Who's and why's of Feedback?
There is a saying - 'No Man is an Island', which means no one, absolutely no one can survive without others (On second thought, i take that back, i know a few people who do!!!).
We interact with people, we work, play, argue, fight etc.
So overall, in the personal and professional conundrum of life, people 'interact' with each other.
In our personal and professional dealings, there are times when we act or react in a certain way that is unacceptable to others - Alas, 'We cannot please everyone all the time'.
Always remember, every person follows some thought process and the golden rule is 'Everyone of us does what he/she thinks is right, in that situation'. Be he/she the CEO of a Corporation or Super villian in a comic book.
So when we observe this sort of behavior in our Project Team, what do we do, how do we react as Project Managers? and most importantly, if we are ones on the receiving end, how do we take the feedback that others give us.
Let us take a real life situation that happened with me many years back. I was a rookie in a IT Large Firm and was working on a big multi million dollar Project. It was my first project right out of college. A large size manufacturing Company had hired our IT Vendor services to Automate one of their new plants. I was part of the development and installation team onsite with other 40 resources (Client and Vendors included) working dedicatedly on various aspects.
Then just a week before go live, my Project Manager had to go on a Personal leave for a Family emegency. I was the only available backup on that short notice. I was representing our Develpoment and Testing Groups now. Things were going fine with the dry runs, system tests etc till the day of go live.
On the night of go live, we started our deployment, things were going by the book for the first few hours then suddenly all hell broke lose, hardware starting failing, drives, switches, programs were not working, networking issues developed. This being a commercial Manufacturing plant which was being controlled by our PLC (Programmable Logic controller) programs, all the Silos, drives and Switches started malfunctioning. It was also a continuous process plant and a break in the process would have meant raw materials losses worth millions and indirect impacts in terms of Go Live date delays, commited dates and other dependencies.
Everyone in the plant started to panic, right from the half asleep Janitor to the Top C-level executives. Since we were the service providers and i was the only highest sitting mark representing our corporation's totem pole, guess who received the flak for all this....me!!!...Yes, and that too in no soft words or even in private...you get the rough idea.....
Finally, the situation was salvaged and we started resolving the issues one by one and things started running fine again.
After nearly 20 years that incident still gives me cold sweats, not so much the things that failed or the soup we were in, but the verbal lashings i got...
What went wrong here? Absolutely everything....How could it have been handled...definitely in a more professional manner...
Even in our Day to day IT Projects, we come across similar situations about our Team members, colleagues etc who needs to be repriminded or think annual appraisal sessions of your team members.
Feedback Process handling
So coming to - How to handle this situation>
Approach 1>
Plain and simple - Speak your mind.
Approach 2>
Provide feedback with a little preparation and technique. I call it the 'AGES' approach.
It needs a little Homework. Follow the below 4 steps -
1> A - Assess
Assess the Situation. Understand the problem
2> G - Good
Quantify other positive contributions of the person in focus. Think what value he provides to the Team, project and the corporation in general.
3> E - Empathize
Empathize with the person and elaborate the negative impacts of his/her actions, understanding that he/she was not doing it on purpose.
4> S - Solution
Think about ways to help the person.
Now let's analyze a Situation with the help of above 2 approaches
e.g. Situation is - We are in midst of an Agile project for which there are daily 9 AM Sprint meetings and all Team members are present except Mark. Mark is consistently late for the sprint stand-ups past few days.
Approach 1>
I approach Mark and reprimind him (Openly or in private).
'Mark, your behavior is unacceptable. You are always late for the stand ups. Make sure this does not happen again'
What happens during/after this? Mark immediately shuts off. He thinks of me as a rude, negative and inconsiderate person. This impacts his work, interactions with the Team and finally his work deliverable or the project as a whole.
Now this is not a very Leader like behavior. A Leader has to motivate and lead by guiding his team on the journey. Help them in their issues, understanding and Guiding them when and wherever possible.
So now let's try approach 2>
A - Assess
I analyze the situation and prepare my response. I focus on Mark's contributions and the current 'glitch' that is being observed for past few days. I also work out a few practical ways this can be resolved. Then i talk to Mark one on one.
