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The world of today is dramatically different from 20 years ago and with the lines between work and non-work already badly frayed, Gartner, Inc. predicts that the nature of work will witness 10 key changes through 2020. Organizations will need to plan for increasingly chaotic environments that are out of their direct control, and adaptation must involve adjusting to all 10 of the trends.
“Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, 'swarming' and more,” said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow. By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 percent in 2010. “People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,” he added. “In addition, simulation, visualization and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”
De-routinization of Work
Work Swarms
Weak Links
Working With the Collective
Work Sketch-Ups
Spontaneous Work
Simulation and Experimentation
Pattern Sensitivity
Hyper connected
My Place
I think Austin makes some excellent points in the article and I encourage you to read it in its entirety. When, I sit back an observe this structure it is very similar to many of the agile practices that have been developed in the Lean Software Development field. Agile software development is a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Though these practices were a result of improvement in a knowledge based field that are starting to be applied in other areas such as Marketing, Supply Chain and even Hardware Development. One of the difficulties people have in grasping this concept is that it is more about flow and speed of the overall process versus efficiencies.
The article is a definite read and raises some interesting concepts for all of us to consider.
The Value Stream Map is a lean tool to analyze the value stream. Value Stream Mapping techniques involves mapping each step of a process looking for waste and on improving the total time from the beginning to the end of the entire stream. One of the powers of the mapping process is that it enables the team to see the entire picture. This coincides with the fundamental Lean thinking of optimizing the entire process versus the individual stages.
Waste in marketing is not as readily identified as in other areas. One example of marketing waste is time. When I present this, there is typically agreement that the longer a customer/prospect stays in one of the process stages of the Value Stream or in the Queue waiting to go from one stage to the next the great chance of losing the customer. However there is also a strong argument presented that the customer controls this time and just trying to hurry them through the cycle may be just as detrimental as the wait time.
Remembering that we want to first look at how to optimize the entire process instead of a particular stage, our first step would be evaluate the total time spent, not resources allocated or used. Moving through the value stream is many times just a matter of evaluating the internal delays that occur in the process. By removing them we enable the customer to make faster and better decisions. We also create more credibility for ourselves as the ‘go to guy” and the organization that has done this before. The question is how do we get there? You first must look internally at eliminating delays.
Lack of resources:
Analyze your team’s resources:
Are you always looking for engineering help?
Do you need IT to set up a trial?
Is a sales call needed?
Are you always waiting on a proposal?
I like to start by suggesting we have unlimited resources then ask what the structure would look like. Many times with a simple reallocation of priorities such as Software Trial being the first priority of IT there is a tremendous improvement. Other times there is simply a lack of personal. This reminds me of a warehouse being more important than a machine. You can increase flow with the machine though you may decrease efficiencies within the department. In the marketing cycle, can you afford having leads sitting going stale? Shifting of duties and resources can very often create extra bodies.
One trick is to reduce the size of a process step. This sometimes enables more activities for an underutilized resource. Seldom do I see the combination of stages as a method of decreasing cycle time.
Improve your response time by getting closer to the customer-literally!
Look at the process that may be hindering your team. Location has always been one of the main reasons that you locate sales people in territories. You customer/prospect is in a different business. His desires and needs will require more adaptability on your part. Why not locate your sales teams in strategic locations. It sets a priority with the team on what is important and improves communication between them and your customer/prospect. Customer support located geographically will reduce travel and being in the same time zone an increase in response time. Most of all what message does it send to your customer? This detached team can usually function well within a company structure as this structure is well known and has more flexibility for your team.
Build quality in to your process:
Respect your people. The sales/marketing team knows how to improve their process more than anyone else. They can tell you if the paperwork, request for proposals, and specifications are flowing. They know the degree of misunderstandings that are occurring internally and with the customers. Allowing local control will invariable decrease cycle time but may increase for an organization as a whole. It is important when local optimization occurs (within specific Value streams) that this [process is well documented and the knowledge created passed on to other teams/
Most sales teams initially spend much of their time discovering how to create more material for the last response. The lack of a well-defined value stream lets errors creep in. Poor value stream quality and customer requests that are hard to understand contribute to wasted time. Properly defining your value streams or in simpler terms understanding your customer needs better can facilitate much of the running around like a “chicken with their head cutoff syndrome” or confusion that may occur.
