Tag Archives: value stream map

You’re Talking About Value Wrong

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“Value” is one of the most overused and misunderstood terms in business today.

It is often thrown around in meetings and on company websites but while many organizations talk about value, very few get it right.

Why is that? What is the problem with value? For starters, value is a perception. What is valuable to one organization -or one person – may not be as valuable to another. And many organizations don’t define value at an enterprise level. As a result, company initiatives are fractured and less impactful because everyone within the organization is using their own value measuring stick.

The second problem with value is that too many organizations equate value only with cost savings. This is a misconception that can cost organizations a lot of money and time with little to show for it. Fact is that organizations, just like people, are happy to pay for things that they perceive as being valuable – cost is secondary.

If you’re talking about value wrong or worse, not talking about it at all, here are three points that will help you reframe the value conversation.

Value does not equal cost savings.

When thinking about value, it’s easy to just think in terms of dollars and cents. It’s straightforward and unlike value, everyone knows exactly how much dollars and cents are worth.

Now, cost is a factor in value but it should not be the leading factor of value. Because in addition to a price tag, there are intangible costs with any transaction. These intangible costs include things like time to make the purchase, the ease of making a purchase, the time to get set up with a product or service, etc. These intangible costs factor into the value and depending on the end-user, they could mean much more than a specific dollar amount.

When you’re discussing value — whether it’s the value of your product or service, a new technology, or your own IT services, don’t forget the intangibles and factor those into the value.

Outcomes by themselves don’t deliver value.

In an article for SysAid, I explained the difference between outcomes and outputs in reference to ordering a pizza. The outputs are the operational measures, like when you order a pizza and it arrives on time and at the agreed upon price. The outcomes are the results that show the value of that pizza delivery, such as did you get the pizza you ordered, was it hot and fresh, did it taste good and so on.

More IT professionals are beginning to focus on outcomes instead of outputs, which is very important! However, outcomes alone don’t get the job done when it comes to value. Competition is too intense these days and consumers have a lot of options, and high expectations.

So what combines with outcomes to create value? The experience of the transaction.

Part of value is experience.

If you don’t provide or enable a good experience, you’re not offering value. The experience is just as important today. In fact, Salesforce found in a survey that 80% of customers say the experience businesses provide is just as important as its products and services. And Gartner found that 81% of businesses compete primarily on customer experience.

Customer experience is more important than ever and if you want to deliver value through your products and services, you have to offer a seamless and personalized experience for your customers.

The Role of Service of Management in Value

By this point, it’s clear that value isn’t just about a price tag. It’s a combination of understanding what’s important to your consumers and consistently delivering those results – along with a great experience. In short, someone finds value when they can say “I got the outcome I needed and expected and I had a good experience while doing it – at the price I was willing to pay.”

The connection between the experience and outcomes lives in your service management foundations. Service management is how you can monitor the experience and ensure you deliver the outcomes that a customer wants so they can recognize the value of your products and services.

Is your service management approach strong enough to deliver value? Have you done these things in the last 12 months?

  • Met with your key stakeholders to review and agree on a shared definition of value
  • Mapped your value streams with all stakeholders, not just IT
  • Audited your workflows to identify and implement improvements
  • Implemented continual improvement strategies

Service management is an ongoing initiative but it can — and will — help to deliver value if it’s done properly with buy-in from the entire team.

If you’ve been struggling with showing how IT delivers value to the bottom line and you want to elevate your IT organization, you need to be sure you’re talking about value correctly. Review your service management approach. Examine the customer experience. You may just find the areas where IT can fill any gaps and deliver the value your customer needs.

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Want ESM? Start with VSM

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Enterprise Service Management (ESM) has been gaining traction over the last few years — and for good reason.  With technology driving businesses forward these days, organizations must be able to holistically drive value to the bottom line of the business. And ESM can help them do just that.

The question is where to start with ESM? How can you implement ESM into your organization so that it actually sticks? While there are multiple approaches for implementing ESM initiatives, there’s one tool that you might already be using that can form the foundation for good ESM. 

Why Is ESM Important?

Enterprise Service Management is an organizational capability for delivering value in the form of products and services by facilitating outcomes leveraging the resources of the entire organization in a holistic manner.

It’s important to acknowledge that ESM is not just simply extending IT Service Management (ITSM)  into the enterprise. You can’t just take your ITSM tools and workflows and apply them across the organization- and expect success. Instead, ESM is about integrating everyone’s activities within the organization and managing those workflows holistically.

So why is ESM so important?  Because organizations are now digital.

Technology plays a role in all parts of every organization.  Businesses have become so reliant on technology to deliver products and services that it is impossible to separate the business process from the technology.   Therefore, it only makes sense that digital organizations adopt ESM.

Barriers to ESM

But organizations face challenges in adopting ESM.  Perhaps the most significant of these challenges are silo behavior and a lack of understanding of how work flows through the organization.

Organizations can’t afford to have siloed departments working in isolation.  Everyone within the organization has to understand not only how their work contributes to success, but also the upstream and downstream impacts of their work.  

The best way to identify and break down silos and understand how work flows through the organization is value stream mapping.  

What are Value Stream Maps?

Value stream maps represent the internal, end-to-end view of how information, products, and value flows through the organization.

A value stream is the sequence of activities required to design, produce, and deliver a good or service to a customer, and it includes the dual flows of information and material.

