Effective Analytics Starts with the Business First

Also, continuous improvement is messy, retrospectives, and wrong thinking.

• Using data analytics effectively starts with the business first.  Analytics are a means to an end and the end is business performance.  Ensuring that analytics efforts are guided by the underlying business goals is vital to reaping the expected rewards.  This means that, before embarking on an analytics project, it is vital to define the goals and how the project fits within the overarching business goals.  "Just about everything businesses do can be broken down into component parts."  By breaking your business down into these components, you can focus your analytics efforts on specific parts of the business to optimize them.  Starting with a narrowly focused area allows you to achieve early success with analytics that can be built on in future projects.

• Managing consumer relationships in the age of Amazon is increasingly reliant on technology.  This article describes how brands can connect with consumers in this changing retail landscape.  As more and more shopping shifts to digital platforms, effectively using those platforms to connect with and sell to customers is becoming an absolute must for direct to consumer brands.  Ensuring that customer interactions bring value wherever they occur keeps them happily engaged with your brand.

• Using continuous flow and continuous improvement can help avoid the hidden costs of batching.  Batching can happen in many ways and often unintentionally.  Processes that result in batches can cause strains on resources as well as poor experiences for customers.  An example from the article is the discharge process for a hospital, which results in many patients discharged at the same time and puts a strain on the team responsible for transporting patients out of the hospital.  Reworking that process reduced the resource strain on the transportation team and improved patient experiences in what is typically their last interaction with the hospital before they leave.

• While commission based sales teams are the default, they are not the only way.  Using a zero commission model can promote a collaborative and customer focused buying process for customers.  " Salespeople are motivated by the same things as everyone else."  Just like everyone else, salespeople want meaningful work with a team around them.  Building a sales culture and a sales process that encourages that collaboration drives a customer experience focused on the customer's buying process rather than on each individual salesperson's specific sales.  "A culture is strong when people work with each other for each other. A culture is weak when people work against each other for themselves."

• Continuous improvement can be a messy process of discovery.  Embrace it!  The organic process of discovering how to improve and consistently working toward a better state is a fulfilling journey of improvement that can take many different paths.  Continuous improvement can be achieved through multiple frames of reference and finding the solutions to problems can take many different paths.  Incorporating continuous improvement and thoughtful problem solving into your organization's culture helps everyone work together to overcome the issues that will inevitably come up.

• We wrote recently about retrospectives.  The Annual Retrospectives Report provides more detail about the benefits and challenges of using retrospectives for improvement.  This particular report is focused on software development teams, but the overall conclusions apply much more broadly.  One of the key takeaways, at least for me, is the amount of improvement in team dynamics that comes along with retrospectives.  The retrospective process focuses on how a team works as a whole.  It considers both how the team is working together as a team (team processes) and how the team is doing its work (work processes).  As a result, the team gets better at doing its work by simultaneously improving multiple aspects of the team.

• Out of the box thinking is out, Wrong Thinking is in!  The idea is similar though, think and approach problems differently.  For example, try to imagine the worst way that you could solve a problem or flip a traditional role on its head.  The article mentions one executive who instructed his intern to "discover things I don't know," effectively flipping the usual roles on their head and allowing the intern to take the lead.  Like in this example, shaking up traditional hierarchies and granting agency to many people in your organization can unlock creative potential that you never knew existed.

Let us know what you think of these links using the contact form below!

Technology Planning: You Really Should Do It

Small and medium-sized businesses will make the most of their technology investments by building a comprehensive technology plan tied to overall business strategy and key goals. Is excellent customer service a key goal?  Your technology needs to support all aspects of customer service to be successful.  How about data for decision-making?  Do you get what you need when you need it? As your business changes, will your current technology flexible enough to change with it? A comprehensive technology plan will help you answer key questions like these and get you where you need to go!

Technology Planning Builds Toward the Future

We suggest using the steps below to build your comprehensive plan:

1. Identify your overall business strategy and goals.
2. Inventory your current technology  
3. Connect your current technology to your overall business strategy and goals and prioritize changes
4. Make your technology plan.

Identify Overall Business Strategy and Define Your Goals

Ultimately, your business strategy and goals drive your technology.  Understanding your vision for your company and your plans for achieving that vision form the foundation of your technology plan.  You can use a streamlined business planning framework like the Business Model Canvas or the Lean Business Model Canvas.  Both popular options can help you develop a solid understanding of your core value proposition and market strategy.

