Seek small ideas – not big ones

As an organisation do you encourage your employees to suggest ideas for improving your business? If you don’t have a formal process by which ideas can be submitted and assessed, then chances are you are going to miss out on some very valuable information that is freely available.
Some recent research by Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder which investigated the idea systems in over 150 companies in 17 countries came to the surprising conclusion that high performing companies go after lots of small ideas while low performing companies tend to go after big ones.

Why go after small ideas rather than big ones in an idea capture programme?
1. It can give your company a competitive advantage in the market place
Small ideas are more difficult to copy by competitors than big ones. Competitors may not be aware of small ideas where they will be aware of big initiatives (the grapevine of suppliers etc.)
Small ideas tend to be more company specific. Only work in the company they were generated in (e.g. Vidette Times – Indiana, USA (printing press rolls)
2. It can bring about performance excellence
Excellence is about getting details right it is about attention to detail. In a homogenous marketplace this is what separates companies from one other.
It is workers, not managers who can spot these inefficiencies
3. Small ideas lead to big things
Most big ideas start off small
Small ideas can help identify where there are problems that need to be addressed. Big problems frequently manifest themselves through a host of smaller signs or symptoms
When an idea is generated, ask
· Where else can this be used in the company?
· What are the patterns of the idea? I.e. are the small ideas all pointing toward a bigger problem?
4. It encourages employees and makes them feel heard
The research suggests that employees do not necessarily seek financial reward, and indeed offering it can cause problems such as who originally had the idea!

Setting up an idea capture programme
The difficulty with having many small ideas is that they can be difficult to capture and organise. Unless each idea if considered and processed, then employees will become disillusioned with the process. Client Solutions has developed an application that can help with the capture, review and approval of ideas from a multitude of sources. If this is something that would be of interest to you, then why not get in touch with us, we would love to show you what we have done in this space.

A Truly Path-Based Approach

This month’s edition (March 2008) of the Harvard Business Review contains an article by David Upton and Bradley Staats called ‘Radically Simple IT’. It proposes an approach to implementing new IT systems that is preferable to the ‘big bang’ or ‘incremental’ methods favoured by most organisations.

The ‘Big Bang’ method involves spending a long period of time developing a system and then implementing it in one foul sweep. This clearly is problematic as the new system may end up being ‘legacy from the day it is turned on’. The incremental approach involves replacing an existing system one small piece at a time. This can take even longer than the ‘big bang’ approach and usually ends up duplicating what it replaces which prevents innovative advancement in the business.

Upton and Staat’s suggestion is one that has been used with particular success at a Japanese company called Shinsei. It is called the path-based approach. The idea behind the path based approach is to focus on providing a path for the new system to be developed over time rather than the functionality that will be in it. This approach takes into account the problems inherent in the implementation of new systems namely,

· People often cannot specify everything they will need at a project’s inception
· Unanticipated needs almost always arise once a system is in operation
· Persuading people to use and own the system after it is up and running is much easier said than done

Three foundational elements of the path-based approach are: -

1. Build a low-cost, efficient platform for running the company’s existing business
2. Ensure that platform is flexible enough to support the company’s growth into new areas (i.e. tweakable)
3. Forge together (don’t just align) business and IT

I was speaking recently with a man in South Africa who has used Serena TeamTrack to build such a foundation for his company. This bank operates in 38 countries round the world and employs about 40,000 people.

At his bank, over 30,000 users can log into TeamTrack to participate in over 300 different processes ranging from HR related processes to server commissioning to SLA management. In other words, TeamTrack extends into all parts of the business and links those parts together.

Continual Improvement is something that Shinsei also recognises as important. By using TeamTrack, companies are able to perform continual improvement even after a system is rolled out. The system can be tweaked extremely easily. Any changes that are needed can be implemented by configuration rather development. Business users can make changes themselves rather than having to renegotiate with software developers every time a change is needed.

So how does TeamTrack meet the three foundational elements of the path-based approach? TeamTrack provides a low cost framework (element 1) that can be easily modified to facilitate growth (element 2) by business people as well as IT people (element 3).

If you would like someone from Client Solutions to contact you to discuss how you might be able to leverage the power of TeamTrack in your organisation, please get in touch.

The Long-Tail of Idea Generation

TeamTrack is used by companies around the world in a myriad of different ways. In fact Serena knows of over 600 different applications that have been created using TeamTrack and they estimate that there are hundreds if not thousands more that they do not know about.
In this series of articles we will look in detail at some of the applications that Client Solutions has delivered to customers in Ireland using Serena TeamTrack.


