Bruce Hodes, Seven rules of strategic guessing

I really enjoyed this article by Bruce Hodes.  His experience of a lack of strategic planning within business managers and leaders is one that resonates with most of us engaged in organisational design and improvement.

His article includes a great many good lessons to think about on how to start planning for 2013.  It's well worth a read if you have 5-minutes!

Talking to customers and getting an honest perspective on the 'true reality' of your business value is I think one of the most important starting points.  It's not true that customers 'always know best' but they certainly provide a smarter sounding board than internalized opinions that come from people that never speak with the people that buy your products and services.

Thoughts?

I.

Seven rules of strategic guessing

More opportunities to write about agility!

I seem to spend much of my business life these days sharing ideas, tools and methods with businesses on the subject of business agility  - having the means to adapt to change and be first-to-market AT LEAST better than competitors. I was therefore delighted to be invited by USTech Solutions Inc. to setup two new blogs on the subjects of TalentAgility (talentagility.blogspot.com) and ITAgility (ITagility.blogspot.com) to act as a knowledge pool for subject-matter.

The new sites are up and running and I'll be posting specific news feeds and content to them (as will others) over the coming weeks.

I.

Poor Knowledge Worker Productivity Should Come As No Surprise To Bosses

How productive are knowledge workers?

It's a topic that's been on and off the agenda of management teams since the late 1950's when people started to realize that a large percentage of employees would one day be part of this group.

Walk into most offices these days and you'll see people working on spreadsheets, Word docs and Powerpoint presentations - home-made applications that 'fill in gaps' to support information analysis and data management needs where the larger process centric business apps don't offer any support.  Over the past few years this 'long-tail' of applications demand has grown ever longer.  The number of requirements for new apps driven by mobile computing, social networking and the expectations of users for self-service computing has multiplied beyond recognition.

When you have knowledge workers mashing and sharing data on these desktop home-made systems, how can you measure their productivity?  Are you PRODUCTIVE if you produce a spreadsheet?  I would argue no.  Productivity suggests that you contribute towards or produce an outcome, not just do stuff.

Could you imagine manufacturing plants ever being so lax in the way they use their labour force?

If we're going to start making the office environment as productive as the factory floor, managers are going to  have to start measuring knowledge worker productivity - and I believe the only way they're going to achieve this is by drawing a line between workforce effort and those defined actions that lead to desired outcomes.

Back in writing mode

Well we're into autumn now and as the leaves start to turn from green to brown I'm back into writing mode.  My next book is coming along nicely.  After spending 18-months planning it and writing methods statements I'm now into the throws of writing 'Organization By Design' - my new book on OBD methods.

As usual when starting a new book I feel I'm at the base of a large mountain with no idea how long it will take to get to the top - or what route I will eventually have to take in order to reach the summit!

Well the good news is that for this book at least I've already done most of the hard work in researching the content before I start, so it hopefully will go swimmingly  (guess I'll have to wait and see).

More details of the topic areas of OBD to follow but it will come as no surprise that most of the topics will be familiar to organizational design experts - with one or to surprises thrown in.

Stay tuned!

I.

Information Worker Productivity Definition

Over the past 3-weeks I've been writing a White Paper on Information Worker Productivity for the Australian public sector.  It's been quite fascinating to take another look at this topic considering that the first time I examined the subject was 2002 - and a lot of things have changed since then.

What has surprised me is the lack of clarity over how Information Worker Productivity should be measured.
Here I've pulled out an excerpt that attempts to re-define how productivity of Information Workers should be measured.
A productive Information Worker in the 21^st century is someone who contributes more to stated organisational outcomes in less time.

This perspective on IWP is a departure from assessments of productivity focused on numbers of documents produced or the numbers of transactions processed. To MEASURE productivity in these terms requires an understanding of what the outcomes are and an appreciation of the linkage between Information Worker ‘effort’ and the ‘contribution’ it produces to serve the outcome.

The White Paper will be available online in the next few days.  Welcome your thoughts and perspectives.

I.