What does an organization really value?
I was at a client recently and found myself in a situation that provides a good illustration of how challenging it can be to gain support for ECM at an organization.
Basically I had spent five or six weeks in deep on this engagement—meeting with stakeholders, poring over documentation, analyzing their web presence, and working side-by-side with our project team and sponsor—plus, they were in a vertical that I had a lot of experience with. All in all, I felt pretty comfortable with my take on the organization and where they were headed…and I had some good ideas on where ECM could add business-relevant value.
Slice of life – social media and the Air Force
I recently stumbled upon an interesting post about the Air Force’s new social media policy on AF.mil. The post itself is really just a press release announcing the Air Force’s decision to open up access to social media sites from within the firewalls on bases across the globe–interesting enough if you’re fascinated by the rapidly expanding footprint of social media at organizations these days. But what really caught my attention was the couple of hundred comments people submitted in the week following the post.
I had the pleasure of meeting Robert Wolcott on a recent flight, and based on our conversation, I decided to pick up his latest book on innovation, Grow from Within (co-authored with Michael Lippitz).
Robert is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management and a founder of the Kellogg Innovation Network, which brings together Kellogg faculty with business leaders to articulate and solve key business challenges around innovation. He’s also a partner at Clareo Partners, a boutique consulting firm that helps large organizations develop innovation and entrepreneurship as strategic, enterprise capabilities.
The book is aimed primarily at the corporate entrepreneur, i.e., folks tasked with finding, nurturing, and operationalizing new businesses from within established organizations. However, there’s a lot of great food for thought here, whether you’re personally involved with corporate entrepreneurship efforts or simply interested in innovation generally. But there were a few things I found especially interesting that I want to call out here.
Successful innovation goes beyond great ideas
About three weeks ago, I sat next to Robert Wolcott on a long flight, and we had a great conversation. Robert’s a professor at Kellogg and a thought leader in corporate innovation, which is a topic I’ve thought a lot about over the years, but never in the systematic way his framework provided. He’s got a new book out (Grow from Within, co-authored with Michael Lippitz), which I highly recommend.
There were many useful take-aways from this book for me, but the most important was the fact that the success of bringing an innovation to market has as much to with how the innovation is brought to market as with the nature of the innovation itself.
Moving beyond projects (part three)
In the last couple of posts, we’ve been looking at the knowledge management (KM) and portfolio management benefits an organization can gain by shifting focus from away from projects and onto assets. In this post, we’ll turn to the ways an asset focus can benefit risk management at an organization.
Most importantly, at organizations that have a strong project orientation, risk management tends to be structured primarily around project risk (schedule, budget, requirements, and so on), while the other categories of organizational risk get considered primarily through a project lens. So, for example, instead of treating compliance risk in and of itself, compliance risk is addressed within the context of the individual projects or initiatives in flight.
Moving beyond projects (part two)
In the last post, we explored how a strong focus on projects can negatively impact knowledge management (KM) at an organization. In this post, we’ll turn to the negative effects a project focus can have on portfolio management.
Let me begin by saying that a project focus is absolutely critical to portfolio management in the day-to-day sense of the term, i.e., making sure that all in-flight projects and programs run smoothly, don’t step on each other’s toes, get done on time and on budget, and so on. However, portfolio management has a strategic value to the enterprise that goes beyond merely the care and feeding of the current projects at an organization. I’ve looked at this issue in depth elsewhere, but in short, doing portfolio management strategically requires moving past simply managing projects so that you can focus instead on managing the assets that your projects create, maintain, extend, and retire over the long-term rather than for the duration of a single project.
Moving beyond projects (part one)
It’s not uncommon for organizations to be heavily project focused, i.e., to align business activities and outputs with the projects that enable, create, or modify them. From budgeting, forecasting, and portfolio management, to cost and time accounting, staffing, and day-to-day operations, most of my clients, regardless of industry or size, exhibit this project-centric approach to work in critical functional areas (such as IT), but a good number of them exhibit this project focus across nearly the entire organization.
There are benefits to a project focus, of course, and to some extent it’s unavoidable, particularly in industries like construction, oil and gas, mining, aerospace, defense, and the like. But there are significant downsides to the project-centric approach, even for clients in these project-intensive industries.
In the rest of this post, we’ll take a look at some of the most common negative effects I see resulting from a strong project orientation and explore some of the alternative (and complementary) methods I typically recommend to help organizations structure their business activities and outputs more effectively.
In my practice, I tend to see two broad approaches to records management (RM) at organizations. In the first, everything is managed as a record—by casting the net as wide as possible, these organizations hope to be able to tightly control all their content and thereby reduce risk. In the second, only a narrowly defined set of information is considered records and managed; the rest is classified as non-records and left essentially to its own devices—by casting the net as narrowly as possible, these organizations admit that tight control over all information is not possible and focus their resources only on the most important corporate information, hoping to thereby increase their chances of succeeding at RM.
While the impetus for adopting each approach makes a certain amount of sense, as viable, long-term corporate strategy, they both fall short. The first is difficult to realize…and far too expensive to support even if realized—all content, regardless of importance or risk, is managed using a very resource-intensive ecosystem of tools and hardware. The second is far easier to realize because a far smaller set of content is in scope for RM (i.e., only a narrowly defined set of corporate records) but exposes the organization to an unacceptable level of litigation risk: because much of the content considered to be non-records is likely discoverable during a lawsuit and because it falls outside the scope of RM at the organization, it will be far more expensive and difficult to discover in a predictable, consistent way.
What I recommend in response to both of these is a tiered approach to RM that falls somewhere in between the two (hence the somewhat tongue-in-cheek title of the post) and allows an organization to manage different kinds of information using different levels of control based on risk and value to the organization. The result is a messier picture of information at the organization, but a far more practical one that can be supported with a greater degree of success.
Lifecycles and organizational awareness
In a previous post, we looked at some quick and easy ways the concept of lifecycles could contribute to an ECM initiative. In this post, we’ll take a look at one of the more advanced uses of lifecycles during ECM initiatives: to develop a more comprehensive view of the work of the organization.
agile ramblings 