It might not be the first thing on your mental checklist, but enterprise software consulting firms play a key role in the overall return on investment for K-12 education by implementing applications –  in our case Oracle and PeopleSoft, which enable significant organizational efficiencies.

In today’s economic climate, K-12 education administrators must be especially mindful of the repercussions of funding capital projects.  While job one is to provide the best possible educational experience for students and retain quality teachers and administrators, K-12 organizations can realize cost savings though wise investments in IT infrastructure.   An  example of this is might be to enable the  improvement of business processes and decision making, thereby enabling management to provide the district with accountability of financial oversight, compliance, and planning/management of assets.

Facing Facts: Public Attitudes and Fiscal Realities in Five Stressed States, a new report by the Pew Center on the States and the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) points to an interesting trend on how residents view their states’ budget problems and a possible solution for K-12 funding woes.  The research compiled survey results from five states:  AZ, CA, FL, IL and NY, and concludes  that more that 6 out of 10 respondents indicated that they would be willing to pay higher taxes to maintain current funding for K-12 education (2010 poll). Respondents from all five states underscore their commitment to K-12 education.

Based on this information, I submit that the desire among US taxpayers to maintain (and improve) quality K-12 education translates to an opportunity for District IT organizations to invest in efficiency-enhancing  enterprise software solutions.

If you are interested in generating your own reports using the survey data from the five states, visit the PPIC website.

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MIPRO Consulting main website.

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About this blog.

In our last blog about project risk, we made mention of our Project Progress Assessment Workshop which supports risk identification, management and mitigation. PeopleSoft implementations can be complex and challenging with many projects running within the core project. Ensuring that all activities, obligations, project structure and deliverables are met on time is a challenge unto itself. In order to keep the project on track from beginning to end, MIPRO’s SD3 methodology deploys project progress assessments (PPA) at key milestones in the project.

What on Earth is a PPA?

PPAs utilize a combination of a series of pre-set interviews with various project team members in order to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of the project. The project plan is analyzed in detail in order to gauge plan versus actual progress to date. The key focus areas for the PPA include:

• Overall status
• Infrastructure and Architecture
• Change Management
• Application Configuration and Delivery
• Team Structure
• Project Management and Structure

A detailed report and presentation is given to both the project management and executive sponsors. Within the report, outstanding issues along with mitigation strategies are outlined. Executing on the mitigation strategies allows the project to stay on path. It is very important to note that the  PPA findings are written from a very neutral position. Issues identified are not the fault of any one party, the issues are simply project issues which must be corrected for the good of the overall project.

As part of the report, we always report back against the original risks identified within the project charter and outline the status of each.

Additionally, we report against new issues and risks identified and create specific risk mitigation recommendations.

Think of your project as a long journey being off course by only a degree or two.  Over time, this will significantly alter your path as it relates to your destination. The PPA allows for course corrections along the way ensuring the project crosses the finish line when and where it was originally intended. The PPA can be executed whether you are implementing on your own or using a partner as these are designed to be neutral in nature.

Questions or comments about what our PPA involves and whether it might be right for you?  Please email me and I’ll be happy to chat.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing inPeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) andBusiness Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitteror Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More business transformation posts.

If my server logs are credible, there is a growing interest in the topic of ‘business transformation.’  I see the term come up with increasing frequency, and it dawned on me that up until today, we didn’t have a category for our business transformation-related posts.  We have posts related to BT, sure, but they were buried inside our larger business intelligence category.

Because of all this, I am happy to announce that MIPRO Unfiltered now has a business transformation blog category, which at this point features excellent insight from Mark Gavora, our Director of Business Transformation Services here at MIPRO.  We’ll be adding to it regularly with topics we already have on the drawing board.

In the meantime, if you have a topic about business transformation that you’d like to see us write about (or proffer our opinion on), please let Mark know and he’ll slot it into his publishing calendar.