An organization will likely have several different value streams.  And in only very rare occasions do value streams not cross department boundaries. However, the people that work within those departments may not recognize or even be aware of that.  

A value stream map allows people to visualize the steps and corresponding data flow of how departments interact, which is what makes value stream mapping so powerful.  A well-formed value stream map identifies where there is friction or waste, such as bottlenecks, missed hand-offs, and ineffective processes, within a value stream.  A value stream map is a great tool for aligning organizations on how work gets done and where there are opportunities for improvements.  When done correctly, a value stream map is a powerful tool for breaking down and eliminating silo behavior within an organization.  

How do Value Stream Maps enable good ESM?

So how do value stream maps enable Enterprise Service Management?

Well, even without maps, value streams already exist in every organization. But they might not be well-understood or the steps involved in the value stream may not be documented. Some members of the organization may not understand their role or contribution within a value stream. 

Value stream maps illustrate how everyone contributes to a value stream, but also what activities and people depend upon those contributions for achieving their own contributions.  Miss a step, or if a step doesn’t happen as expected, and the value stream breaks down. And when a value stream breaks down, not only is the organization impacted, but the customers of the organization are impacted as well. 

This is where good ESM helps. 

Good ESM delivers the repeatable, consistent, and measurable workflows and underpinning technologies that support the work done within value streams. 

Value stream mapping also helps organizations avoid what I call “enterprise silo management”.  Enterprise silo management results when organizations take a technology-first approach to ESM.  Examples of “enterprise silo management” include approaches like providing access to the ITSM tool to colleagues outside of IT for logging and tracking tickets. Or an organization has purchased specific “modules” for its ITSM tool or provided separate instances of its ITSM for use by a non-IT department, such as HR or Facilities.  In many cases, this results in no end-to-end, cross-departmental views of the flow of information, work, and value.   In fact, these approaches only reinforce departmental boundaries and cause friction within the organization…the opposite of what effective value stream maps would illustrate. 

Start ESM with VSM

Effective ESM connects the parts of the enterprise together to create a better working environment and deliver improved results. After a year of remote work with many organizations still grappling with how to deal with hybrid work environments and higher customer expectations, businesses are feeling the pressure to find better ways of working.  Progressive organizations recognize that each part of an organization must be part of those better ways of working and contribute for organizational success. 

ESM is a holistic approach that will improve the effectiveness and efficiency of any organization. 

But to do ESM well means starting first with identifying and understanding how the work flows through the organization.  Value stream mapping illustrates how work and value flows through an organization.  With this information, CIOs can begin to build their business case for ESM and gain buy-in from other leaders. 

Starting ESM implementation with value stream mapping is a powerful start that will set your business apart today and in the future. 

 

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Business-IT Alignment isn’t a 50-50 Deal

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More and more companies are transforming via digital transformation and discovering new lines of business or radically changing their existing business models through the use of technology.  What does this mean?  It means that IT and the business have no choice but to become aligned if they want to succeed.

It’s no longer just “nice to have” alignment between business and IT. If the IT organization isn’t aligned with the business, the business will go around IT to make their initiatives happen — and that can have catastrophic consequences for everyone. 

It’s one thing to have a meeting with both the business and IT in the room and claim that you’re aligned.  But the realities of what alignment looks like and what it really means for IT and the business is more complex than simply adding IT to meeting agendas. 

What does it mean for the business and IT to be aligned? Who’s responsible for creating that alignment?

From Service Provider to Solution Provider 

According to Tim Winders, Vice-Chancellor of Information Services at Purdue University Northwest, “IT is aligned with the business when IT moves from being a service organization to delivering business solutions.”

The subtle difference between providing business solutions and being a service provider requires a proactive approach. As Tim explains it, “In the reactive model, IT fixes problems but is outside of the decision-making process.”  Being proactive as an IT organization means being “a collaborative business partner delivering solutions that solve specific business problems. IT collaborates with the business to identify business problems to provide proactive solutions, improving products, customer experience, and business reputation.”

The days of IT just implementing the right technology are long gone. IT has to be an engaged part of every business strategy discussion because technology touches every piece of the business.  IT must be engaged from the beginning if that technology is to work to enable value to the business and its end users. 

Mike Gill, CIO at Marian, Inc, explains it this way, “You need to ensure your solution delivery provides value. The value is not if you have the best technology or it runs the most efficiently, the value is if it solves a problem the business has.” 

Of course, it’s easy to say that the IT organization is driving value and is aligned with the business. But what does ‘alignment’ actually look like?  How do you know if you’re aligned? 

What Does Business-IT Alignment Look Like?

If business-IT alignment is connected to driving business value, then you have to start there. Of course, as I’ve pointed out before, the problem with “value” is that it’s a perception. What’s valuable to IT might not be valuable to the business – and vice-versa.  So it’s important that value is identified and agreed by every stakeholder in the organization — customers, partners, suppliers and internal stakeholders. Defining and agreeing on the definition of value as an organization is the first step to getting IT and the business aligned. 

Once value is defined, you can refine your workflows and processes to ensure they are actually delivering business value, including the appropriate measures within those workflows to check for value. For example, Mike shared a way that he can determine if IT is aligned with the business. 

