Business Initiatives and Processes
How many times at my place of work have they come up with a new system that is going to move the business into the next echelon of efficiency and efficacy? The process is implemented, the people do it, but in just two weeks it is a forgotten entity placed on the scrap heap of "it seems like a good idea at the time".
Why does this happen?
It boils down to one issue. Need. Business processes and mechanisms, if they fulfill a need, stay. Once implemented and running for a number of weeks one begins to wonder, how on earth did we survive without this mechanism? A simple example comes from my place of work (computer programming). We now have an application which keeps track of the various tasks we have to do, and what state those tasks are in. There was a time (sic) when we did not have this application, and I shudder to think of how we managed without it. How did we manage?
This goes some way to demonstrating why new needs arise. It's only when you fill one business need that other needs arise. Without the first need, you have no idea of the 2nd. While you do not have food you have no need for a roof over your head is a fairly brutal illustration here. A more realistic illustration of this is that recently we also installed a new build system (maven), very funky. We've used maven for almost a year and it has certainly made life a lot easier. However, now that we've been running it so long, we've noticed that what we now need is an automatic email sent by maven whever it does a build, to anyone who is interested. At the moment, the notification is done by a human. It would be great if maven could automate that email. Without maven we would not have this need.
I think this is also the reason why programming is more often than not, an iterative, incremental process. i.e. you often find yourself forging ahead with the design and building something, only to realise that the original spec and design was limited and sometimes, just plain wrong. Having build the first "phase" you realise how many more needs there are. These needs are hard to predict. The reason why these needs arise only after you've started is analogous to the way a "new" need arises after you've implemented a new process in the work environment.
comments are always welcome.
posted by Michael Wiles at 4:45 pm
1 Comments:
This is most certainly true - we've seen it with clients that we provide systems for. In fact, we pretty much rely on it for repeat business. Consider : you write a system to automate some manual process or to implement a process that never existed. At first, the process is simple because the manual process is simple or it's the first process being used. Once it's implemented, there is always new needs, new improvements to add, and none of these would have been necessary without the first system being implemented.
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