Oh, and while we’re doing announcements, I’d be remiss not to remind everyone of our Twitter feed and Facebook page. You should join us on both if you follow brands on social media.

Any other questions?  Ask away in the comments!

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More news posts.

People and organizations are “doers” by nature. We want to build something, provide some service, and support operations. Too often, we “take the bull by the horns” and start solving problems because we believe we know what needs to be done — like implementing Oracle or PeopleSoft. Sometimes we get lucky and…it works! Many times, of course, it does not work.

In our quest to be a “mover and shaker,” we spend a lot of time and money on initiatives that go nowhere, or worse yet, have to be redone. We take the bull by the horns only to find it is taking us to the slaughterhouse! Enter strategic planning…a substitute for having to rely on good luck!

Fundamentally, a great strategy assures that the bull we grab by the horns takes us to greener pastures. It does this by clearly painting a vision of the future. Ideally, this does not even involve the organization in question. It is an ideal client state that the organization intends to help clients achieve.

Example: a transportation company might have a vision of a world where everyone enjoys going anywhere they want to go without risk of injury or harm to themselves, others or the environment by 2050. Most visions are a bit more detailed than this, but the critical components of a good vision are here. It describes an end state, not actions that will be taken. It unifies understanding about what could or should be. It provides sufficient detail to guide the organization in its decisions as is continues to build out its strategy. Another example, investing in inexpensive, but poorly designed brakes would not align well with such a vision, nor would initiatives that provide fast trains burning high-sulfur coal. Initiatives that support a magnetic levitation train or a fuel cell powered car, on the other hand, might align quite nicely with this vision. Kaufman, in 1991, referred to visions of this nature as Ideal Visions.

Ideal Visions are a significant departure from common organizational visions because an Ideal Vision no longer assumes that the client of the strategy is the organization; rather, it implies an acceptance that the organization exists to the extent that it provides a value to someone else—clients in the short-term and society in the greater scheme. The organizational goals and objectives are defined within the guiding context of this Ideal Vision. This may seem obvious, perhaps even pedantic; however, there are many cases where shortsightedness or lack of alignment with societal benefit brings prominent companies with very smart “movers and shakers” to ruin.

A frequent error is to define success in terms of revenue and profitability in spite of a contribution to a greater societal value. Companies like Arthur Anderson and Enron come to mind as high profile examples. Their undoing came from decisions that were made based on pursuing goals that had nothing to do with societal value. I’ve seen well-intentioned companies adopt a vision of providing cheap goods that you can rely on, suffer from poor sales because they release products that few clients want, then wonder why they have lost money five out of five years in a row.

When we adopt an Ideal Vision for our organization, our mission objective must define the results our organization must achieve to enable our vision to become a reality. In my next post, I will discuss creating a mission objective and how a mission objective differs from a mission statement. In the meantime, if you want some help building a strategy and roadmap for service delivery or alignment with world-class efficiency and effectiveness, or even if you just would like to discover the “right things” for your organization, drop me a line.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More business transformation posts.

Many organizations striving to be perceived as a ‘Great Place to Work’ consider leveraging retention as a metric to assess their success. While a common practice, organizations often leverage it incorrectly. Let’s walk through a few of the pitfalls in using retention metrics and get to some meaningful ways to assess if your workforce wants to work at your organization.

One common error is to oversimplify retention measurements. In these cases, organizations adopt a criterion-based assessment along the lines of “no more than 30% turnover” or “no more than x number of employees.” Perhaps the most obvious error with a this approach concerns the number chosen. 30% turnover may be spectacular for a call center industry, but dismal for an electric utility. How do you know your number is a good one for your business and the times in which it operates?

One way to improve on this is to leverage a normative reference along the lines of “our turnover will be within the top quarter of all organizations in our respective industry.” This approach references peer organizations and can vary from one year to the next. It also does a good job accounting for industry-wide variables like supply and demand ratios.

Unfortunately you can have two organizations, both in the top ten percent of their industry, with very different workforces. Why is that?

