I borrowed this concept from Steven Covey who wrote the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, a book everyone should read at some point. This is also the basis for the ever popular "gap" analysis, a technique in which we determine where we are and where we need to be. Then we look at the delta, the difference or, in the parlance of the technique, the gap and figure out how to get from here to there.
It is important to have a clear vision of where you want to end up. Another old saying comes to mind. When you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there. I sometimes sense this is the way systems evolve. The planning is incremental and the enhancements are a patchwork of little improvements or fixes done over time. At the end of the day, you wind up with a quilt-work instead of a smooth and uniform process flow.If a business process is completely manual, partially automated or perhaps broken, and there is a desire to improve service or increase efficiency, it is often tempting to take a look at a small portion of the process and address it. We look for the major flaws or the low hanging fruit. We shoot for a quick fix, a small and easy adjustment that may improve things a lot. We move slowly and carefully so as not to be too disruptive.
While I applaud the effort to avoid having a negative impact on the business, we sometimes draw out the pain and introduce more problems than we solve. Running parallel can be overly burdensome and when only part of a process is reinvented we force people to do double or triple the work for extended periods of time.
At some point this even becomes counter productive. It can lead to more mistakes and distrust of a new process. One has to look at the total picture and decide what the ideal process would be. If we are talking about order entry, for example, ultimately we want the order to be in a specific format and contain all of the data necessary to both execute the order and collect the proper payment.
All too often the focus will be on "streamlining" by locking down one field on a form or adding some calculations and pushing a snapshot of data to some interim holding file for analysis. Eventually the order process gets modified again and the data, after it has been pulled for analysis, are changed. Without a holistic view we wind up carrying multiple versions of the truth.
One more old proverb comes to mind. It seems there is never enough time to do it right the first time, but there is always time to do it over. Let's identify the ultimate destination up front, chart a safe and direct course from here to there. Let's not wind up beached in a sand dune or dashed on the rocks.
Captain Joe
Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC
Great advice Joe! This is exactly where I start when evaluating and proposing to clients. It was logical to me so I am glad to see how smart it is because you use the same concept. When starting with the “Where you want to be” overview smart decisions can be made as you can then divide your end game into more affordable stages. Many times in my experience that “end game” is far away from where you are now, mostly because previous IT decisions where made without this philosophy and you have an IT infrastructure that I call the “Farm House”. An Infrastructure that has add-ons all over that creates a management and maintenance nightmare. And yes it costs a lot more to support when built this way. Unfortunately when an infrastructure is built on the “Farm House” design getting to where they should be can be expensive but if you can get them to see the long picture it will save them more in the long run. Later Captain!
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