Get your FREE 30-day trial.
Please complete all fields.
Ah, the good ol’ days
Last week I ran into a former customer of mine from about 16 years ago. While reminiscing about the years gone past, he shared an experience with me, about a project he had been involved with which had gone terribly wrong. The deployment had been horrendous, the partner engagement very superficial, and he had been just utterly dismayed to start another project again – ever again!
“Wow, poor guy!” I thought, and for some reason this conversation bothered me for the rest of the day until I remembered a few engagements I had been involved in with external vendors in my early days - oh boy, some make me cringe to this day, yikes. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say that I do and demand things waaaaay differently now, and I've learned many valuable lessons along the way. What I have noticed in my wiser, older years, and what has stood the test over and over for me, are exactly 3 keys. How do I know they are the secret to my success? Because I have run into many of my past customers and I’m happy to say that I have not instilled any fear in them.
Simple:
1. People
2. Process
3. Tools
The normal order in the usual project engagement is the reverse: tools first, then let’s see what processes we need to adjust, and then, when the time is right, we’ll let the people know what’s going on. Many of us have at least evolved to go in this order instead: Process, Tools, then People. But why do we continue to put People last?
It is the People who will be using the processes and tools, we must therefore start with them, and genuinely try to understand and listen to what they do, need, and want. How many times have you heard end-users say these words: “Well, if they had asked me, I would have…!” Or how about this: “That’s great, this won’t work for us, we do it this way!”
You must, therefore, talk to the People, find out what’s going on:
And then, LISTEN to what they say, write it down, record it, repeat it. Once you get a feel for what they do and how they do it, then proceed with #2.
This is the big elephant in the room. Everybody knows they have to change their process, but nobody wants to admit it, and definitely, nobody wants to make the effort to re-design it. Why? Usually, nobody has taken the time in the first place to properly design it. How many times have you received a “No, we don’t have one” when you’ve asked for process flow diagram. It’s painful to do, for two reasons:
And the TRUTH is why it is so difficult. People will realize they have to do things differently now, they have to change the way they work. We’ve all gone through this – I threw a change-fit recently when I received a new cable box and had to figure out the remote. Ridiculous, right?
The only way to get through this is to question every process, make sure to get an answer, then question it again. It will do wonders, trust me, and they will thank you later for having sweet looking process flow diagrams.
Alert – terribly bad analogy coming up: if your shoes are a size 10, and you keep wearing 9s, changing to a new, better, faster shoe won't help. (I told you it was ugly)
Everyone has used a tool (software, system, hammer, etc) that has made us miserable; yet, we go through upgrade after upgrade, years of using it, bruised thumbs, and just won’t get rid of it – we end buying the same shoe size in a different color, or newer material, and tell ourselves “…it’s okay, I’ll just grin and bear it until I get home, then I can take them off.”
Instead, here is what we should do:
I’m walking down the street and lo and behold it’s a customer of mine from a long time ago. We chat, laugh, chat some more, laugh some more, and we go our separate ways, smiling, remembering the good ol’ days of a project gone by, deployment gone great, and people gone home without achy feet.