Ultimately, normative retention measures also fail to support the greater organizational goals like competitiveness and reduced operating costs. This is because organizations relying on this metric have failed to assess who they are retaining. A dismal retention score may in fact be just what an organization needs to clear out the poor performers or transition a workforce to a changing business model.

In most organizations, there are four basic types of workers: 1: Those that are your top performers; 2: others that might be a top performer with further development; 3: still others that get their job done satisfactorily; and finally 4: those that are underachievers or problematic. Most organizations care about retaining the first two or three types. Retaining groups three and four at the expense of one and two may do more harm to an organization than good.

Another pitfall in retention measures (even ones at companies that are sophisticated enough to measure retention of valued performers) deals with accounting for one-time events. Things like mergers, divestitures, closing a line of business are all examples of anomalies to a company’s retention measures. Granted, some companies adopt a strategy of merging and acquiring other companies, in which case they may want to set up multiple retention measures (e.g., for core staff and the staff of acquisitions), but in most cases, these events represent outlying events. A common solution for dealing with outliers is to issue two reports, one that includes the outliers and another with the outliers removed. This provides leadership the necessary information to accurately assess their success.

Amazingly, we still have more to consider. You can do a great job of retaining valued staff and still have some significant issues. At one fortune 500 company for whom I provided consulting services, they had top notch retention scores until the organization decided to delve a bit deeper and see why people were willing to stay. Shockingly, about 80% of the population responded that the only reason they stayed was the high compensation program. In fact, they did not like working for the company and would leave if only they could find another company willing to provide a comparable (or slightly lower) compensation program. Ouch!

This gets to the other factors of a ‘great place to work’ that retention just cannot measure. Things like employee engagement. Employee engagement gets at the heart of why retention levels are high or low. Things come into play like ‘Do employees enjoy working with their manager (often the single greatest factor of retention) and are they being challenged and developed in their job?’ (another major factor of retention). The answers to employee engagement questions typically provide the complimentary detail needed for leadership to decide what they must do to truly provide a great place to work.

Business Transformation Services (BTS) helps organizations understand how to achieve ‘Great Place to Work’ initiatives. Whether it is defining retention strategies and their associated metrics or building integrated talent management programs with performance management solutions, competencies and succession planning initiatives, our consultants can provide your organization with the guidance you need to leverage Oracle or PeopleSoft to achieve world-class results.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More business intelligence posts.

Lately, all I seem to hear is, “How fast can you upgrade my HCM?  How fast can you deploy my new Talent Management solution?”  It’s all about technical achievement and getting ‘solutions’ in place as quickly as possible.

What is this fascination with speed to implement/upgrade a technical solution without consideration for what value it brings to HR, its customers and ultimately the business?  I know the word value is insanely abused in this business, but it’s the reason you endeavor on an implementation or upgrade in the first place: to improve HR and bring the business a true benefit.

Regardless, this seems to be a common theme recently – organizations being sold on the idea that faster is better, maybe because it’s tangible, check box-able and involves far fewer headaches than looking in depth at business process and function.

The pitch is going like this lately: We can provide you with a rapid upgrade; we can deploy our solutions faster than the competition, on and on. One vendor I know actually measures its success by how fast the product goes into production, as if they are shucking corn instead of trying to affect a positive change within the business. Where is the business value in that? A system that’s in production that the users really don’t know how to use, a system that IT doesn’t fully understand how to support and one that gains no benefit from rethinking, retooling, or reworking their business processes to be either more efficient or enabled to support the overall corporate initiatives.

I don’t get it.  To me, that’s chasing the wrong thing.  And what bothers me is that organizations are buying into this pitch, which not-so-coincidentally mirrors what likely is internal sales pressure from the vendor’s management to get sales rolling again.

I recently spoke with the new HRIS Director at a Silicon Valley firm. When talking about their last HCM upgrade, she said it was quick, it didn’t require much of HR’s time, and it was cost-effective, but what it didn’t do was add any business value whatsoever.