“We have an internally developed ERP system and have the freedom to implement workflows that provide maximum business value – it is a custom system tailored to our company. One sign that we are aligned is looking at transactions in the system,” explained Mike. “Are users doing all the steps in real-time or are they catching up transactions at the end of the day? Looking at the logs you can see if a process that should occur over a longer period (days, not minutes) is mirrored by a similar timeline of transactions in the system. If I see those transactions happening by different people over the course of a day or two then I know the system is aligned to the business (both function and usability). If I see all those transactions happen within minutes of each other then I know they are just catching up work into the system because they must – [which indicates that IT is] not aligned.”

The key here is that Mike made sure the technology fit and supported the workflows of the business, instead of the other way around – a key to business-IT alignment. This enables the technology to be instrumented or monitored to confirm business value – and therefore, better aligned with the organization. 

Additionally, to ensure you’re aligned, look to see if IT is being invited to new projects and initiatives at the kickoff meeting. According to Mike, “It is easy to invite IT leadership to monthly and annual executive status meetings and feel like you are giving them importance or that you are aligning business and IT. That does matter, but it matters more when the regular business projects and initiatives are inviting IT representation in the first steps. It means the business and IT are given the chance to stay aligned from the beginning rather than create the feeling that IT just does what the business says – that never leads to good outcomes.”

IT leaders must regularly check in with other company leaders to ensure that IT is involved with all upcoming initiatives.  If you do that, you’re on your way to business-IT alignment. 

What To Do About Business-IT Alignment?

Once some signs of business-IT alignment begin to appear within an organization, you have to ask yourself one thing: “What am I going to do with this opportunity?”

I believe that IT organizations struggling with business-IT alignment fall into one of two camps. The first group doesn’t know how to achieve business-IT alignment. For that organization, they need to collaborate across the organization to define and agree on value, co-create workflows and solutions to achieve that value, and work together to monitor and continually optimize those solutions.

The other camp consists of organizations that believe that they have business-IT alignment – but they don’t. This is a much larger number of companies than the number of organizations that just can’t figure out alignment.  For these companies, the IT organization is in danger of losing its influence in the company – if it has any influence at all.

Business-IT alignment can often become performative in organizations. It’s easy to have meetings, to gain an agreement on a definition of value, and to create workflows that should enable the realization of value. It’s another thing to ensure that everyone in the organization – both from the business and from IT- is following through and living that definition of value. 

The important thing every IT leader must do is identify what happens after the big discussions, after the kickoff meetings,  and understand what is really going on in the day-to-day running of the organization. Is your team clear on the value it delivers and how it delivers it? Are you enabling your team to work across departments and proactively identify and promote the value you’re delivering? Are you enabling the rest of the organization to have input in how IT is operating and to provide feedback and suggestions for what needs to be done from a business perspective?

Business-IT alignment isn’t a 50-50 split. To achieve and maintain alignment, both IT and the business have to give 100 percent to make alignment work. But before they can both commit 100%, one team has to be the one to step up and put all the effort in first. I believe that team is the IT organization.  IT has to start giving 100% toward business-IT alignment,  even before the business commits to alignment. It’s work to get into alignment and the onus will fall on IT, especially in the beginning – but it’s work that pays off.. 

And remember, business-IT alignment isn’t a one-and-done activity. It’s a continual process that has to be monitored, mapped and measured on a regular basis. 

My challenge to you is to share: how are you staying aligned in your organization? What are your methods for checking and measuring business-IT alignment? Where are the gaps in business-IT alignment that you need to fill?

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When Your Remote Work Solution is No Longer a Solution

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CIOs led the overnight transformation from in-office to remote work environments for many organizations in 2020. All over the world, CIOs enabled their organizations to continue work and stay in business amid a global pandemic. The accomplishment was astounding and for many CIOs, it earned them a rightful place as a strategic leader in the company.

However, there’s a difference between the COVID-19 stopgaps many organizations put into place and true work-from-home solutions.

What is the difference?

The work from home solutions put in place enabled the organization to work in the way it was already working. Most of these remote work solutions didn’t introduce anything new to the organization. They really just moved the metaphorical water cooler from the office into employee homes.

However, what these solutions did do is open up a vision to what else could be possible in terms of remote work and having a flexible workforce.

It’s becoming increasingly important that organizations take their remote work solutions one step further and expand into new ways of working and supporting new business models through remote work.

The pandemic has changed work-life for good. According to a study from US-based Enterprise Technology Research, IT leaders “expect permanent remote work to double to 34.4% of their companies’ workforces in 2021, compared with 16.4% before the coronavirus outbreak.”

Not only are more employees working from home, but many businesses have also pivoted during the pandemic. Some organizations have developed new revenue streams. Others have adapted to different business models. In short, the business has changed.

IT needs to determine if the remote work solutions they put into place this past spring are actual remote work solutions – or if they are just bandaids. Why? Because this is just the beginning of change. The way we do business has been forever altered because of COVID-19. Traditional ways of working are a thing of the past. We’re going to see more hybrid office models and higher expectations from both customers and employees on what the business needs to deliver.

This is where the rubber meets the road for IT. Every organization has to adapt and they can’t do that without IT. Smart CIOs know they can’t point to this past spring and say “we’ve already innovated!” IT must be able to lead the business into a future that is completely reliant on technology-based solutions.

So where does that start? How can you ensure your organization is ready for the future?

We must start with the foundation – and that foundation includes service management. Now, before you roll your eyes and say “been there, done that”, let’s talk about why you should revisit your service management foundation right now.

The changes in your business may require a change in your foundation.