Focusing on delays is an important part of Lean Marketing. It is one of the first things to be considered in the Value Stream and should be a primary focus. It is extremely important to sustain this effort by getting closer and closer to the customer buying process. The more you engrain yourself in that structure will significantly improve your probabilities of success. It will decrease your marketing cycle and in the long run increase your customer’s life cycle. Not a bad alternative.
Jason Fried is the founder and CEO of 37signals. Fried is a passionate leader in the field of simple, clear, and elegant web-based user interface design. He spearheaded the concept, design, and development of Basecamp, 37signal?s web-based project management tool for designers, freelancers, and creative services firms. Fried is also the co-author of Defensive Design for the Web.
Released as an ebook, Lean Marketing House is now available on the Business901 website. "When you first hear the terms Lean and Value Stream most of our minds think about manufacturing processes and waste. Putting the words marketing behind both of them is neither creative nor effective. But the future of marketing may be closely related more to these terms than you may first think. Whether Marketing meets Lean under this name or another it will be very close to the Lean methodologies developed in software primarily under the Agile connotation,
The book uses the symbolic Lean House to symbolize the five basic principles of Lean:
Identify Value (Roof)
Map Value Stream (Header)
Create Flow (Value Stream – Pillars)
Establish Pull (Foundation)
Seek Perfection (Base)
In addition to these five sections, the book also includes a section on Lean Tools and Tips for the marketing process. The book consist of 112 pages and over 40,000 words. The book is the first in the series of the Marketing with Lean Program: This series consist of the five individual products.
Do you really expect a CEO to lead a Lean Transformation? Why should you even expect upper management to sign off on the transformation before you prove the value of it? Time and time again, I have always heard the failure of any transformation, Lean, Six Sigma or practically any methodology to be the fault of lack of upper management support. Here is why you don’t need them or want them around.
When inducing change in an organization the transformation needs to start along the edges. The core where your upper management exists has a tendency to reward proven solutions; they are not the risk takers. They buy patents, give rewards for innovation and even buy companies. Most core participants tend to focus on knowledge flows within the core rather than making a concentrated effort to identify and participate in relevant knowledge flows on the edge.
Knowledge flows naturally flourishes on the edge. Why? Because by definition, participants on these edges are wrestling with how to match unmet needs with unexploited capabilities and all the uncertainty that implies. Edge participants therefore focus on ways to innovate and create value by connecting unmet needs with unexploited capabilities and then scaling these opportunities as rapidly as possible. In the process, they create significant new knowledge.
Since much of the most relevant knowledge on the edge is tacit knowledge, edge participants naturally place a heavy emphasis on building diverse networks of relationships that will help them to collaborate more effectively with others in the creation of new knowledge. For this reason, gatherings where participants can share stories and experiences, learn from each other, and identify potential collaborators become particularly prominent on the edges.
Edge participants often reach out to participants in the core in an effort to build relationships and enhance knowledge flows. But those efforts are often frustrated or at best to marginalize because where participants are too busy concentrating on defensive strategies within the core, trying to protect their profits and position, to understand the true growth opportunities represented by relevant edges. Or participants tend to focus on transactions rather than investing in a long-term effort to build sustainable, trust-based relationships on the edge.
For this reason, especially, the few core participants to understand the full potential of the edge and are able to reach out and connect into rich knowledgeable flows occurring on the edge will be in the best position to create economic value. They will be able to respond to increasing margin pressure in the core by helping to scale innovation on the edge and in participating rich new sources of profitable growth arising there. Unfortunately most core participants to the extent that they recognize increasing importance of knowledge flows at all, tend to focus and knowledge flows within the core rather than making a concentrated effort to identify and participate in relevant knowledge flows on the edge.