Another HR Director whose company recently deployed a new HCM solution under the faster-is-better philosophy said at the end, they had a system that just “happened” to them. They didn’t change anything other than the software.

So what will it take for Human Resources and their IT partners to stand back and say, let’s take the opportunity to enhance our value to the business by looking at our processes, understanding how we can better enable our users and customers and then how do we continue to measure and monitor our effectiveness and contributions to the company?

Software for the sake of software is academic, nothing more than a technology experiment.  If you don’t know why you’re doing something – or if you’re only doing something to prove that something has been done –  perhaps it’s time hit the brakes and ask, “What am I trying to accomplish here?”

And if you’re like any of the stories I’ve been hearing lately, don’t be surprised by the silence.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More management posts.

Let me guess what you’re thinking: Oh, this word again.  Right.  Here we go.

Yes, you’ve heard it over and over again. Organizations make substantial investments in technology hoping to improve business practices. In the early stages of projects, the focus may indeed be using technology to improve the business, but as deadlines approach, this focus invariably narrows to enabling an on-time go-live. With this shift, organizations find the results a lot like their old way of doing business. In change management, we refer to this as OO + NT = EOO or Old Organization + New Technology = Expensive Old Organization.

Remember this little equation.  We’ll be coming back to it.

Some innovative organizations looked at project track records, especially technology projects, and decided to shift their focus from technology to a more holistic organizational focus.

Enter business transformation (BT). Business transformation leverages five disciplines to get measurable and lasting value at an organizational level:

1. Strategic Planning
2. Process Improvement
3. Organizational Development
4. Change Management and
5. Training

BT assures initiatives deliver value by first identifying opportunities for improvement. This may require, among other activities, creating a results-based strategic plan or analyzing customer and business partner feedback. The goal is to answer the following question: “What opportunities for improvement are most likely to yield the best value?” This powerful first step assures any initiative (technical or organizational) has objective metrics to gauge progress and success. Next the future-state processes are created. Importantly, the work done at this step focuses on ideal processes for the organization. Note that no effort is invested in current-state processes.

From this information, consultants create a transformation roadmap. The roadmap lists the initiatives the organization should pursue, the expected value of each initiative and a timeline to complete each initiative. In some cases, benchmarking metrics provided by research firms are used to articulate value; however, a more detailed analysis may also be required.

For example, one fortune 150 company chose to assess how employees within one line of business spent their time on a daily basis. They used the resulting data to identify the cost of overlapping activities and the risks of inconsistent policy interpretation, process execution, and quality assurance.

With this kind of information, leadership prioritizes projects with much greater clarity as to the value delivered by the project and the magnitude of the resulting change. This is far better than simply placing a “leap of faith” on technology to drive undefined organizational improvements. Since the organization fully understands their desired state and metrics, fit-gaps with a technology project are based on alignment of the technology’s processes with the optimum processes rather than current state processes for the organization. Change increases, but so does the organization’s ability to leverage value from expensive technology investments. So with BT, what we wind up getting is OO + BT + NT = TO, where TO is Transformed Organization.  For both technology and organizational projects, change management efforts are greatly improved because change managers are easily able to articulate the vision for the future and the need for change — often a challenge for change managers.

Finally, BT works at a level that enables it to affect full organizational change. By working with the business rather than IT, BT initiatives involve the right executives to realign organizations. Many BT initiatives include updates to organizational structures, role and competencies. As such, they are commonly sponsored by executives up to C-level.

By way of final example: the consolidation of a decentralized service delivery model to a shared services model with centers of excellence fits well within the scope of BT. Adding a CRM or HCM solution to support the consolidation is just one project in this greater initiative. IT is not in a position to mandate the organizational changes necessary to capitalize on the value of many large-scale technology solutions. For an HR Shared Service Center, this typically requires the active support of the organization’s Chief People Officer.