You may have had the smoothest, most cohesive workflows, value streams, and service management practices before COVID-19. But things have evolved and your service management practices need to also evolve to better support those changes.

Your foundations may have already had cracks in it.

Over time, foundations tend to shift. This is true for houses – and for service management. Perhaps pre-COVID-19, your service management practices were working well enough. Maybe there were one or two gaps in communication or service delivery but nothing significant enough to warrant restructuring or strengthening your service management practices. Well if something was only working well enough during the relatively stable period before COVID, then it’s not going to keep working well enough during the uncertainty of business during a pandemic.

Service management hasn’t been extended into the enterprise.

Enterprise service management is not a new idea. But many organizations have resisted it or many organizations thought they were implementing Enterprise Service Management when really they were just extending a few IT workflows. Silos, especially IT silos cannot be the norm anymore. With new ways of working, shifting business models, tightened budgets, and an uncertain business climate, it’s more important than ever for IT and other parts of the organization to collaborate to co-create value and drive the business forward.

Band-aid solutions will only make everything worse in the long run.

Finally, we all need to recognize that some of the solutions IT implemented in response to the pandemic were never meant to be long term solutions. I think IT departments and CIOs across the country produced some of their best work this year with the rapid transition to remote work. What was accomplished is extraordinary but it was only one piece of the puzzle. We didn’t know in the spring how much COVID would change businesses. We didn’t realize we had to create sustainable solutions for remote work, new business models, and new revenue streams. Most leaders made the best choices they had at the time. But now that we know this is a long term situation, we have to revisit the choices made and the solutions put into place to ensure if they are still the best options available. Because if they aren’t, they could slow down workflows, stress out employees, create silos, and hold back business growth.

All things considered, this is a unique opportunity for every IT organization. There’s never been a moment like this one that is so prime for strengthening service management, breaking down silos, and leveraging technology. The end of 2020 isn’t going to magically end the uncertainty in the world right now. The problems of today will continue presenting themselves until we make the necessary changes. Take advantage of this time of uncertainty to strengthen your service management foundation because that will help you in 2021 and beyond.

If you haven’t taken stock of the strength of your service management practices yet, here’s what you can do:

Align your service management goals with the organization’s strategic goals

With a new year right around the corner, IT needs to align themselves with the rest of the organization and create strategic goals that will support the entire organization. Revisit your plans for 2021 and make adjustments if necessary so you can prioritize service management initiatives that align with business goals.

Define and map your value streams

The way value flows through your organization to the end customer has probably changed. Your value streams and their supporting workflows will have changed as well. Value streams are cross-departmental so while you’re aligning strategic goals, collaborate with other parts of the organization to map your new value streams and ensure IT is supporting the entire journey — all the way to the end customer.

With clear strategic goals and redefined value streams, you’ll find yourself in a stronger position to help the business innovate and survive this chapter – and the ones to come.

 

Is your remote work solution no longer working? Book a free 30-minute consultation with me to discuss how to find longer

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How to Fix Your Broken Workflows — For Good

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Every business leader wants the same three things: to reduce risk, increase revenue, and decrease expenses. Often, there is a general assumption that technology is the only way to accomplish these goals using IT. I’ve seen it time and time again. An organization will invest in a technology, thinking it is the silver bullet for success.

Instead of first paying a huge sum of money for technology, I suggest looking at one thing if you want to be an IT organization that reduces risk and contributes to the bottom line: your workflows.
Fixing ineffective or inefficient workflows is the way to work smarter, not harder — and without an added expense. So many organizations overlook the impact of their workflows on the overall business. But with tightened budgets and a remote workforce, your workflows are more important than ever.

Workflows Deliver Value

Value is the most important thing a CIO and the IT organization need to understand if they want to reduce risk, decrease expenses, and contribute to the bottom line of the business. You cannot accomplish anything without robust, effective, and efficient workflows. And when I mention value, I mean how the business delivers value to a customer — the business value that is realized by the end user.

This is something that a tool cannot do for you. Technology, no matter how new or fancy, cannot understand business value and structure itself to deliver that value as effectively and efficiently as possible. However, if the people using the technology understand how value flows through the organization and is delivered to the customer, they can ensure that the technology is used effectively.
That’s why the power lies in your workflows. When you improve your workflows, you get more out of your tools and technology, increasing the ROI on those investments.

Why Bad Workflows Happen to Good Organizations

Unfortunately, bad workflows are extremely common. They happen within many organizations and often for a variety of reasons. Currently, bad workflows are happening because with most organizations, value streams have evolved and changed, but the workflows supporting those value streams did not.

Right now we’re seeing this because of the pandemic. Most organizations are working remotely and some are working with a smaller, leaner team due to layoffs. But, the workflows that were in place before COVID-19 were likely designed for a different situation.

While the pandemic is a huge example of how much workflows can shift, there are other smaller, more common changes that happen in organizations that can turn a good workflow into a bad one. Small changes in how a product is delivered, the way a piece of software is used, or even changes in how organizations communicate throughout the value stream can negatively impact workflows. If these small changes aren’t reflected in associated workflows, value leakage occurs.

TaUB Solutions says value leakage is the greatest threat to value realization. Value leakage can occur throughout the value stream, as solutions move from conception to customer implementation. One small change can become a big one overtime and when that happens, value leakage can cause major problems.

You have to regularly audit your workflows to ensure they deliver value and if those workflows are the most efficient and effective way to support a value stream.