G - Good
'Listen Mark, I know the project is in full flow and i see you are working very hard - day and night and especially your work on the ISO webservice solution was extremely well received by the client and it had zero defects too'
E - Empathize
'To continue the same trend of success, we as a Team have to focus on the project. That is why the daily sprint attendance is important, so everyone can understand the current Project progress, work dependencies, issues, project announcements, if any'
'Now i understand everyone has a personal life and sometimes there are some things that have to take a priority'
S - Solution
'So if there is anything there i can do to help you here, like changing your Office timings for a while or there is something you want to share, let's talk about it'
Which conversion do you think will have more impact.
So to summarize, to provide feeback, Keep your mind open, unbiased and clear, understand the situation or focus on the problem at hand not the person, understand the circumstances and behavior of the other person and help him/her resolve it positively. When you leave your feedback meeting, make sure neither one of you leaves with a bitter taste in his mouth, leave with a positie mark. After all, projects are a Team work.
Showing posts with label Management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Management. Show all posts
Friday, July 27, 2012
Monday, June 6, 2011
Business Transformation
In Today's economy lots of Organizations, especially in the financial sector have an increased focus on their internal IT spend and leveraging their business processes and lesser focus on improving the external business aspect.
This has lead to a lot of Enterprise level business transformation projects. Essentially these initiatives are more or less related to identifying duplicate and/or redundant business processes, eliminating them or making use of latest technology tools to achieve organizational efficiencies.
In general, most Financial organizations (Insurance, banking etc) are a little slow to adapting such enterprise wide changes due to strict regulatory and compliance policies and their sheer organizational size, resource count that would be required to execute the changes and the overall Organization culture.
They get into transformation projects due to sheer Market competition pressures, regulatory requirements, directional change in executive management or changes in labor market etc.
What is Business Transformation?
The primary purpose or objective of any business is to provide and add 'value' to their customers in return of the price paid. 'Value' is measured in terms of financial gains or commodity, service provided etc. In order to provide more or better 'value', organizations strive to improve, build upon or modify their processes etc so as to attain their objectives. Especially in the current economy, many business and Industry vertical C-Level executives have shifted their attention to business transformation activities.
One of the best Transformation examples, i have seen in today's marketplace is the innovation giant - Apple. The way the company has transformed itself from the early MAC days into today's world leaders leading the tablet revolution.
Transformation Enablers:
Business Transformation is more related to aligning the Process, people, culture and Technology towards the company goals and objectives. These are the most important business enablers.
for e.g. In the Claims department of an insurance organization, there is a predefined workflow process by which the claims intake occurs. The organization takes in claims information by Fax, email, phone, mail etc and then it is directed to the system of record either as a file upload, manual load etc followed by rendering this information to the Customer service representatives online, so they can interact with customer efficiently, all this plays a very important role in the decision of whether a transformation in the process workflow is required or not.
All this determines the total amount of time taken to input, process the information right from intake to providing information to customers via the customer service portal.
Business transformation is a modern day technique sought by organizations to think about their business processes and outcomes so they can improve on their customer relations, customer service, improve upon operating efficiencies and essentially cut down on costs. The reason why organizations need a business transformation or an overhaul can be manifold.
For Instance, for large organizations, Processes are preset to meet business needs, this gets complemented by organizational culture, external factors like statutory policies, rules set by governing bodies also come into play and before the organization knows it each business unit, department has its own set of processes which are tuned and tweaked over time to run the business. No one has looked at the organization or enterprise level viewpoint and this ultimately leads to lots of inefficiencies mainly due to overall inefficient workflow processes, slower customer outcome.
To add to this, to stay competitive in today's marketplace and to better meet their customer needs, meet the regulatory requirements organizations have to improve on their efficiencies.
A Business Transformation project would essentially involve the following steps,
Objectives and Roadmap
Develop a high level roadmap right from understanding the business needs and objectives at the executive level. This helps define the overall financial objective, the organizational change management expectations from this initiative. Involvement of Top level executives is a very important factor for the success for any Transformation initiative.
The key transformation agents for any initiative are the Top CEOs, CIOs, Stakeholder like Business SMEs, Project Sponsors etc.
Feasibility
High level Feasibility study and planning
- This involves a feasibility study wrt resources, Technology, budget etc
Strategy Definition
Understand current state and future state of the process
- Which may lead to Process realignment or altogether process changes
Layout the goals as quantifiable and tangible statements as to what this initiative is suppsed to achieve. e.g.
