As a hands-on active Information Management lead, I am required to apply as and when apt various schools of Information Management thought including DMS, ECM, BPM among others in our regular Request for Change cycle.
Serendipity was to force me to be innovative in our change management as our Solution Designer was rendered unavailable and I was forced to replace and then utilize the services of our development partner resources to deliver the solutions to requested changes.
Having been put into a seat which I last occupied more than a decade ago during the days MySQL did not have the ability to have nested SELECTs and when one had to painstakingly use Natural Joins to achieve the objectives. I was sure that while my semantics may still thrive, it would take me another decade to get back into the world of syntax. And my deadlines were closer to 10 days than 10 years.
The “Standard” process here would have failed to deliver the results within the expected time. It was time to innovate and time to collaborate. Innovate and collaborate I did!
Skip the process. Join hands with my Syntax stars. Do a quick semantic-syntax collaborative analysis. Prepare a business-oriented presentation of the analyses. Discuss, prioritize, and decide with the business (collaborative again ranging from meetings to emails to phone calls). Clarify all open points and sieve out the unnecessary RFCs. Arrange for the syntax stars to document the Solution designs. Start development.
Interestingly, this approach broke all the rules of the “formal” process. Yet, it achieved what a formal process failed to achieve – many firsts in our organization.
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Zero conflicts between Business and IT
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Zero escalations to Senior Management
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Zero delays in achieving deadlines
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Zero additional man-days
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Zero version control
(There were only 2 documents – the RFC and the SDD and both were one and final. The SDD accommodated changes and is considered to supersede the RFC)
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Zero additional cost!
I may not have used any collaboration or adaptive tool as we have none available to use as such. Yet, the principles remain the same.
As Max “ACM” Pucher said quite appropriately in his latest well researched blog post, “The Complexity of Simplicity”, “Motivating people to pursue well-defined goals autonomously, while receiving recognition for a job well done is a lot cheaper than process enforcement.”
While Necessity may be the Mother of Invention, Collaboration must definitely be the Mother of Change
Originally published in The Information Manager
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