Fixing Your Broken Workflows

To fix your broken workflows, you first have to start with understanding the most important thing: value. If you haven’t mapped your value streams or your value stream map is from pre-pandemic, now is the time to give it an update.

Mapping value streams must be a collaborative, cross-departmental project. Because this is a detailed, step-by-step process that breaks down every step of the value stream and the workflows that contribute to them, you’ll have the opportunity to see how your workflows are contributing value, where any gaps exist, and what can be fixed or changed.

This process of mapping value streams may not sound like the most exciting initiative for people to spend their time on. But when it’s done correctly, it will save you needless expenses and improve efficiency which can contribute to a better bottom line and a happier customer.

But the job isn’t finished! It is very important that revisiting value stream maps becomes a regular practice. There’s a balance to scheduling your reviews. You don’t need to review it every week. On the other hand, if you only review once a year, you might not be doing it frequently enough. I recommend you start reviewing your value streams monthly and if you find after a few months that no changes are being made, you can move to reviewing them quarterly. Whatever the timing is, book it on your calendar and make it recurring so you never have an excuse to not review these.

In this time of higher user expectations, tightened budgets, and distributed teams, you have to leverage every advantage you can. Instead of looking outside of your organization for the next best thing or the next best hire, examine and optimize what you’re doing now. Taking these steps will strengthen your organization for the future, ensuring that when you do invest in something new, it’ll have the impact you’re looking for.

 

If you need support cleaning up your workflows, book a  free consultation call. This is one of my specialties!

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The Opportunity of Failed IT Plans

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What went wrong in 2020?

I know, it’s a big question and most people would probably say “Everything.” Or at least, many CIOs would confess that the original strategic plans they had for 2020 were not executed.

There were many initiatives that just failed to get off the ground in 2020 due to COVID-19.

Now that 2020 is winding down — what happens to those initiatives? Should you try to execute on them in 2021? Are they even still valuable to your organization? Will you still have the capital for them? How can you afford them?

Smart CIOs know they can’t carry on as normal. Just because something was on the plan for 2020 doesn’t mean it should continue to be on it for 2021. Yes, strategic projects are still strategic, but it’s time to address whether the strategy has changed. If it has, the CIO has to know how to protect IT’s budget while shifting initiatives.

This is where the opportunity of a failed plan presents itself and where innovative CIOs can reset their priorities, align themselves with the rest of the organization, and ensure budget protection for 2021.

Revisit Your Organization’s Existing Strategic Plan

First, it’s important to understand what impact COVID-19 has had on your organization. This means more than just a workforce that is now working remotely. How did it impact the way your business operates and delivers value to customers? Did business models change? Did you add any new capabilities that are still contributing to ROI?

Now look at your existing IT strategic plan. Does it incorporate the changes made because of the impact of COVID-19?

It’s possible you could have some major changes to make to the IT strategic plan. For example, if your organization has added new revenue streams, then you may need to completely change the strategic plan to incorporate those new streams.

Look for Opportunities in your Value Streams

As you review what has changed in your organizations, you should also be identifying the opportunities for IT inside of this new strategy.

This exercise is best if you know the value streams in your organization (whether they are brand new as a result of COVID or they were already in place). If you don’t know the value streams of your organization, then now is the time to map them along with other members of the executive teams.

Remember, this is a chance for meaningful, impactful change. It’s no longer “business as usual.” We can’t say “Well this is the way it’s always been done” because organizations have proven they are capable of agility and making big changes quickly. When mapping value streams and looking for opportunities, don’t be afraid to open up to possibilities that might have seemed impossible a year ago. After all, most people would have said taking an organization completely remote in 48 hours would have been impossible this time last year but by now, most IT organizations have accomplished exactly that!

Fix any Value Leaks

Now, after you’ve reviewed value streams and are fired up about the new strategic projects you could bring to the organization in 2021, there’s a big question to answer: Where do you find the budget for it?

Some IT organizations were fortunate enough to have larger budgets this year while they enabled remote working — but those checkbooks won’t be as open in 2021.

Here’s what you can do right now to protect your budget in 2021

Look for the value leaks in your organization. Value leakage is a common problem in every organization but few leaders know to look for it. Businesses don’t operate on a consistent basis every single day. Value leaks can occur when changes in business workflows aren’t reflected in technology workflows, or people weren’t trained on new products or features, or when services or products aren’t retired appropriately. Value leaks occur due to poor communications, or when the organization fails to fully understand the costs and risks of any change, no matter how slight it may seem. If no one is monitoring value streams and measuring how value is delivered, then value will start getting dropped along the way.

In the context of protecting the budget for 2021, you can start finding and addressing the value leaks that are happening right now in 2020. When you start to fix the leaks, you can prove to the organization that you’re creating more value. The more value you bring to the table, the more you can justify your future budget and protect the budget for those bigger strategic projects you identify when mapping your value streams.

The Key is the Big Picture

The most important thing any CIO can do to seize the opportunity of failed plans is to not lose sight of the bigger picture. 2020 didn’t go to plan for anyone and every organization experienced shifts that will impact future strategies.

Your strategic projects from 2020 might still make sense in 2021. Or they might not. What’s important now is to look at how the organization delivers value to its customers and the opportunities for IT to enable and co-create that value. Then look at how IT can create even more value by fixing existing value leaks.

I think everyone will say that 2020 changed everything. But only the most innovative CIOs will be able to say that 2020 changed everything in the best way possible.