- Financial goals - e.g. Increase the Net revenues at the end of next 2 years by 20%
- Customer service - e.g. Reduce Customer service operational time per customer from 15 mins to 7 mins with the same or better quality of service
- Change Management - e.g. Layout a 3 month plan to migrate the changes throughout the organization to all departments involved.
- Align organization metrics and KPIs with the Roadmap
Execution and Control
- The esential parts in any project are its execution and control strategies which ensure regular monitoring and data analysis.
This has lead to a lot of Enterprise level business transformation projects. Essentially these initiatives are more or less related to identifying duplicate and/or redundant business processes, eliminating them or making use of latest technology tools to achieve organizational efficiencies.
In general, most Financial organizations (Insurance, banking etc) are a little slow to adapting such enterprise wide changes due to strict regulatory and compliance policies and their sheer organizational size, resource count that would be required to execute the changes and the overall Organization culture.
They get into transformation projects due to sheer Market competition pressures, regulatory requirements, directional change in executive management or changes in labor market etc.
What is Business Transformation?
The primary purpose or objective of any business is to provide and add 'value' to their customers in return of the price paid. 'Value' is measured in terms of financial gains or commodity, service provided etc. In order to provide more or better 'value', organizations strive to improve, build upon or modify their processes etc so as to attain their objectives. Especially in the current economy, many business and Industry vertical C-Level executives have shifted their attention to business transformation activities.
One of the best Transformation examples, i have seen in today's marketplace is the innovation giant - Apple. The way the company has transformed itself from the early MAC days into today's world leaders leading the tablet revolution.
Transformation Enablers:
Business Transformation is more related to aligning the Process, people, culture and Technology towards the company goals and objectives. These are the most important business enablers.
for e.g. In the Claims department of an insurance organization, there is a predefined workflow process by which the claims intake occurs. The organization takes in claims information by Fax, email, phone, mail etc and then it is directed to the system of record either as a file upload, manual load etc followed by rendering this information to the Customer service representatives online, so they can interact with customer efficiently, all this plays a very important role in the decision of whether a transformation in the process workflow is required or not.
All this determines the total amount of time taken to input, process the information right from intake to providing information to customers via the customer service portal.
Business transformation is a modern day technique sought by organizations to think about their business processes and outcomes so they can improve on their customer relations, customer service, improve upon operating efficiencies and essentially cut down on costs. The reason why organizations need a business transformation or an overhaul can be manifold.
For Instance, for large organizations, Processes are preset to meet business needs, this gets complemented by organizational culture, external factors like statutory policies, rules set by governing bodies also come into play and before the organization knows it each business unit, department has its own set of processes which are tuned and tweaked over time to run the business. No one has looked at the organization or enterprise level viewpoint and this ultimately leads to lots of inefficiencies mainly due to overall inefficient workflow processes, slower customer outcome.
To add to this, to stay competitive in today's marketplace and to better meet their customer needs, meet the regulatory requirements organizations have to improve on their efficiencies.
A Business Transformation project would essentially involve the following steps,
Objectives and Roadmap
Develop a high level roadmap right from understanding the business needs and objectives at the executive level. This helps define the overall financial objective, the organizational change management expectations from this initiative. Involvement of Top level executives is a very important factor for the success for any Transformation initiative.
The key transformation agents for any initiative are the Top CEOs, CIOs, Stakeholder like Business SMEs, Project Sponsors etc.
Feasibility
High level Feasibility study and planning
- This involves a feasibility study wrt resources, Technology, budget etc
Strategy Definition
Understand current state and future state of the process
- Which may lead to Process realignment or altogether process changes
Layout the goals as quantifiable and tangible statements as to what this initiative is suppsed to achieve. e.g.
- Financial goals - e.g. Increase the Net revenues at the end of next 2 years by 20%
- Customer service - e.g. Reduce Customer service operational time per customer from 15 mins to 7 mins with the same or better quality of service
- Change Management - e.g. Layout a 3 month plan to migrate the changes throughout the organization to all departments involved.
- Align organization metrics and KPIs with the Roadmap
Execution and Control
- The esential parts in any project are its execution and control strategies which ensure regular monitoring and data analysis.
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