Management 2.0, SOO and productivity

March 26, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I started, here and there, writing about the need for changing flows direction within organization : switching from a “pushed” to a “pull” way of producting and communicating. The purpose is to make it possible for people to determine their action according to a goal rather than to an order.

Why is that so important ?

Because it’s more consistent with the reality of people’s work today. It waid said many times, repeated, but the time when employees has to reproduce endlessly an unique task or gesture is over. Their activities, their daily tasks, are not defined in a production plan but by a request, a need that are continuously changing. Generally people don’t need to be be told what to do but need support to do things. They need more support than instructions and this support, as paradoxical as it may be, may come from above. Today, orders are coming from above and support from above is expected. What is needed to help people to do their job is the exact opposite.

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Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

To understand enterprise 2.0 companies should learn from theory of constraints

August 21, 2008 By Leave a Comment

It’s funny to see how history seems to be endlessly repeating, how issues that have been fixed years ago are coming back to the surface.

Because the question of productivity, time management, ROI in an enterprise 2.0 or in a Service Oriented Organization remembers me of something that already took place years ago (and was fixed) in manufacturing industry and seems to be breaking out again in the knowledge and services industry.

It’s nothing more than a nth application of theory of constraints (TOC).

I first looked into this case when I was a student and was very interested in optimization issues (finally I didn’t change that much since I’m mainly blogging about optimizing organization in a knowledge economy context). At the end of a manufacturing management class, the outside contributer advised me to read “the goal”, from Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

First surprise, it was a novel. The proof of the power of storytelling because I’m not sure I would have been caught up in this if it had been writen in a more academic manner.

Second surprise : I was really slapped in the face to realize I had to unlearn many thing I thought being unbreakable truth. The young and inexperienced student I was at this time was convinced that everything was about productivity and outputs there was no sheet anchor. I learned, on the contrary, that it was sometimes efficient to have employees that don’t work and machines that don’t produce anything. It was not that idiot : if the final product needs many pieces to be assembled, it’s no use having a huge sock of “A” if “B” needs more time to be produced. Doing this drives stocks that cost lots of money, so it’s sometimes better to slow production down, even interupt it. And the employee that is, as a consequence, not working, helps you to make money because he’s not making you loose money by creating stocks.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

One day, every project will be agile

June 27, 2008 By 1 Comment

The time is not far when the question of reinventing project management will be a key issue. The purpose will be to reconsider a project as something that have to fulfill a need and not an objective by itself as it’s so often. How can we see a project is its own purpose ? When, at the end, what is delivered totally matches with what what decided at the beginning and, at the same time, people realize it doesn’t fulfill the need because the need has evolved in the meanwhile, or that the client (internal or external) agreed to something that didn’t was not really what he expected, perhaps by lack of communication or bad understanding to what could actually be done.

By being next to developers all day long, I looked at the way they were working and it seems to me these guys discovered a kind of Holy Graal called agile method.

Of course I immediately tried to find if it could be use for other kind of projects than software development.

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Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , ,

Is creativity the only answer to complexity ?

May 21, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Basically that would make sense. In an industrial economy everything is product-centric : we know what it is, what it’s made of, of which pieces it’s composed, there’s one and only one to produce and assemble them, and everyone knows exactly what he has to do. It’s a system based on infinite repetition of totally scripted actions whithout any deviation : each production has to be the exact clone of the previous one.

In a knowledge based economy, things change. Most of times, the product consists in “finding a solution to a problem”. That makes things much more complex. Each steps depends on the the result of the previous and the product (ie the solution) is unknown at the starting of the production.

So there’s no suprise to see projects failing when people try to apply them what used to work before.

But we can get throught that : let’s see how.

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Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,