "ounce of prevention" method would be to examine changes before they take place to ensure that it is a VAA, but if that occurred there'd be no reason for analysts to come in later and cut this fat.  As an analyst, I suppose I should be somewhat grateful that these things do occur.

But every activity in your process should be able to stand on its own, and if you find things that were put into place to handle circumstances that no longer exist, or if they take away from VAA's for a minimal return (i.e., making a change that adds time 100% of the time to deal with an issue that only occurs .01% of the time and only costs 10% more time when it does occur is, well, you do the math).  So make them stand, and if the activity can't withstand the criticism, then its time to change the process.

Technology that fixes process

One of my favorite places to work with is Hanover College.  Over the years I've been able to partner with them on a number of technology initiatives.  When they were needing a new, more cost effective way to monitor and control student print activity, and give students more access to information and resources, I was able to work with Hanover on a number of projects, including follow me printing. This is where you send a job to a virtual print queue, and then where ever you go, you can release the job there.  It really helps on a big campus, especially for students who may be working in a dorm room and who want to pick up that job at the library or student center later.  I also put in the cost accounting and control of print jobs for students, where a student uses their swipe card to release the job, and so they can be charged back for the prints they make.  We used integration of active directory with key fobs for copier access with the help of Dr. John Collins, the head of IT, who actually wrote the scripting to combine the two systems.  The same system also helped with implementing their green initiatives to limit print usage and enforce campus print policy. 

I think this is why moving into Process Optimization is an easy transition from IT, because the correct use of technology leads to efficiency.  I always tell my clients, "If what  your doing on the computer isn't making your job easier, then the computer isn't doing its job."  I avoid "technology for technology's sake", but often times leading people to the right technology or even making them aware of what things exist to help is a large part of discovery.

Getting through a process like Cyrus the Great

Herodotus the historian records an interesting story of an ancient emperor who, when scouting a river, found it impassible.  Unfortunately for the river, it also managed to drown one of Cyrus' horses, which caused the emperor to swear that he would break the river and allow a person to cross the entire river without ever getting their knees wet.  In order to make good on this threat, he put his entire army to work making one-hundred and eighty trenches to channel the river in separate directions.  Having taken his revenge on the river, he then proceeded to conquer a kingdom called Babylon, which may have been even more impressive.

"But David," you ask, "what does this have to do with business processes?"  I'm glad you asked, theoretical questioner.  Because often times we allow our process to become stagnant and backed up because we funnel them all through one office superstar who will take on the work, but won't complain when given more tasks.  The problem is that even the best employee is limited as to what they can accomplish and soon their desk will become the dreaded "B" word, Bottleneck.  What's worse, eventually this dedicated rock star is going to take a vacation, a sick day, or heaven's forbid, find more pay for less work somewhere else.

If you have a process at the office that comes to a dead stop when one person goes MIA, then it's time to start digging trenches.  Funnel the work off to others so that no one person holds the fate of your productivity in their hands.  Not only will it keep work flowing when that person is absent, but having that relief valve when the work begins to pile up will give you a happier employee as well.

The path of least resistance

"What you don't understand," he stated, "is that the sales department is the reason things aren't getting done right!"

The accounting department was very convinced that if sales just did their job right, then everything else would work out.  In their minds there was no other possibility.  My response was to explain that sales people are like electricity, they always take the path of least resistance.  If the easiest way to complete their task is to circumvent a process, then they will, over and over again.  They are natural efficiency experts, although their means of achieving efficiency, when combined with a certain task oriented tunnel blindness, can cause headaches for others.  But when you see that a process is being excessively worked-around instead of worked-through, then maybe it's time to change the process.  Like the picture above, people will gravitate to the easiest way possible to reach their goal, and in business.  Workers want to do their job in the most efficient way possible, it is up to you to find the path most used, and pave that path.