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Can good ESM lead to better EX?

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What is employee experience (EX)?

A recent Forbes magazine article described EX as “the sum of all interactions that an employee has with her employer during the duration of her employment relationship. It includes any way the employee “touches” or interacts with the company and vice versa in the course of doing her job. And, importantly, it includes her feelings, emotions and perceptions of those interactions.”

What companies are learning is that EX is a really big deal and is becoming a critical factor in the success of the modern organization.

Why all the fuss?

There are a number of reasons why EX is getting so much attention across businesses today.  First, happy employees make for happy customers.  This Harvard Business Review article discussed the strong statistical link between employee well-being and customer satisfaction.  A study conducted by Glassdoor showed that a happier workforce is clearly associated with an organization’s ability to deliver better customer satisfaction.

It is easier and less expensive to recruit, retain, and grow employees when there is consistently positive EX.  When companies create outstanding experiences for their employees, people want to work for and stay with these companies.[1]

Another Forbes article discussed the correlation between good EX and profitability and value.  For example, the stock prices of companies appearing on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies rose 14% per year from 1998-2005; stock prices only rose 6% for companies not on this list.  A Globoforce-IBM study found that organizations that scored in the 25% on EX saw 3x return on assets and 2x return on sales.

Indicators of good EX

But here’s the thing.  EX cannot be directly measured.  Think about it – how can you measure how someone feels?  Sure, you can conduct surveys or interviews and get a general impression of how employees feel about their employers and work environment, but this approach has some level of subjectivity.

Secondly, many organizations are under a mistaken perception that EX is just something to check off a list.  But EX is not just about employee appreciation lunches or passing out gift cards, nor is it something that is just the responsibility of an HR organization.  Rather, it’s the entire organization that influences and promotes EX.

Good EX is largely the result of an organizational culture that values employee contribution, collaboration, well-being, purpose, and other factors within the workplace.  It truly does come down to how employees feel about their organization, their management, and their job.

Good EX might be indicated by high net promoter scores, high employee retention rates, or smaller time-to-hire measures.  As mentioned above, good EX may even show up on the bottom line in the form of increased profits or market value.  But none of these indicators are scientific measures good EX.

One thing for sure however – just as with a positive organizational culture, people know good EX when they experience it.    Can good enterprise service management help enable that positive employee experience?

What is enterprise service management?

During his recent Cherwell Software CLEAR 2020 keynote address, Sam Gilliland, CEO of Cherwell, discussed how taking an enterprise service management (ESM) approach has helped many organizations weather the service support and delivery challenges caused by the pandemic.  By having an organization’s service providers, such as IT, Facilities, HR, and others utilizing a common platform, those organizations were not only to respond to the operational challenges presented by the pandemic, but they are also able to thrive despite those challenges.

But what is ‘ESM’?  Is it just dropping the “IT” from ITSM and replacing it with an “E”?

ESM is about taking an enterprise, not departmental, approach to managing, enabling, supporting, and delivering an organization’s products and services in a way that co-creates value and delivers measurable business outcomes.

In a nutshell, I believe that good service management can enable a better EX.  Good service management brings transparency and measurability into organizational operations.  Employee can see for themselves how the organization is performing, and how their contributions result in organizational success.

ESM encourages collaboration and teamwork by enabling and supporting holistic workflows.  Each part of any organization must work well for all other parts of the organization in order to achieve success.   Conversely, organizations whose departments work in isolation from others cannot react to or respond as quickly to changes in marketspaces and business as organizations that think and work holistically.

By having these holistic workflows in place, employees can be confident that they are doing the right things right.  Holistic workflows also help employees avoid having to make multiple individual requests with individual departments within the organization just to achieve needed outcomes.

3 things to do to help service management enable better EX

Is your organization’s approach to enterprise service management enabling a better EX?  If not, here are three things you can do:

  • Automate the obvious – not just within IT, but across the organization. Those simple, but repetitive and tedious tasks currently requiring human intervention can be better served by automation.  Automation in turn enables employees to work at their own pace on their own schedule, which is a satisfier when it comes to EX.
  • Identify and map enterprise value streams. Most value streams within an organization cross departmental boundaries.  For example, take onboarding a new employee.  Not only is HR involved, but also IT and Facilities. Where are the handoffs?  What work can be done in parallel?   Mapping and understanding how work and value flows through the organization is critical for enabling positive EX. Are there any gaps or delays in how work and value flows through the organization?  How does technology and process enable those value streams – and are there opportunities to optimize those value streams?
  • Develop employee journey maps. Employee Journey Maps (EJM) are similar to customer journey maps but are focused on the employee’s journey with an organization. Where does an employee encounter friction? Can the use of technology or automating processes eliminate that friction?

While good EX is largely the result of nurturing the desired culture within an organization, ESM can augment that experience through proactive management of work streams, well defined and streamlined processes, and delivering valuable products and services. Yes, good ESM can make for better EX!

[1] https://www.socialchorus.com/blog/future-of-work/the-employee-experience-in-2019/

 

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Did You Pivot Or Are You Just Spinning in Circles?

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COVID-19 caught the business world by surprise. And it didn’t just change where organizations work (from an office to at home) — it has changed everything: economies, regulations, timelines, employee and customer expectations, the list goes on.

So what did the majority of organizations do in response to this swift and sudden change?

They pivoted.