The Idea Forum Application
An article entitled ‘Big Results from Small Ideas’ by Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder looks at the impact of idea generation schemes in companies. They examined over 150 companies in 17 countries and surprisingly found, that the companies that did best were those that implemented lots of small ideas rather than a few big ones. They said,


“We compared the best idea systems in the world--those implementing 20, 50 and even 100 ideas per employee per year--with medium- and low-performing systems. The purpose was to document what works to promote idea generation, what doesn't, and why. One of the most surprising findings of the ‘Ideas Are Free’ study was how high-performing companies focused on small ideas while low-performing companies tended to go after big ones.”


What we are talking about here is the long-tail of idea generation. It is better to focus on lots of small ideas than a couple of big ones. The value of all those small ideas combined together far exceeds the value of a few big ones. In the graph below, we can see that the combined value of the ‘big’ (green) ideas is less than the combined value of the ‘small’ (blue) ideas.




The difficulty with any long tail however, is that the amount of effort expended in gathering and evaluating each idea in the long-tail can outweigh the benefit to be derived from implementing them. That is why you need to automate the process.


Client Solution’s Idea Forum application allows employees throughout an organisation to submit innovative ideas that are then peer reviewed. The top ideas each month or quarter are escalated to management who will consider them for implementation.


The main advantage of this application is that it captures valuable innovative and creative suggestions throughout the organisation. By exposing them to other employees for consideration, the organisation ensures that the best ideas bubble to the top and are improved upon by a forum type discussion. The result is that creative energy is generated by all the ideas and comments on ideas, bouncing off each other.


One good idea can be more than enough to pay for the application and by giving those who are closest to your products or services a voice; who knows what other innovative opportunities can be harvested.


How does it work?

1. An idea is submitted into TeamTrack through a website on the company intranet
2. The author of the idea may take a few days to fine tune the details of the idea and attach images and various bits of documentation to it
3. When the author is ready to have it peer reviewed, she clicks the ‘Send for Peer Review’ button.
4. Users who have ‘peer review’ privileges, can browse the list of ideas that are available for review. They can click into an idea, read the associated documentation, add their own comments and then give the idea a rating.
5. The ideas with the highest average rating or number of reviews bubble to the top.
6. A manager moves all ideas out of the peer review state every quarter and the top ideas are put before management for consideration. The authors of the top rated ideas are rewarded in some way, usually by giving them a percentage of the savings or profit resulting from the idea being implemented.


If you would like to discuss implementing the Idea Forum application in your organisation then please get in touch.


In future articles I will be looking at some other Client Solutions applications developed in TeamTrack that Irish companies are capitalising on.

Enhance your TeamTrack Interface

In this tutorial I want to show you how you can use HTML to add pictures to your TeamTrack solutions in order to make them more interactive and colourful. A picture that uses shadowing can also add depth to your solution making it richer and more appealing.

The technique basically is made up of the following steps.

1. Make the graphic that you want to add and save it as a jpg file [e.g. ExplainImage.jpg] in the main images folder which is usually [C:\Program Files\Serena\TeamTrack\bin\images] on the server computer.
2. Add a new text field to the workflow called lblExplanationHTML. Set the type to 'Memo' and check the ‘Spans entire row on form’ checkbox. ‘Render HTML tags’ should also be checked
3. Check the ‘Access Overrideable Attributes’ box to make the ‘Default Value’ box editable and make it read only.
4. In the ‘Default Value’ box type the following
   
   

   <img src = "../tmtrack/images/ExplainImage.jpg">

5. Click the 'OK' button to save the new field
6. Edit the field again and replace the logical field name 'lblExplanationHTML' with a colon :If you add that field to any transition or state it will be visible as in the screen shot below

In a future article I'll show you how you can build complex colourful tables using HTML and scripting.

Modelling as the future

This interesting blog article by Jeremy Burton looks at the focus Microsoft is putting on Modelling as the ‘Holy Grail’ of programming. The idea is that programmers will be able to develop applications in the future simply and quickly by linking together services using a graphical tool.

The developer essentially draws a picture of a process (model). When she is happy with that process she can turn it on and it becomes available to the entire organisation. The new process is automatically enforced which frees up employees from focusing on operational issues and instead allows them to spend their time pursuing strategic goals. This is already possible with Serena TeamTrack which organisations all over the world have been using for years to manage their businesses.

The next generation of modelling that Jeremy speaks of is the ability to have non technical people draw these pictures and be able to expand their process pictures to tie in with other applications in the organisation or websites that are outside it. These websites can include SalesForce, Google Earth, QuickBooks online, or any other website that exposes a web service.

While Microsoft talk about this Modelling as an aspiration, Serena is about to release a product that will accomplish it.

Business Mashups are coming early next year.

Augmenting your SharePoint system with TeamTrack

Many organisations have a Microsoft SharePoint system in place which they use primarily as a document library. Often it can grow to become a monster that is full of redundant documents and is impossible to navigate and maintain. TeamTrack, a business process management tool, can be used with SharePoint to enforce a more controlled solution.