This is a long post with lots of dependent concepts.  Have questions?  I’d love to talk.  Simply email me.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More on business intelligence.

(Continued from part one, here.)

Some process engineers (just like project managers) will quickly point out how their discipline recognizes a need for change management and accounts for it by including change management activities in their methodology.

Indeed, the control phase of a DMAIC is about maintaining defect reductions – keep that trendline going down!  Regardless, process engineers (again, like project managers) have too much work to do to consistently and effectively manage change to assure lasting adoption.  Other issues demand their attention and larger initiatives become too complex to effectively manage their organizational change.

Adopting what I consider to be an “organizational excellence” approach to process redesign is something I strongly recommend.  This better positions an organization to change by allowing process engineers to focus on improving organizational processes while enlisting the support of a dedicated change management function to support change.

Yes, this is a multiple resource model, and it’s already a best practice with large projects like ERP implementations. Fundamentally, organizational excellence accounts for up to four disciplines interacting to affect greater process improvement: Strategic Planning, Process Improvement, Project Management and Change Management.

By having individuals who focus on the core deliverables of their discipline, organizations are better able to assign the correct mix of professionals at the right times to assure an initiatives success.  This seems simple, but it’s so often overlooked or misunderstood.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More posts about smart management.

Let’s start with the obvious: business process redesign, process engineering and business transformation all strive to affect an organization’s bottom line. Companies like Motorola, USAA and Toyota have reaped substantial benefits from these endeavors resulting in disciplines like Six Sigma, Lean and World-class alignment being commonly recognized as best practices across industries.

And yet, so many fail.

Regardless of the merits of process improvement initiatives, too many of these efforts don’t bring about the lasting bottom-line impacts they claim they’ll deliver. All too often, blackbelts masterfully execute a DMAIC only to find that, six months after completion, the business has largely regressed to pre-DMAIC behaviors.  This is precisely what you don’t want.  In the scrapheap of failed transformation projects, many are bleeding from this exact wound.

In my experience, during a transformation, redesign initiatives often fail to account for the necessary organizational change. This gap leads to many of the problems you see in the long-term effectiveness of process improvement projects.

Although a sponsor/champion for the transformation is identified early on, process engineers often rely too heavily on them. Other key players are not sufficiently involved and may not buy-in to the redesigned processes for a number of reasons.

For example, although a process is more efficient for the sponsor’s scope of operations, it creates challenges for other areas outside the sponsor’s scope. The (obvious) result is a pushback to organizational norms. Communications with feedback may not be sufficient to enable others to embrace the transformation. Employees and mid-management may not fully understand the new processes and their critical success factors. Ultimately, the processes are inadvertently undermined through work-arounds and subsequent process revisions that serve to fit familiar behaviors into the redesigned methodologies.  Bad news.

And there’s the culture issue.  Over the longer term, culture is insufficiently addressed. Corporate professionals often do not fully consider the needs of field operations employees or key employee drivers (like corporate performance measures) that must be modified for lasting change to take place.

A classic example occurred in call centers where the leadership’s goal was to solve customer issues with the least resources. While the importance of solving customer needs received much lip service, performance measures still focused on volume. Until call centers implemented a balanced scorecard approach to assess effectiveness, customer satisfaction and retention remained low.

Likewise, failing to account for policy changes can eliminate the value from a major process redesign. Example: automating a mail room’s ability to correct addresses and eliminate the incidence of undelivered mail does little good if the business units do not allow mail room personnel to change customer data.

Finally, huge problems occur if success is neither rewarded nor recognized. In many initiatives, early adopters of the change are not given the support they need to succeed. They stumble through the transformation with lackluster results. If they eventually succeed, they are not recognized for their work. Experiences like these severely damage the ability of the transformation to spread beyond the initial pilot area as word quickly spreads about the “cost” of adoption.

(Stay tuned for part 2 of Mark Gavora’s column, scheduled for publication on Tuesday, May 25.)

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More posts about smart management.