I know that many seasoned leaders and CIOs have rolled their eyes at the word “pivot” in the past but, it’s 2020 and well, it just might be the word of the year.

No matter the industry, businesses have had to pivot. A few examples of this include restaurants acted as grocery stores selling fresh produce, meats and beer, among other things, gyms transitioned into online workout subscriptions, and distilleries began manufacturing and selling hand sanitizer. Even Chuck E. Cheese pivoted into a delivery pizza chain under the name Pasqually’s.

In big or small ways, every business has had to pivot. When done correctly, a pivot can create new revenue streams, keep businesses afloat, and deliver even more value to their customers.

However, organizations run into problems when they think they’re pivoting but really, they’re just checking off tasks, working for the sake of being busy or failing to innovate. In short, they’re not pivoting — they’re spinning in circles.

What’s the difference between pivoting and spinning?

Business pivots are meant to help a business recover from a difficult period that made their original business model less sustainable. It is sometimes seen as a short term move, but it can have positive long-term impacts on the businesses, depending on the business. Whether it’s meant to be short-term or long-term, a pivot is a deliberate and purposeful shift to create value for the end-user.

Deliberate and purposeful are the two keywords in that definition. It’s what makes a pivot different from a knee jerk spin. A knee jerk spin will not create value for your end-user or your business, but it will likely cost you time and money.

Here’s how to know if you made a pivot versus a knee-jerk spin. You pivoted if:

  • You relied on data to make decisions about where to shift 
  • You already had a clear understanding of how value flowed through your organization 
  • You understood what aspects of the business worked and leveraged those things to create new value streams

The difference between organizations that pivoted and those that are spinning is that the pivoting organizations already had a holistic view of their organization and how it delivers value. They understood their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats before the pandemic hit.

Organizations that made knee jerk reactions were in the day-to-day, siloed operational mindset. They didn’t know where they were to begin so they could change direction to move into a better place when COVID-19 hit. 

What Can CIOs Do to Stop Spinning?

If you are concerned that instead of pivoting, you’re just spinning, it’s ok. It’s not too late to slow down and make the pivot you need. Here’s how:

Identify the value you deliver to the end-user

What is the value that the organization delivers to the end-user? How does IT contribute to that business value? Are you able to connect IT services to the happiness and success of a customer? If no, then that’s where you start. Understanding where IT creates value in the organization is the first step to being able to find innovative ways to keep delivering it. 

Communicate with all key stakeholders

Are all of your key stakeholders in agreement with the value you deliver? Does the sales department see the same level of value that the marketing department does? Do your customers see the value your salespeople see? Every stakeholder needs to be on the same page here or else you’ll end up trying to deliver too much.

Map everything out

You can use a whiteboard or create a digital version, but you should have a clear map of your value streams and your customer journeys. It is imperative that everyone on your team can visualize where value is created, where it may be getting lost, and where there are more opportunities to create value.

Creating a customer journey and value stream maps are two exercises that will provide that holistic view of the organization you need to survive this pandemic and whatever comes next. They are collaborative exercises but once completed you’ll be in a better position to take actions that will help the business pivot to where it needs to go. 

Fill in the gaps

You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are. The truth is, even as we continue to move through this pandemic, we have no idea what will change in the future or what the next upending disaster will be. There is no such thing as “smooth sailing” forever. Another emergency will hit organizations and they’ll need to pivot. Taking the steps now to address where you are, lay your groundwork and create that solid foundation will strengthen you to not only pivot and survive in this emergency, but in future ones as well. 

 

If you want to ensure you’re making a pivot and not turning in circles, let’s chat! Book a free consultation to learn how you can leverage your wins and successfully pivot your organization.

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Did You Leave Some Value Along the Road?

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Let’s start off with a scenario. Let’s say you are preparing for a cross-country road trip. Before you head out, you are responsible and change the oil in your car. You prepare your playlist, grab your road trip snacks, and hit the road. You drive for a day or two and you make it through a few states before that pesky “check oil” light pops on. You’re annoyed because you just changed the oil and you’ve only driven a few hundred miles. But you don’t want to risk losing your engine, so you get off the highway, find the closest gas station and change the oil and hit the road again.

Now let’s say that happens every few hundred miles for your entire trip. My guess is that after the first or second time that “Check Oil” light went on, you would ask a mechanic to look at it to examine why you’re leaking oil, even if it meant extending your trip a few hours or a day to get it fixed.

Now, what if I told you that much like a car leaking oil slows down a road trip, IT services that leak value can slow down business growth. The difference is that CIOs don’t have a handy light that goes off to let them know an IT service is low on value. They have to look for the signs themselves.

If you’re wondering why your IT services aren’t delivering the way you planned, it’s time to check if you’re leaving value along the side of the road.

Understanding The Value Of IT

Before you check to see if you’re leaking value, you have to understand how you are creating that value to begin with.
The difficulty with value is that it is a perception. There is no one single definition of it. Value needs to be defined by every stakeholder in the organization — customers, partners, suppliers and internal stakeholders. Business leaders should be working with these stakeholders to define value and ensure that value is understood across the organization.

Once you have a definition of value inside the organization, you can begin to understand how IT co-creates that value with other stakeholders.

For IT leaders, this means understanding how the outputs IT delivers connect to the larger outcomes the organization is achieving. This will require you to work with other stakeholders in the organization to understand their projects, initiatives and goals, and how IT supports them. If you are able to connect how IT helped marketing hit its revenue goals, then you’re understanding where IT co-creates value and you can optimize your work, investments and priorities to increase that co-created value. If you are able to do this for every project you work on, then you’ll be running a value-driven IT organization.