To understand how this can be done consider the following core strengths of both SharePoint and TeamTrack.

SharePoint
SharePoint is mostly used as a browser-based document management system. Individuals within the organisation create site collections, sites and personal sites in which libraries can be hosted. SharePoint can tightly integrate with Microsoft Office (2003 and later versions only) so that documents can be added to SharePoint libraries directly from within the Microsoft Office application itself.

Users can also ‘check out’ a document from within the Microsoft Office application itself which effectively locks it down so that other users cannot edit it until it is ‘checked in’ again.
Some basic process management can also be implemented in SharePoint such as a predefined approval process though it is limited and difficult to change.

TeamTrack
TeamTrack is a full business process management tool that enables an organisation to quickly define and automate its own internal processes. It can enforce agreed standards so that control is put on the routing and authorisation of items such as documents or issues. Versioning can also be enforced and any changes to the process can be rapidly implemented.

Processes that have been enforced can be viewed graphically so that users can easily see what the document has gone through in order to be in its current state and where it will be routed next.

Combining SharePoint and TeamTrack
A solution that combines both SharePoint and TeamTrack would be the ideal as it would effectively wrap the SharePoint library with the control provided by TeamTrack as shown in the graphic below.

TeamTrack Process Wrapping your SharePoint Libraries

Taking advantage of TeamTrack’s open APIs; integrations to established third party change management tools can be easily implemented. This level of version control is not present in SharePoint alone and is important from an auditing perspective.

Rather than forcing your employees to provide required documents as a method of controlling how they work, this solution will allow your existing processes to drive the business and where documents are required along the way they can be attached. This is a subtle difference but it results in a solution that is more in tune with how you do business. Any collaborative business process can be represented in TeamTrack quickly and easily. Where you rely on SharePoint alone to manage your documentation you can miss out on this.

Finally it is worth pointing out that this combined solution will also be Mashup-Ready as the next version of TeamTrack (due out in the next couple of months) will allow quick integration with any Web 2.0 application that exposes web services such as SalesForce, PeopleSoft or Google Maps. More about that in other blog articles.

Conclusion
Integrating SharePoint and TeamTrack provides a stable, extensible, enterprise-wide solution. It will allow you to easily manage your documentation ensuring any approval or change processes are well managed and audited. If you would like to discuss augmenting your SharePoint system with TeamTrack please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.

Getting the most out of your TeamTrack System

Serena estimates that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of TeamTrack applications in existence. This means that although you may have installed TeamTrack in your organisation to manage a particular process, chances are, you could be getting more value out of it.
In this brief article I want to give you some examples of ways that organisations are using TeamTrack.

1. NDA approval
In the US, over 4,000 employees at Lockheed Martin use TeamTrack to manage a number of processes including their Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs). Details of each NDA are entered into TeamTrack and can be tracked as they are approved. Through powerful reports, users can quickly see what NDAs are in place and what their statuses are.

2. Leave Requests
In this workflow, an employee submits a request for leave. The system routes it to the employee’s supervisor who will receive an email with the request details. The supervisor can approve or reject the request and this response is sent back to the employee. If the leave request is approved, the number of days requested is subtracted from the employee’s entitlement. Reports can show all outstanding holidays for employees.

3. Project Governance
While Serena Mariner can be considered the tool of choice for managing a portfolio of projects, some organisations do not want that level of control. For simply guiding a project through a series of authorisation gates and phases, TeamTrack can be the perfect tool.
TeamTrack can be configured to require that certain documents are attached at specific phases of the project and that sign-off is obtained from management at various points along the project lifecycle.

4. Expenses Approval
Many large organisations use TeamTrack to manage their expenses approval process. Employees can enter their expenses directly into TeamTrack or attach their expense forms as spreadsheets or documents. They are then routed to appropriate supervisors who can reject or approve them. If they are rejected, they will be sent back to the employee with a note and if they are approved they will be automatically sent on to the finance department to be dealt with. This simple process can really speed up expenses approval and reports can show how expense claims are distributed across your organisation.

5. Managing Customer Enhancement Requests
Over 3,000 employees at Thomson Financial use TeamTrack to streamline various processes including the routing of enhancement requests. Using the process that they implemented, when a customer logs a suggestion or request with a customer service agent, it is routed based on its importance, to the product manager or development manager for consideration.

Thomson Financial has also overhauled its sales proposal process with TeamTrack. “It used to take about five days to pull together a sales proposal. Now it takes three minutes,” says Hastings-Kimball. “Our sales teams now spend more time with their customers and prospects to increase revenue.”

I hope this short article has stirred your creative juices and you can start seeing new ways that TeamTrack can be used in your organisation. If you would like to get in touch with us to discuss those new ideas, please do not hesitate to do so.