Why do these edge people or these risk takers even care about the core people? Edges and cores need each other. Unless they become part of the core, edge players never gain access to the stature, money or connections that exist in the core. The core needs innovation from the edge to continue refreshing and regenerating itself. In business terms, edge companies need resources to scale growth and core companies need new growth platforms to compensate for increasing competitive pressures.
In tomorrow’s podcast, Terry Barnhart and I discussed how Boyd’s OODA Loop could be used to implement Lean without the efforts of top management or a mandate driven down the chain. It could be driven by performance from the edge. The idea came up during the discussion on isolation and how Boyd saw isolation as a critical strategic device. In effect, the opposite of the information-rich environment that you picture in developing Lean, isolation could be a key factor in a Lean Transformation.
Isolating your enemy, Boyd saw, as a powerful tool in making his OODA loop inoperable, cutting off the flow of information both in and out of the organization. In his 14-hour briefing, "A Discourse on Winning and Losing," Boyd described three strategies for isolation.
"Physically we can isolate our adversaries by severing their communications with [the] outside world as well as by severing their internal communications to one another. We can accomplish [the former] ... via diplomatic, psychological, and other efforts. To cut them off from one another, we should penetrate their system by being unpredictable.
"Mentally we can isolate our adversaries by presenting them with ambiguous, deceptive, or novel situations, as well as by operating at a tempo or rhythm they can neither make out nor keep up with. Operating inside their OODA loops will accomplish just this by disorienting or twisting their mental images so that they can neither appreciate nor cope with what's really going on.
"Morally our adversaries isolate themselves when they visibly improve their well-being to the detriment of others ... by violating codes of conduct or behavior patterns that they profess to uphold or others expect them to uphold."
Building a collaborative team effort will be much easy out on the edge. You will be able to develop and modify your lean practices with ready participants that are looking for similar solutions. Look for early success on the edge, they are much more forgiving and helpful building your team there. As you start moving to the core expect to encounter resistance. Sidestep the resistance, why waste your time? As you build constituency, integrate your culture downstream and the non-believers will isolate themselves from the team.
This sounded at first a pretty cold-hearted method but the truth of the matter is that building a winning team normally includes leaving a few naysayers behind. Many of them will join the team after it has become successful others may never join. This may be a slightly worn out video as it has appeared on my blog before but it is very fitting!
This storyboarding process used by Disney is just absolutely sensational. Disney was a storyboarding freak! Not only does a storyboard allow for a dress rehearsal of the final product but by the very fact of being posted on the wall,it elicits early feedback and encourages quick, painless editing, leading to significant savings in time and resources.
The above sounds like a good Value Stream Mapping Session? Below are the takeaways I received from this video and how I apply this 25 step process to Marketing is in parenthesis.
Storyboard artist is a communicator (Marketing)
Blueprint of movie before production (Customer’s Value Stream).
Panels of the entire movie (Record all the Value and non-Value steps of the process)
Use to develop a visual story (Create story in pictures(post-it-notes)
Before expensive animation takes place (Plan before doing)
Minimum amount of info but enough for a quick read (Post-it-note)
Express what your feeling (Tell like it is)
Drawing has to have meaning (Customer Value Defined)
Storyteller must be a good pitch artist (Talk out loud and tell the story)
Put it on a Story Reel?(Gemba)
Leave the experts work the scenes they are strong at (Include others)
Everyone must be aware of overall needs of story (Understand the big picture)
If you show it graphically, you can do it! (Clarity = Flow)
Cut out a lot of unnecessary work (Reduce the Non-Value added steps)
Working together Storyboard artist and director (Sales and Marketing)
Keeping everyone on the same page (Ditto)
What if Scenarios (Reduce Risk)
Start out with the important scenes (CTQ’s of Customer)
Tool for staging (Our response)
Prepare for the scene(Customer Engagement – Sales Calls)
Develop story and character (Customer Support)
Don’t become in love with an idea (Keep an open Mind)
Every storyboard recorded – Change was OK! (If it doesn’t fit, throw it away!)
Ideas are not necessarily used immediately (Accept Relevancy)
Saved the unused work for future reference. (Backlog)
Information designer Tom Wujec talks through three areas of the brain that help us understand words, images, feelings, connections. In this short talk from TEDU, he asks: How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big ideas?