With that understanding in place, identify the specific targets and goals for the next 1-2 years.  Consider all aspects of your company such as:

• Revenue
• Market share
• Production
• Customer service

This list is not exhaustive and the areas that are important to focus on will differ for everyone.  Focus on the areas that are the most important for your business first.

Inventory Your Technology

To do your inventory, consider hardware, office tools, software applications, web presence (e.g. website and social media accounts), and telecommunications.  For each piece of technology in your business, identify:

• What it is:
  • Type of hardware, operating system, office tool (i.e. Office 2013, etc.), software application, service
  • Include related information like make, model, version, serial/license number, vendor, purchase/contract date, and projected replacement date.
• Who uses it, where, and for what. In your description, include the level of detail that makes the most sense for your business.
• What did/does it cost: Include capital and operating costs and replacement costs

Connect Your Current Technology to Your Overall Business Strategy and Goals

As a whole, how does your technology inventory support your business goals and strategy?  As you consider these, use the retrospective format we previously discussed by asking:

• What is working well?
• What could be better?
• What do you want to change?  How do you want to build on what is working well?  How do you want to improve what could be better?  What do you want to do that you haven't done before? 
• Prioritize changes based on the projected impact on your business success and identify the target timelines for implementing each change.

Make your technology plan

Now that you know your priorities for change, starting with the highest priority, make a plan for implementation:

• Identify the resources you will need to plan your changes, such as consultants, research reports, or product websites, etc.
• Gather the information you need and assess options and cost.  
• Determine the timeline and process for implementation.

Regardless of the changes that your business needs, being intentional about technology planning will ensure that your technology supports your business goals.  If you're not sure where to start, contact us below.

Alex's Business Bits and Bytes for April 16, 2018

Here is my latest collection of interesting business and technology links.  I hope they spark new insights for you!

• Making good use of your data is easier than it might seem!  This article discusses the importance of determining your focus when applying AI technologies to your most important data questions.  Remember to set goals that link back to your business objectives.
• Organizational change is hard, but commonly cited failure rates overstate the difficulty.  With proper methods, organizational change can be reliably successful.
• Employees are people, not resources.  Promote creativity and productivity by designing teams and office spaces with this in mind.
• Want your team to solve its own problems? Here are some tips to help them solve their own problems and know when they need to come to you.
• Have a spring or summer vacation planned?  Here are some tips for disconnecting while you are away so that you can come back relaxed and refreshed!  Alternatively, if your team isn't taking enough vacation, here's how to encourage them to take the time off that they need to be their most effective.
• Finally, is it possible to build the perfect team?  Here is a fascinating deep dive into Google's research on team dynamics and their quest for the Perfect Team.

Let us know what you think of these links using the contact form below!

Retrospectives: A Business Process Improvement Lesson from the Software Development World

In a previous post, we talked about the biweekly continuous improvement meetings that our development team uses.  To ensure these meetings are effective we use a process called a retrospective, which is commonly used in agile software development teams.    

Excellent teams do not simply appear.  They emerge over time and then only by deliberate attention to improvement.  Retrospectives are a key ingredient in that emergence.  Despite sounding like a buzzword, these meetings are a focused way to run a continuous improvement meeting for any type of team.  The retrospective meeting emphasizes on how the team is working—its processes and its culture—by identifying what has been working well, what could be going better, and what the team wants to try doing differently going forward.

Running a retrospective is a lightweight and efficient approach to continuous improvement.  Here’s a quick guide to help you get started.

The Process

A retrospective meeting focuses on three topics: what went well, what could have gone better, and what we want to try to do differently.  Each member of the team comes with ideas for the first two topics, the team discusses each persons’ ideas for those topics, and the team identifies changes it can try before the next meeting.  Here’s some more detail about each topic:

What went well?  Each person identifies ways that the team worked well.  These should be focused on process.  On “how” rather than “what.”  Perhaps the team did a really good job communicating changes to a product.  Maybe the team made good use of a new tracking tool and production went more smoothly than it had in the past.

There are many possibilities and the items that make the list may vary considerably from meeting to meeting, depending on the particular work the team is focused on at the time.  The important thing to remember is to focus on how the team is working as those are the areas in which they can most easily make improvements.

What could have gone better?  While the first topic focuses on how the team worked well, this topic tackles the areas in which the team felt it struggled.  Perhaps they discovered that a shipment was missing components at the last minute before it shipped and someone had to run around trying to fix it last minute.  Alternatively, someone may have struggled to find the information needed to complete their task.  The team should discuss each observation and consider what they might have done differently or what process they would change to help avoid the issue in the future.