Business Process Modelling third in top 10 technologies for 2008 (Gartner)

According to Gartner, Business Process Modelling is one of the top technologies to focus on in 2008. While BPM is not technically a ‘technology’ (it is more a field of knowledge), it must be in place before really useful SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) applications can be developed.

This supports comments in an earlier blog article where I suggested that more formal automation of business processes must occur in organisations to accommodate recent changes in the general business environment. In that article I argued that organisations cannot enforce their processes without some process automation tool like Serena’s TeamTrack.

Gartner’s full top-ten list can be found here.

What has changed that businesses need process management software?

The business environment in which we all operate has changed fundamentally over the last decade or so. The need for organisations to employ some form of process automation is greater than ever. So what are these environmental changes and how have they impacted businesses? In this article I will look at five environmental factors that every organisation must consider.

1. Globalisation
The Internet and email have made the world a much smaller place. This has had two profound effects on business. First, competitiveness has increased as greater numbers of companies are able to enter the most lucrative markets. You no longer need to be physically close to your customers to do business with them. A well designed Internet site can attract customers and manage the sale without the need for any personal interaction.

The Internet has also permitted the free flow of information. Information about company offerings and pricing are easily accessible to both customers and potential competitors! The net effect of all this free flow of information is that companies are becoming more homogenous. It is increasingly difficult to be dominant in a market from a cost leadership or differentiation strategy. Increased competition is driving down margins and increasing the flow of information so that any advantage gained from a differentiation strategy is soon eaten up. The only strategy left is to be more customer focused, or operationally excellent. RyanAir is a great example of a company which is doing this. The difficulty with being operationally excellent is that you need good processes that are strictly adhered to. This is something that is impossible without some form of automation.

A further effect of globalisation is geographically dispersed workforces. Increasingly we are seeing companies outsource entire business functions. To ensure that these outsourced groups are participating in the business effectively, a high level of communication and collaboration is needed.

2. Increasingly regulatory environment
Various debacles in the world of business from Enron to WorldCom have necessitated the introduction of tighter regulations on how organisations do business. Required periodic audits now interrupt businesses on a regular basis. Manually, such audits can take weeks to complete but an automated system can reduce them to a few hours.

3. Changing Labour Markets
Charles Handy introduced the term 'Portfolio Worker' to describe a way of working where individuals are mobile and move between organisations bringing their expertise with them for the duration of the project they are working on. While that prediction has not fully come to pass, it is increasingly the case that employees are staying for shorter periods in the one company and are seeking more flexible working hours and working arrangements. Where processes are embedded in employee's heads, the danger is that an organisation cannot learn from past experience. Processes need to be stored outside of individuals so that they outlast those employees in the organisation.

Employees that do stay with their organisation are also seeking more flexible working arrangements. These can include working from home one or two days a week or working hours that suit them. Obviously in an organisation where processes require immediate action from these employees, major bottle necks will begin to form. The good news is that these employees who seek more flexible working times tend to be willing to be contactable through their Blackberry, or equivalent, umbilical cords. Automated process management tools that can use these devices therefore, can overcome most limitations flexible working arrangements introduce.

4. More demanding customers
With increased competitiveness, customers have become more demanding. They are unwilling to tolerate issues getting lost in the cracks. They expect quick response times of 'minutes' or 'hours' rather than 'days' or 'weeks'. If they are not satisfied they will simply move to another supplier. All of these threats can be managed effectively with some form of automated process management system. No longer do companies need to depend on employee's remembering to keep issues open or to get back to customers with information or resolutions to issues raised. Instead automated systems can prompt employees to perform the actions necessary to enforce adherence to predefined processes.

5. Greater need for flexibility
Entrepreneurial Management is largely about managing change and being able to best position oneself to best take advantage of inevitable change. Many of the top business schools around the world have entrepreneurship management units or are offering modules in this up and coming discipline of management agility. 'Taking charge of change' necessitates having established, visible processes in place that can be quickly and easily modified. Unless these processes are managed by a tool, communicating changes can lead to confusion and mistakes.

Conclusion
The business environment has changed fundamentally in the last decade. Companies will increasingly struggle to keep up if their way of doing business (their processes) is not automated by software.

Serena TeamTrack is a web-architected, secure and highly configurable process and issue management system. It creates a clear process throughout the application lifecycle—from initial request to post-delivery customer support activities.

Thousands of companies around the world are using TeamTrack to manage processes across organizational silos and drive the highest levels of efficiency. With TeamTrack, you can control and automate any business process, manage issues throughout the lifecycle of your IT projects, and facilitate collaboration among all stakeholders across your enterprise and beyond.

For more information click on the link below or contact us to request a visit so that we can show you the power and advantages of TeamTrack.

http://www.serena.com/products/teamtrack/index.html