Tom Wujec is a Fellow at Autodesk, the makers of design software for engineers, filmmakers, designers. At Autodesk, he has worked on software including SketchBook Pro, PortfolioWall and Maya (which won an Academy Award for its contribution to the film industry). As a Fellow, he helps companies work in the emerging field of business visualization, the art of using images, sketches and infographics to help teams solve complex problems as a group.
She stated that many strategies such has shareholder value, core competence, six sigma and right sizing have lured many companies into a dangerous internal focus, viewing the world from the inside out. As a result, companies lose sight of the market, which leads to poor results over the long run. Inside-out thinking distracts companies from the core purpose of a business: to create and serve customers.
In research for the podcast, I came across this video by the other co-author George S. Day. George is the Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor and co-Director of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In this video he emphasized that we must stop looking at your customer as another competitive force but rather embracing how they perceive your relative market position. Understanding this as your market orientation will allow you to achieve greater revenue and profit. He also claims that this orientation with allow you to react sooner sooner to market shifts.
The four imperatives that are discussed in the video:
Be a customer value leader
Innovate new value for customers
Capitalize on the customer as an asset
Capitalize on the brand as an asset
If you have been reading my blog for any period of time, you realize George is preaching to the choir here. Great delivery and a real enforcer of why Customer Value is so important.
From the Driving Market Share Website:Every customer is looking for value, and practically every company claims to offer it. Yours is likely no exception. But do you really know what value means to your customers? If you suspected they were less than thrilled with your products and services, how would you go about discovering why? And if you discovered that you were missing a piece or two of the value equation, what would you do to address the problem? These are questions that every business leader should consider, especially in today’s economy. When you make an effort to figure out what value looks like to your customer—and take steps to provide it—the results can be extraordinary.very.
And remember, Customer Value is the best Leading Indicator of Growing Market Share.
My guest on the Business901 Podcast was Tricia Bhattacharya. She authored the Guide to Operational Excellence that Xerox makes available to their print customers. It introduces a five-step plan to help in-plants remove waste like overproduction and idle time. The five steps are: understand the goal, measure the current state, analyze data, develop a plan, and implement and track results.
Tricia explains the guide by saying, “I thought with Xerox and all of our focus on Lean Six Sigma, why don't we develop something that print shops can use to help themselves run a little more efficiently. As a Black Belt, I thought some of these concepts are not really too difficult, Lean Six Sigma has almost a stigma attached to it that it's very difficult and very hard to apply to a smaller business or a medium sized business. I took some of the simpler concepts out of a Lean Six Sigma tool set, put them in this guide, and renamed it "Operational Excellence."
She is currently a Worldwide Segment Marketing Manager for the Xerox Graphic Communications Business Group. In this role, she is responsible for developing marketing programs focused on in-plant environments. She also holds a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Her 19-year career at Xerox has spanned roles from product development to marketing and she holds several patents for technologies developed while working on high-speed color product innovations. She earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Lafayette College, an ME in Mechanical Engineering from RIT, and an MBA from the Simon School at the University of Rochester.
The author of Borrowing Brilliance, David Kord Murray, has an impressive résumé. Not only is he a rocket scientist who worked on numerous projects for NASA and the Pentagon but he's also a successful entrepreneur, having sold Taxnet, a company he co-founded that specializes in e-filing software, to H&R Block (HRB) in 2005. And in between those items on his CV is a strong hint that he practices what he preaches. When Murray was head of innovation at Intuit (INTU)—the creator of TurboTax, which allows users to e-file—he saw a brilliant idea, borrowed a chunk of it, and made a killing. His book encourages everyone to give it a try. After all, he argues, it worked for Johannes Gutenberg, George Lucas, and the Google guys.
The Good: Practical and simple advice on how to come up with new products and services by cherry-picking, then combining, others' ideas.
The Bad: Author Murray often repeats his main points—even some of his anecdotes
The Bottom Line: An entertaining, easy-to-read romp through the history of innovation, from Gutenberg to the Google guys, plus a method that appears to actually work.
is simply a good book.
