My Book

INTRODUCTION

Matt was clearly frustrated. What had begun as a simple request had quickly escalated into a frustrating question-and-answer session between him and his coworker sitting across the meeting table. As the company’s production manager, Matt was always looking for ways to make his department run more efficiently. Early in his career, Matt was very hands-on and kept track of the entire operation. However, in the last few years, the company had experienced significant growth and upgraded its processes, which meant incorporating much more information technology. That, in turn, meant Matt had to ask the IT department for more and more help. Not only was it frustrating for Matt, who preferred to be self-sufficient, but after meetings like this one, it was maddening. From the other side of the table, Kyle, the IT manager, continued his list of seemingly endless questions.

“Okay, so you want to get production order information from the salespeople to your production schedulers sooner via a new application for your schedulers. My question is where that information is right now,” Kyle said.

“It’s in the company’s existing application or databases. You should know – it was your department that gave sales their sales application to begin with,” Matt shot back.

“We implemented a CRM for the sales department based on their requirements – that’s got nothing to do with production.”

Like I know what a CRM is, Matt thought. Out loud, he said, “Look, all I know is my production schedulers get a form emailed to them from a salesperson with a customer’s order information and specs on it. But you know salespeople – sometimes it takes a couple of days for them to get around to it, and there’s almost always some important information missing on the forms, which means my schedulers have to track it down before we can do anything with it. Those are days we could have the order to the customer sooner, instead of getting phone calls wanting to know when they’re going to receive it. And sometimes they call before we’ve even received the order from sales! Do you know how stupid that makes this company look?”

Kyle said, “I understand the importance, Matt, but I can’t just push a button and make it happen. I need some more information before my department can even begin to figure out what would be best. I mean, what specific data are you looking for? Does it have to be approved by the sales manager before it comes to your department? What are the parameters, criteria, and business rules for the flow of this information?”

“That’s easy,” Matt said. “Jack and Susan have been with us for years, so they know what they’re doing – they don’t need to pass their sales orders by Emily. Tom, on the other hand, is still pretty new, so I think Emily is still reviewing all of his sales orders first. As far as the data we need, the specs should all be in the form they email to us . . .”

As Matt continued, Kyle sighed inwardly. Matt, for all of his competence, has absolutely no clue when it comes to IT, he said to himself. Kyle faced the same challenge wherever he went. The company’s managers knew IT is the future and that it would keep them competitive in the coming years – but they had limited knowledge of how to actually harness its potential. As such, Kyle spent part of his time trying to explain what IT could and couldn’t do, part of his time creating a patchwork of applications to solve individual problems, and part of his time trying to keep it all working. He knows that creating yet another specialized application to handle another part of operations will ultimately create problems for Matt’s department and his own in the future.

At the conclusion of the meeting, both managers walked out feeling they had accomplished nothing. Kyle had given Matt a list of questions he needed answers to before he could help; Kyle knew it was only a matter of time before upper management heard that Matt had found a way to shave a day or two off of order fulfillment and would tell Kyle to drop everything and make it happen.

For his part, Matt was angry that Kyle made it seem like such a monumental task to take a simple Microsoft Word document that the sales department already had and just speed up how soon his production planner got that information via an application to pull it from sales. I mean, don’t the sales people know that information as soon as they get the order from the customer?, Matt thought.

The problem is not that either individual is incompetent or unmotivated. Both want to reach across the table and engage in a mutually-beneficial working relationship. And yet these two well-intentioned managers are about to spend thousands of dollars in application development, man-hours, training, and productivity, and cannot see a way around it.

There is a better way.

In a similar situation I experienced as an IT manager in a large organization, one of my colleagues summed it up perfectly. After some of our technical staff had created what she wanted and delivered it to her, she said, “Your department gave me exactly what I asked for – but not what I needed.”

She was not the problem; she had a very clear idea of what she needed the technical solution to do. The problem was not the competence of the people in my department; after meeting with her, they delivered exactly what she asked for. The problem was that they were speaking different languages. She spoke in business terms, while the technical staff spoke in technical terms. If I had been present in the meeting, I could have interpreted between the two functional areas, but only because of my background in operations and IT management – a background most employees on either side do not have.

I have been on both sides of the table – as an IT manager like Kyle, administering IT resources, and as an operations manager like Matt, helping businesses reach the next level of operational effectiveness. I have worked with fledgling start-ups and with companies employing thousands of people, in industries as diverse as e-commerce, manufacturing, and government. My career spans from an in-the-trenches IT developer and tester at the bottom of the pyramid to a senior-level executive at the top of it. Even my education encompasses both business and IT with a master’s in computer science and an MBA.

My experience has allowed me a unique perspective from both sides of the table and at both the bottom and the top of companies. In all that time, I have seen hundreds of scenarios similar to Matt and Kyle’s played out. Those experiences led me to develop the People, Process, and Technology Management Framework (the PPT Framework).

