Delivering Progress - Engage, Examine, Envision, Experiment, Execute (and repeat)

Annoyingly alliterative article attributes aside, my main intent with this article is to offer a practical approach to delivering progress. I'm intentionally avoiding the terms "innovation" and "transformation" as I often find myself a bit abstracted from reality when I peer too far above the first horizon. In no way am I downplaying the importance of keeping an eye beyond the immediately achievable; that's just not the focus here.

Throughout my career, I've had experience with organizations that operate where "business drives technology" as well as the alternative. Regardless of the organization's organic default on this relationship, my most rewarding challenges have been presented by business partners with a vision for aspirational, incremental progress paired with a pragmatic, patient, approach.

While - as in most things - I'm very much a work-in-progress in this area, here's how I boil down the core components of forming a successful partnership that delivers tangible progress. This is written through the lens of a service provider, author-biased towards technology services.

Engage

All successful partnerships are founded on genuine, often symbiotic relationships. It's easy to come to the table with preconceived proposed solutions, especially in the spirit of trying to exude preparedness and expertise.

A more successful approach involves actively listening to the problems your customers are trying to solve, prodding with questions focused on the business goals, and memorializing and organizing the products of the discussions (notes, process documentation, business requirements, etc.) such that they can live on throughout the engagement.

Examine

The best way to find opportunities to improve is to fully-understand where we are today. If you don't know where you are, getting to where you want to be is going to be tricky. I'm still working to refine my approach here (and likely will always be improving), but I boil this down to a few key pieces.

• What - What business process is in scope of the improvement we're targeting?
• Who - Who are the players in this process? What are their respective roles? Where do we have gaps, blind spots, or tricky handoffs between players?
• How - How much of the process is manual or mostly-manual? How consistently is the process executed (i.e. do we manage the exceptions or do they manage us)?
• Why - What's the business value of the process? How does the improvement increase or optimize that value?

The examination phase is the most important to document, socialize with stakeholders, and validate. Everyone starting from the same baseline is critical to moving forward.

Envision

Here's where the real fun begins. Now that we've written down who does what, how they do it, and why, let's break out the [virtual] whiteboard and craft a vision of the future.

Sometimes it's better to start from a blank slate and re-envision how we'd do it if we were starting over. This can be liberating and - in some cases - the most productive approach. You'll still need to roadmap from current to future, so starting this stage from a blank slate pushes some work downstream.

In other situations - and in the spirit of this article - it's easier to start from the current state, identify the general destination and plot out very close proximity targets that can be reached in the near term with a straightforward plan. An example would be identifying approval steps in a process that occur via email (read: carrier pigeon) and asking if anything is ever "rejected." If not, change that to an informational step and remove the lag time of waiting for approval.

I use an example that doesn't involve technology intentionally. These discussions aren't about creating a new whizbang system that can automagically churn out better widgets as fast as possible. They're a collaborative opportunity to improve in any way possible.

Now that we've set a vision, let's make it happen.

Experiment

This isn't about the Scientific Method, but I have met quite a few folks that apply it here. The key here is action. We've gotten the gang together, figured out what we do, where we wanna go, and our first few stops. This should be an iterative process where you methodically test those first few steps out of the current state.

To simplify, just plan, test, review results against vision and expected value, revise broader plan, and repeat.

Hmm... maybe I should just refer to the Scientific Method.

Execute

This is the easy part right? If something you experimented worked as expected, implement it and you've made progress towards the destination. The key is making the progress measurable and mutually-accredited. We did it together by everyone coming to the same table to accomplish a collective goal.

If you don't write it down, reflect your results in the "new" current state definition, and celebrate the increase or optimization in business value, did you really actually do anything? If you find the opportunity to have fun and establish or improve relationships along the way, even better.