The modern employee has a responsibility to ensure that there work is completed in time and to the highest quality for the good of the business, to this end it must also be in accordance to the companies guiding principles and governance rules. We have recently worked with three clients on different projects but found a commonality between their challenges to unobtrusively enable their employees to capture and add find-ability to their information.
The sirens devoured sailors that happened to pass their islands and succumbed to their songs.
In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus is warned by Circe that he will pass the sirens island. She tells him to plug his men's ears with wax so they can not hear the sirens songs and to have them tie him tightly to the mast so he may listen if he wants to experience their seduction. Odysseus would have fallen in the sirens trap but for being tightly bound to the mast of the ship. Odysseus therefore chose to experience the sirens temptations and would have succumbed to the sirens but for his foresight to have his men bind him to the mast of the ship.
I am not suggesting that the modern organisation needs to go to such lengths as bee’s wax and chains but there are similarities with the modern challenges associated with information governance, PMO and effective communication. All require self control and discipline but, more importantly, all need to have the correct way (process or channel or method) to be as intuitive as possible. The employee should be empowered to do their work with as little admin or extra effort for the key requirements of the organisation’s governance or compliance requirements. Following structures and meeting the demands of defined processes needs to be intuitive and inherent not obtrusive.
We have recently worked with three clients who were all doing different things but with common challenges pertaining to user adoption and compliance.
Communication Strategy
A global firm were looking to maximise their return on investment from their communication tools projects. A large amount of money had been spent on various communication channels including email upgrade, collaboration portals, chat / messenger tools and video communication. The firm were delighted to offer their staff so many different tools to communicate however they quickly realised that there was an issue. User adoption was hugely inconsistent across the different businesses and territories, with no consistent approach or rules of engagement there was a risk that information was being lost as not everyone was using the tools in the same way or as they were intended. Technically everyone was up to speed on how to use the tools. The firm were looking for a consistent, efficient approach to communication across all medium.
The critical challenge that we faced was to not be too rigid but rigid enough so that there were defined, consistent approaches and most importantly that the approach was intuitive and easy for the users. The recommended approach for this type of engagement is to firstly understand who was using each tool across the organisation and map that use to their training to spot and highlight any issues in the roll out plan (if any). This also enabled us to spot patterns across the geographical regions which assisted us later to focus efforts based on each region’s behaviour with specific channels which were under used or incorrectly used in order to bridge any social issues. The next step is to come up with the defined best practice and to ensure that all parts of the organisation are represented in this step - this is critical. We need to answer the following: Is the approach as simple as possible? If not, how can it be simplified? What are the risks of users not following this approach and the consequences etc.? Based on this the teams need to be made aware of the approach for the different channels in order to maximise the ROI and this can be done in a multitude of approaches from incentives to focussed training to policies to enforce use. Finally and perhaps most importantly in order to ensure the user adoption continues and grows after the initial focus, the key is to include some very simple Aide Memoir’s in order to brief users in a very simple way as well as monitoring use to highlight the continual improvement and efficiency / cost savings for the initiative.
Information Governance
A global airline who was concerned with information overload, silos of information and unnecessary repetition of effort / duplication wanted our thoughts on how to introduce controls and governance in order to maximise the value from the information and to ensure it was optimised for the organisation in terms of its use, find-ability and benefits. There was also a legal consideration around the governance and retention of information.
The challenge on these engagements is striking the balance between the benefits and the user experience. The other challenge being faced was how to tackle this - there was information across the companies business units and divisions with different maturity levels. In terms of the user experience, we need to ensure that the governance processes and requirements are delivered in such a way that enables users to do their job’s without being restricted or causing additional, intrusive admin or overhead. This is the big challenge and one in which technology and well-defined processes can assist with. The benefits of the process must be shared with the users in order to gain adoption and buy in. The most successful way to achieve this is to show the users the benefits in terms of time savings, consistency and find-ability - as per Odysseus’ men, having your head bitten off is quite the incentive. In terms of the disparate business units, the different levels of maturity needs to be captured. The learning of this assessment should be fed into the approach and methodology. This would be a structured undertaking and would need to follow a phased approach. Initially the organisation would need to evaluate what they have available in order to understand the magnitude of the challenge; if this is not a feasible option the approach could be to define a central approach and then distribute this out to the teams. This approach comes with risks – the central approach may not capture all of the information required or it may be less user friendly than the current approach – this will have an impact on teams in the field and can cause animosity to a new approach. Taking an iterative approach can reduce the risk but can increase the timeframes and this balance must be struck. Their needs to be a central team who owns this or the risk of losing sight of the end objective will be high. Based on this and a pilot which looks at a cross section of functionality the project can be structured to prioritise quick wins and core business areas as well as policies, the taxonomies and meta-data that is critical. This will then map back to the framework to put the policies and controls in place for the areas that should be focused on. With this information an iterative approach can be taken but based on the above choices this will need to be defined. Once completed the key outcomes are: corporate compliance in terms of retention policies and data, there will be a clear audit trail of the information lifecycle, governance will be in place and the find-ability and legal requirements will be met. The benefits to the users will be unobtrusive compliance as the tool and processes aim to be low impact to their normal operation. Any requests for information can be serviced much simpler and efficiently thus driving down costs. The information itself will be stored in the right place making it secure and cost effective as its value evolves over time.
Programme Management Office
A large communications firm who had huge market share but were under threat from government changes and fierce competition wanted to control spend and make sure that they had control over projects, avoid overrun, ensured visibility and control costs.
The challenge with this engagement is inevitably how to enforce, without restricting and without being intrusive - how to enable the employees to maximise their contributions whilst also having a control and sustainable approach. Through a series of simple structures we were able to define high level processes that ensured that the visibility of projects was high whilst also offering a model which could adapt to the situation based on various drivers. One of the keys here was to create roles which various people could map into dependent on their requirements, this ensured that the right people were included, projects had a consistent approach and could also scale. We also ensured that the communication plan was simple and escalations had to go through a process which everyone bought into. We also enabled “shortcuts”, this was for a minor change or a high priority action to be fast tracked through the process(es) in order to be resolved in a timely manner - this was hugely successful but needs to be taken with caution as it can be abused to bypass controls. Thanks to the processes being simple we were able to summarise them into neat high level, visual representations which enabled people to be empowered and understand the processes very quickly. There was also detailed documentation behind these but the visual aids should cater for 80-90% of queries. Due to the escalation and defined meetings with senior stakeholders the risk of micromanaging was reduced - saving senior staff’s time and also empowering the project teams to progress and empowering them to succeed. we made the team more effective and added controls.
Summary
As per Odysseus’ strategy to overcome the risk of the sirens there is a need for us to empower employees to meet the strains and demands of the organisations essential controls and mechanisms. By making these tasks intuitive and as simple as possible you are encouraging and empowering your teams to do the right things for the greater good of the company without impacting productivity and admin tasks.
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