A learning model for professional services organizations

It sure would be nice to have a manual.
It shouldn't be that hard for our groups to make one.

I'm sure many of us would say that our organizations do not provide us with sufficient training for us to be truly great at our jobs.  They also don't provide us enough knowledge-sharing and partering abilities with our peers. 

I just recently started a job that had next to no training provided to me.  Without it, I had to go find people and resources on my own to give myself even a small clue of what I needed to do.  And even then I didn't have enough information and it made it way more complicated than it needed to be.
While there, though, some colleagues and I built a model that provided us the training we knew we all needed.  We saw training being delivered in three levels: A) our roles B) our accounts and finally C) our projects. 

Role level.  We agreed that by first focusing on our roles, we would be able to help each other become excellent at what we do, individually.

Account level.  We next decided to focus on our customers and accounts.  We felt that the politics and preferences of our customers mattered a great deal and that there was a big need for teammates to be trained on accounts.

Project level.  The final thing we knew we'd need to focus on was our projects.  We agreed that our projects should be the simple part of this.  We all know what we have to deliver and fit in, so the training here really should be minimal.

By training and accumulating knowledge at these three levels a professional services organization can learn, continuously improve, and deliver the maximum values to its customers.

Create workflows to create documents

Documents suck.  People don't want them
but they are a typical and critical part
of business oftentimes.  Let's change this.

The goal is not producing documents, its managing workflow.  One consequence of a process may be that it creates documents but in an efficient system, the goal is to manage knowledge and creating small, reusable components of things that you can use again, thus reducing cost and improving quality.

Documents are concrete artifacts that are typically a composition of several other smaller things.  For example, a document could include some background, a schedule, and some tables of data.  Web based content management systems do a good job of separating content from presentation but today's document-based systems very infrequently do this.  For this reason there is a lot of waste in project work.  Documents get started, get re-purposed, and the knowledge base expands but not in an organized or analyzable way.  Things get really messy in project.

But it is possible for us to know our document types and figure out what kinds of things we have to produce for our customers.  Once we do this we can figure out the elemental parts of these documents and have those parts created through efficient workflows.  Just like the web publishes pages our consulting companies should be publishing documents that are compiled automatically through our data, systems, and knowledge.  Writing net-new things is required to extend the existing database but this is a good thing.

So knowledge workers of the world, please think of how you can shorten the overall workflow of your document-creation streams and look to partner with an organization like mine who can take your project data and present it to your customers in a low-cost and very-high-impact way.

Replacing Problems with Solutions -- More thoughts on Pragmatism

After I published my last article “15 ways to be more pragmatic at work” I started to wonder if I’d overdone it by citing fifteen points about being pragmatic. Maybe I personally wasn’t very pragmatic since it took me fifteen points to make my case!

When I wrote my 15 points, the problem that I was trying to solve for was that for me the idea of pragmatism seemed very complex and I felt that I had to create an equally complex solution (one that required a fifteen-point process) to solve for it. The basic point here is that pragmatism has a lot to do with efficiency and perception.

If the input requirement I'm given is “build a box” and I create something wildly complex like a computer, you may say that I wasn't being very pragmatic. Whereas if I instead drew a box with paper and pencil and you liked it, you may say that I'm rather pragmatic. It all depends on how we define the problem, who's the audience or judge, and what's really at stake.

When it comes to making new things and getting the most out of life, all of us probably want to know what to expect before we take something on so we are prepared to advocate or defend what we’ve done once we get to the end. We don’t want to do anything without a purpose or to have a story to tell! We know that we won’t be able to mitigate all of the risks involved in doing what we want to do decide to choose the most important risks to mitigate and go down the road to fixing them. Along the way we may have to defend our actions and tell others that what we’re doing is the right thing and the step we’re taking is the right one. In others eyes, we want to be seen as capable, confident, and intelligent; independent.

A pragmatic solution to me is one that includes only as much complexity as is required to be deemed by the people who defined and/or are defining the immediate problem at hand as acceptable. To provide for this we have to know what expectations others will have once we’re finished. This is why we have to inquire and wonder and include others on our journey. This is why planning matters and this is why it’s nearly impossible to create solutions in a vacuum.

Let’s set our sights on replacing problems we have with solutions we like.

Recording the Web

Just found a free new tool called Braincast (http://www.blogger.com/www.braincast.com) that allows anyone to call a number from their phone and make a recording. The service then emails you a WAV file of that recording that you can post online. Pretty cool. Great for bloggers or podcasters! Here's a file I just recorded: http://tr.im/2xrg

It's Efficient, but for Whom?

One big problem with the "green" (environmentalism, efficiency, social consciousness) movement is that it is hard to know the truth about what is green. Hence the term "greenwashing" as in flubbing or lying about the greenness of one's product, company, or service. But is lying necessarily bad here? It could be.

It's the case in business and life that things can be "efficient" (defined by Answers.com as "Acting or producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort.") for one person but not another. In fact, that's the norm; there are system effects to improving one area of a process while not considering the others. There has to be a balance since there are many stakeholders and perspectives for anything we look at or touch. A simple example of sub-optimized efficiency is a company that dumps its waste into a local water supply, saving itself money but breaking the law and damaging the water supply. It's efficient for them but inefficient for the water supply, water users, etc.

Say things change and this same company decides to change its behavior and "go green". They promote how they reduced X, Y, and Z. This is good. All positive change is good, but it's still not enough. The company is not off the hook now for doing ONE GOOD THING!

The point here is that there are many SHADES of GREEN. Anything that is positive for people or the planet can be considered green but we have to be very careful what we call green or call good enough. What we should be shooting for is A BRIGHT GREEN THAT WE CAN MEASURE. That said, there's usually a the competing force of financial and economic greed. We can and do measure that well: it's called profit or loss. Where's the balance in a system like this? How would we know if we were doing the right thing? What if I made $1M from a business that hurt things and then reinvested that in saving children or streams? Am I bad?

Where's your focus? Social? Environmental? Monetary? The work and process are what's core and what matters.

Preindustrial Model for the Future

Just read a really interesting article that was shared with me from a friend who works at Sightline Institute in Seattle. The article is about some of Japan's past and present methods of operating sustainably. Even though times have changed and are complex now, I think there's a lot to learn from the Japanese and on building sustainable societies. I especially enjoyed the "co-creative" or "generative" communities statement that was made. Here's a part that I found really interesting in the article.

• "...You could say that a truly sustainable society existed in Japan during the Edo Period. Because all resources were regarded as precious, plenty of businesses evolved to deal with re-use and recycling. There were businesses that specialized in repairing metal goods; old cooking pots and kettles and other items of metal could be repaired and used again. There were special tradesmen who would repair wooden barrels and pails used to hold liquids. During this era, everything was repaired properly and used as long as possible. Paper lanterns and locks were repaired, mirrors were polished, and so on."