What to do differently?  After the team explores what went well and what could have gone better, they should consider what they might do differently before the next meeting.  Ideas for these changes could come from items that went well, allowing the team to build on their past successes.  Alternatively, the items can come from the team’s observations about its struggles.

When selecting items to try differently, the team should choose items that can reasonably progress before the next meeting and should only choose as many items as they can focus on.  We usually find that this is in the 2-4 item range.  What if you have more ideas than you can implement?  We often create our list for the next meeting and add them to the next meeting’s ideas for improvement so that we can consider them again in the future.

Two tips on keeping your team focused on the areas for improvement:

1. Between meetings, review how the team is doing on the items you chose.  If the team has a daily status meeting, talk about these items twice a week.  If it doesn’t have a status meeting, nominate someone to check on the status and communicate it to the whole team a couple of times a week.
2. At the start of each retrospective meeting, review how the team did on the items that you chose to focus on at the last retrospective meeting.  In what ways was the team successful?  What still needs more work?  What items or actions weren’t as important as the team thought?  If there are any items that the team wants to keep working on, they can be added as ideas for improvement for the current meeting.

The Logistics

What happens in the room stays in the room.  The contents and discussions in the retrospective are meant to be for the team.  To ensure that the team can have candid and meaningful discussions, the content of the meetings should remain for the team’s eyes only.  Without this confidentiality, the team may not feel comfortable addressing politically charged areas and will not be able to realize their full potential for improvement.

Choose a frequency for the meeting.  At Renaissance Information Systems, we hold retrospectives every two weeks, which is common among development teams.  Much more often than that and the team doesn’t have enough time test changes between the meetings.  Holding them less frequently than every 3-4 weeks makes it difficult for the team to remember what happened so long ago.  Think about the rhythm of your business and pick a frequency that makes sense for your team.

Budget an hour or so.  Retrospectives take about an hour to run through.  The goal is to have an opportunity to discuss each team member’s observations.  This gives the team a chance to think about what each observation means for the team and if there is anything they want to do differently.

Designate a facilitator.  The facilitator guides the team through the meeting, ensuring the team members understand and follow the process. The facilitator could be the same each time or could rotate among team members. Consider what will work best to build an open, honest team spirit, given your organizational culture.

Document the discussion.  Find a way to document the discussion, preferably involving the team members (this helps to keep everyone engaged in the meeting).  The method you use to do this will likely vary depending on how your team is structured.

Our RIS team is composed of remote workers, so we can’t meet in a conference room.  Instead, we use a board on a tool called Trello.  We make a list for each meeting with a section for each category (see below for an example).  Each person is able to enter cards to the list ahead of time and we then all discuss during the meeting.  Entering cards in the items for improvement section as we go.

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We have worked with another team in which all the members are located in the same office.  That team uses sticky notes and sticks them on a whiteboard in the conference room.  Each person comes with their ideas and takes turns putting them on the board.  As each person puts their sticky notes on the board they explain it to the team and everyone discusses.

The Result

We found that this process quickly focused us on bite-sized areas that we could improve and we saw huge improvements in our team processes within just a month or two.  We continue using the process, meeting every two weeks and incrementally improving and adjusting our processes.

Just like each team needs to continuously focus on how it can work better and improve, so too should your software.  To find out more about how continuous improvement can benefit your team and your software, contact us below.

Alex's Business Bits and Bytes

Every other week I like to share a collection of links that I think are interesting or insightful in the realms of business and technology.  Hopefully they spark a new insight for you!

• Feel like you are solving the same problems over and over again? John Shook writes about achieving sustainability in your organization.
• Does planning drive you crazy?  Here are some approaches to getting through the planning struggle.  If technology planning is driving you crazy, we can help!
• The B2B sales process is becoming more like the B2C sales process every day.  Is your technology prepared to support your sales as interactions with your customers change?
• Avoid the pitfalls of setting unrealistic growth targets.  The numbers here apply to very large businesses, but the principles hold!
• Aspiring to the scale of Facebook, AirBnB, or Amazon?  Check out this article about using the power of network-based strategies to drive growth.
• Looking for something to read?  Try science fiction!  "Science fiction isn’t useful because it’s predictive. It’s useful because it reframes our perspective on the world."

Let us know what you think of these links using the contact us form below!