Getting your Ps and Ts right

For a B school graduate freshly out of haven of academia, it takes a while to digest that folks in new companies are not rubbing their hands in anticipation of your recommendation and suggestions in the last slide. Fed on a staple of case studies, we dreamt of easing our way through the complex 'strategic' problems plaguing organization . We would do some radical earth-shattering number crunching of their performance indicators, market trends and industry benchmark. We will call to question their unacceptable positioning at right-bottom quadrant of fix-it-all-need-analysis-cost-benefit-bell graph and anoint them to that elusive market leadership position. How ???
Just wait for that last slide of recommendation and next steps. It was like the richer cousin of some regional party election manifesto in terms of articulation. Sexy, promising, eloquent and forward -looking. So what went wrong in the real life ?

Actually, nobody asked for one.

So that begs a question whether they were too timid to acknowledge our intellectual radiance or we just stuffed our brains with jargons that were rendered meaningless in the face of organizational dynamics.
Or we just thought too much too soon.

My short stint in an IT company has taught me a thing or two about organizations. Though not a fair extrapolation, yet I would like to believe my observations will be traceable to majority of corporate workplaces.
I hope to be remain objective in my narration and therefore, may be 1 point at a time is what I may do justice to:

1. People, process , technology (PPT): My presales experience has given me tremendous exposure to molestation of this otherwise profound abbreviation. If you are entrusted with outlining a transformational framework for your client’s existing set-up or in-house divisional restructuring or executing a new project regardless of scale , remember this- You have three candidate dimensions to effect changes and drive efficiencies.

Technology might be the easiest to turnaround but the efficacy of any change across any of these 3 dimensions are so closely related to the readiness and acceptance of the other 2 that absence of alignment spells doom for all transformational undertakings. Before any radical shift, get your people in line for they are the end-users and it’s in the trenches of junior management that change agents lose their way.

Then pan out the components of workflow and identify the points where the implementation of new technology will cause changes. Once the complexities arising out of new technology adoptions have been identified and remediated, conduct a pilot phase of implementation. This will help in picking up the bottlenecks that were glossed over in planning and assessment phase.

Once the big –bang or phased deployment of change element is complete, next step would be to closely monitor the performance metrics of new environment to stability and have a help-desk for handholding of end-users in their understanding of new set-up. Now just as I wrote the last line, I felt my professional bias has taken over the neutral mindset i intended to stick with.

To cut the chase, even though you may have the wisest of intentions or best in breed technologies in backyard, unless there is an aggressive strategy to engage people, little can be achieved. Now I won’t pontify what great feats have been achieved by people willing to do something inspite of absence of all standard enablers yet my takeaway is that even in context of profit driven organization, sustainable benefits can be realized if only managers invest in nurturing employees and upholding organization’s values system. Long back in Mr Handa’s witty one-liners I read- you can fool the people you work with, you can fool the people you work under but and that's a big BUT..you can never fool the people who work under you.

Hypocrisy on the part of top management can let indolence run amok. Likewise, a battery of top managers totally dedicated to customer’ cause and employee’s legitimate interests will draw a multiplier effect on the morale and motivation of the people they represent. We have been told all this in context of leader's virtues but corporate set-up has a wonderful way of inverting the fallacies of democracy. In your company you don't get the manager you demand but we most certainly strive to deliver as he wishes.