BAU versus non BAU

The meaning of BAU.

According to Wikipedia “Business as usual (BAU) – the normal execution of standard functional operations within an organization – forms a possible contrast to projects or programs which might introduce change. BAU may also stand in contradistinction to external events which may have the effect of unsettling or distracting those inside an organization.”

Handover to BAU

May be this is not important for most of IT guys who are deeply focused on implementing the function and deliver it, this more into a support thing, when you hand over certain function of application or even process to BAU that means, it is live going forward and this is the standard which we will follow.

That’s why someone should look out of the box and get to know end to end before handing a new process to BAU, and someone else has to maintain the process and provide enhancements in order to avoid getting out of date.

BAU Anti-Patterns

Business process anti patterns still needs to be detected and have solutions identified to address these cases, otherwise it will end up messing the whole process.

May be this is a good opportunity to study certain anti-patterns by giving the opportunity for violations to occur in certain testing modes or environments and welcoming negative scenarios and actions to realize all the facts and take it into consideration in an enhanced version of the process.

Challenge your BAU

From time to time we should just open our processes for challenges, get some fresh folks to question your process, and also get some experienced folks to evaluate your process someone who are totally coming from the outside can even point you to hidden threats or can point to a simple factor of success, it always takes courage to accept the change.

BAU crack

When we go deep toward details, it becomes part of our thinking and we might miss the point or the objective due to this.

Let me tell this story short, it was one day while having dinner with my team, and we were just chatting about the nature of food each one used to have regularly, and I remember one of my team members saying and I will quote “I eat this every day this is BAU for me, I mean this usual” and we realized that he used the word BAU unintentionally so everyone started to laugh.

It was fun however it indicates that we are deeply overloaded in my organization at that time in processes not just this but BAU processes this was like a magical word, even if you need to end some debates or discussions about certain functionality, you can simply say it is BAU, and no one will even question this functionality.

This extreme right? But real in some cases.

Open Up for non BAU

Encourage your work force to come up with alternatives and simplified ways of doing the same thing, offer awards and use gamification techniques to support creative ideas towards your processes enhancements and change.

Promoting the why and the why not as fair questions can help get more accurate and optimized results, we think the solution is in Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery CI/CD for the process itself not only the technology or the tools.