Social: Executing without overheads

"2 months! You have to kidding me! " shouted Mark at Jill, our head of procurement.

It was later in the evening around 7:00PM, most of the employees had left for the day, but the ones that were in the office were collecting to see what the big public bawling was about.

"This can't be good" I thought to myself as I got nearer.

"Hey, hey!!! Can we please take this in my room." I interrupted their intense disagreement.

While we walked towards my office, I wondered,

" I was brought in by the CEO and the board as the head of operations (of this software development company with nearly 500 developers in three centers) to help them streamline the operations and grow the business ."

"For my part, I have done everything by the book. I have incorporated (Key Result Areas or Goals) for each department in-line with the organization goals. I have then rolled out a balanced score card throughout the entire organization. Put in a system of measurement on each project, and finally made the leads and managers responsible for customer success. All in just over a year. This was a no brainer. It should work!"

"Yet…," I pondered on, as I made them both sit down in my office and got them both a bottle of water

"We have issues:

1. Each project seems to be working as a little company and nobody seems to care for the organization

2. At the ground level there was a constant struggle or issues between all the departments. It seemed that we needed more and more processes and rules because every rule in some way crossed some other teams productivity

3. Teams were interested in getting only their task done without care for anyone else. It felt like we were running a bunch of mercenaries…"

My thoughts were interrupted when Mark, (Mr. Magic as I called him) our creative design group head spoke up.

"Harsha, I have to have the latest hardware for my project (The actual hardware is not important here), and have made a procurement request as you have asked us to, but yet Jill here is telling me that it is going to take two months!"

Jill replied "But Harsha, you have asked me to import these machines from the low cost vendor as a part of organization cost management process."

'That is fair', I thought, but before I could react, Mark rebutted, "By that time my project will be done and dusted by then! Look, I want to be a team player, I have even done the analysis on the web, I have even called a couple of vendors locally and they can have the machine in-house by tomorrow morning."

"But that is going to cost more" said Jill defending her department goals.

"By how much?" I asked both of them.

"$285 more…" came the answer.

I nearly fell of the chair!

I asked them to go ahead with it. I told Jill that we will add this to her budget and that it would not affect her department targets. Notice, I just broke my own rule to do good to the company.

Both of them went about their business and completed their projects successfully.

As they left the my office, I shook my head in disgust.

"$285! And, they are fighting like kids! But it is strange. But both of them are empowered employees and were doing everything by the rules I had had set up for them, if you look at it they were both trying to do good for the company.  Somehow, the organization and I had let them down. The organization structure and the systems and processes that I had laid out with the best of intention was the real reason for them fighting. Their corporate goals  were opposing one another!"

But how would I fix it????

As I reached home, my daughter came running to me and asked, "Daddy, which nail polish do you think I should wear?" and thrust out 5 different choices from her moms collection!

It had been a long day, I thought to myself "Why me?" in a bit of self pity. Then did any self respecting parent would do and washed my hands off it by saying, "Why don't you ask your friends?".

She got distracted by something and went away.

An hour later just my daughter flopped in the couch next to me. I noticed that she has a crazy shade of blue nail polish on her hands that was mixed with pink and silver dots!!!!

Knowing fully well something crazy was going hit me, I ventured, "But I did not see you call or go out? Did you talk to your friends?"

She quickly said, "No, I checked with my friends on the social networks and we decided that I should go with a combination than just one color!"

She disappeared just as she had appeared but got me thinking of the problem earlier in the night.

That is when it hit me!!!!!!

The world around us has changed. We have three main advantages going for us.

1. We can’t put a processes/rules around everything. We have to let the organization evolve through empowered execution.
2. With the internet information is instantly available to everyone (Not just the procurement guys!)
3. The power of social network can be used to harnessed (People are influenced by their social network) companies to drive employees to execute strategies to success!

The Club VA (Our enterprise social network software to enable operation excellence through empowered organization!) is built to help companies execute leveraging these three advantages.

Results: After we implementing the Club within the organization we found the follow results:

1. Not only did we not have any of the problems described above, the server utilization increased by over 20%.
2. Employees felt empowered to make decisions for the organizations at the execution levels that decreased costs by 10%
3. In just one year of implementing the software we were able to bring about team cohesiveness and reduce attrition by over 50%.

If you want to achieve similar results. Please feel free to call any one of us at Vantage Agora.