I designed the framework to help companies address the immediate challenges presented in the scenario between the two managers as well as some secondary- and/or long-term issues. The benefits of the management framework include:

• Scalability: able to be implemented at the company level, department level, or even functional level, while maintaining the ability to deal with various levels of complexity as the company grows
• Knowledge management: processes and procedures are documented and regularly updated, providing a valuable resource for each department and the company overall by removing the risk of critical knowledge residing solely in the minds of employees
• Business continuity planning: with documented operating procedures, operations become independent of key people or technology applications• Flexible structure: a framework which lays the foundation to accommodate growth and the dynamics of the market while providing stability and structure
• Increased communication and collaboration: provides tools for inter- and intra-departmental communication, including setting mutual expectations and teamwork
• Continuous process improvement: by systematically organizing the elements of a business work system, the framework allows for quantifiable performance measures as each process can be systematically improved and optimized
• IT-business alignment: tools ensuring the alignment of strategy, processes, and technology in the short- and long-term
• Business process management: tools for documenting, organizing, and managing business work systems
• Optimization of key performance indicators and metrics: a systematic approach for breaking KPI determinants into their individual components and enhancing the effectiveness of each
• Human interaction management: a process-based approach for optimizing people’s engagement with business work systems
• Disaster planning/recovery: inventorying business processes and IT solutions for disaster recovery planning

The PPT Framework is not designed to be an answer to all of a company’s problems, nor is it designed to capture every single piece of data and information within a company’s operations. Its purpose is to be a powerful methodology which provides a stable platform for managing growth and complexity, affording stability while also being flexible enough to allow for rapid operational change.

Similarly, this book’s purpose is not to provide a step-by-step guide for implementing the PPT Framework for a specific industry, company, department, or process. It is a broad reference for those considering the need for the framework as well as those who are in the process of implementing it.

Implementing the PPT Framework never truly ends. As a business expands, as the market changes, as people come and go, and as new technologies are incorporated, a company continuously changes. Thus, this book addresses the specific elements of the framework – the building blocks, if you will – and provides an illustration of how it could be implemented by using Matt and Kyle’s hypothetical situation.

While the company in the scenario is a mid-size company with a number of departments and managers, that does not mean the PPT Framework is only for mid-to-large organizations. Because of its scalability, the methodology is just as applicable for small businesses with only a handful of people. Because start-ups and small businesses often lack the resources to have specialized departments, many lack the structure and systemized approach of larger organizations.

As a small business grows, the principals of the company often do not have time to adequately train new hires and to communicate exactly how their company operates. The PPT Framework provides a key advantage by allowing the founders to document their priority processes, thereby shortening the time to train and communicate. For fast-growing companies, this is very important because some kind of structure must be implemented; waiting until a crisis point when structure is absolutely necessary will cost much more in time, capital, productivity, and other resources. By developing a systematic process while the company is small, the ideal structure will already be in place.

Larger organizations usually have processes and business rules. In this case, one of the primary benefits of the framework is allowing a standardized, company-wide system which incorporates existing processes while also allowing for much greater growth. More importantly, it provides a method of continuous process improvement towards optimal efficiency.

One of the appealing aspects of the PPT Framework is its simplicity. In fact, the whole framework can be summarized by a series of diagrams created by just two straightforward tasks:

1. Inventorying the boxes which represent the existing entities and the associated information for each one

2. Drawing the lines between the boxes which represent the relationships and flow of information between each entity

As an analogy to explain these two tasks: if I had just poured out a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of a mountain scene, at first I would have no idea how all the pieces fit together. I would not solve the puzzle by picking up two pieces at a time to see if they fit together. I would look at the cover of the box and get the big picture – the snow-capped mountain, the green valley, and the blue sky.

If I were to apply the PPT Framework to the jigsaw puzzle, inventorying the boxes would be sorting and grouping the puzzle into distinct piles (which you could think of as invisible boxes). Blue pieces would go into the ‘box’ for sky pieces, white pieces would go into the box for mountain pieces, and green pieces would go into the box for valley pieces. After the initial sorting, I would sort the pieces further – perhaps separating the sky pieces into those with clouds and those without, or the valley pieces into those which were edge pieces and those which were not.

Drawing the lines would be seeing how the pieces fit together within their individual groupings. After fitting the pieces within each group together, I would see how each group fit with other groups, such how the whole sky scene fits together with the whole mountain scene.

This analogy applies to every company, department, and existing process. The pieces of the puzzle already exist and, together, create the big picture. The manager’s task is to categorize all of those pieces into distinct segments and then determine how each piece interlocks with the others.

Like the PPT Framework itself, this book is divided into five primary elements.

Chapter One: The Functional Organizational Chart captures the big picture of the company. It is not the traditional hierarchical chain-of-command type, but rather a representation of the high-level flow of information between company departments.

Chapter Two: Managing the People Component addresses the people element of the framework, separating individuals from their functional positions, and then matching those positions to processes.

Chapter Three: Managing the Process Component addresses how information flows through the company and how to separate the logical workflows from how the work is carried out physically (the standard operating procedures) – a crucial distinction within the PPT Framework.

Chapter Four: Managing the Technology Component addresses the role of information technology in facilitating people’s engagement of the processes.

Chapter Five: Governance addresses how to maintain the PPT Framework in the long-term.

At its core, the PPT Framework is process-driven. While people may rapidly change, the functions required by a process remain more stable; therefore, the process determines the skills required in a position. Technology rapidly changes, but the same information must pass from one position to another; while the technology may alter how people execute a process, the process still requires the same tasks to be performed.

It is difficult for me to stress the value companies can realize by applying the PPT Framework. The efficiency gains, the increased morale, the decreased communication problems, the cross-departmental collaboration – the list of benefits my clients and past employers have experienced goes on. But perhaps the most exciting idea is that the more they engage with the framework, the more benefits they will see.

If you are considering utilizing the framework for your own company or department, or even if you are in the process of doing so, I highly encourage you to continue down this path – for the sake of your company and your team.

I look forward to your success!

Kan Wang

June 2011