Are You Consistently Delivering Value?

Now, many organizations may already do this. They already define value and IT has already worked with other departments to ensure they co-create value through their services.

But your job isn’t done.

Business doesn’t operate on a consistent basis every single day. No matter how tight our processes, how smooth the services are; there will be evolutions in services, products, and how the organization operates.

And sometimes, those evolutions are forced upon a business due to forces outside of their control. For example, a global pandemic can hit and everyday business life is turned on its head.

Other times, it’s not a major pandemic, but a slight shift in how a product is delivered, how an organization communicates, or the way technology is used.

Whether the reason is big or small, when undetected shifts within the value stream occur, IT services begin to leak value and IT becomes less effective. In other words, you have “value leakage”.

My friends at TaUBSolutions explain it this way; value leakage occurs when “solutions move from conception to customer implementation.”

Value leakage can occur when there is not adequate training, when there is poor management of organizational change, when we don’t retire services or products when we should, when there is poor employee and customer experience.

How to Avoid Value Leakage

Value leakage will always be a threat to IT’s effectiveness. It is up to the IT leader to be vigilant about delivering value and to look for the signs. Remember, unlike in your car, there is no “Value Leakage” indicator light.

Instead, IT leaders should regularly do two things:

  1. Talk with stakeholders about service delivery.
    Are they still seeing value from your services? When was the last time you checked with your stakeholders to confirm this? (Hint: if you haven’t done this since COVID-19 hit, now is the time!)
  2.  Review customer journey maps and value stream maps.
    These two tools were designed to help stakeholders understand how value passes through the organization and is realized by the customer. They will help you identify where value should be delivered or where it can be delivered.

Don’t leave value on the side of the road. Protect yourself from value leakage and check in with your stakeholders. I created a Value Leakage Indicator Tool to help IT leaders measure where they are and are not delivering value. You can download it for free here.

Additionally, if you need help identifying value, connecting IT outputs to business value or mapping value streams, please book a free 30-minute call for us to discuss how you can drive more value in your business.

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When In Doubt, Follow the Value Stream

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Every day, IT leaders address questions to help keep their team moving forward, which in turn keeps the organization moving forward.

Questions like:

  • Where should the IT team spend their time?
  • How should IT allocate resources?
  • How can IT justify larger budgets and more investments?

In the past, IT leaders have taken a straightforward approach to answering these questions. They have broken down each question and explained in technical detail everything their team has accomplished and completed, no matter how small or mundane.
In other words, IT delivered outputs.

But in today’s world, outputs aren’t enough. The old approach to making decisions based on outputs is over. Because today, IT must deliver outcomes.

If an IT leader was to list only outputs without connecting them to any business outcomes to the C-suite in the hopes of securing more resources or larger budgets, the C-suite will look at them and ask: “How did this drive business value?”

Closing tickets, upgrading technology, and troubleshooting technical issues are an important part of the success of an IT organization. But IT leaders must do more than just list outputs. IT leaders must show how these outputs connect to the organization’s bottom-line goals, and IT’s role in delivering needed business outcomes.

Before an IT leader can decide on how their team should allocate its time and resources or how IT can obtain larger investments and partake in bigger initiatives, they must answer these questions:

  • How did IT’s outputs reach the end customer?
  • How did IT’s outputs help the customer achieve their goals?
  • How did IT’s outputs increase revenue or decrease expenses?
  • How did IT’s outputs help the business achieve its goals?

To find the answers to these questions, you have to follow the value stream.

What’s a Value Stream?

Steve Bell and Mike Orzen, authors of Lean IT define a value stream as a “sequence of activities required to design, produce and deliver a good or service to a customer and it includes the dual flows of information and material.” According to Bell and Orzen, a value stream consists of “all processes, tasks and activities used to bring a product or service from concept to customer and includes all information, work and material flows.”

In short, value stream is the steps taken by an organization to meet customer demands and bring value through a product or service to that customer. The value stream is the big picture look at how value flows through the organization.

How To Follow the Value Stream

Following the value stream means exactly that – following how value flows through an organization and identifying where there may be improvements that can be made. It is about gaining clarity around how value is delivered to the end user, and how to use value streams to help you make decisions in your IT organization.

For every initiative or project, IT leaders must be able to step back and ask, “where and how does this fit in a value stream?” If you’ve followed the value stream and there is no fit for the initiative, then why is it a priority?

Often when you’re following the value stream to determine the importance of an initiative, you will end up involving other departments and stakeholders. As noted above, the value stream is how value flows through the entire organization, not just within one department. Value streams will cross departmental boundaries and a collaborative approach is mandatory. Working in a vacuum will simply waste time and resources — time and resources that could have been better spent contributing to the value stream.

Now, in this digital world, this means understanding how technology contributes to the value stream. IT manages technology and technology will always play a role in the value stream. Understanding this relationship will give you a context for certain services or initiatives.

Map your Value Streams

How do you know if a technology, a specific investment, or an initiative is contributing to a value stream?

The answer is simple: map that value streams. A value stream map is a visual representation of how value flows through the organization. This visualization enables you “follow the value stream.”

Mapping value streams will:

  • Identify cross-functional nature of work, which can avoid “siloed thinking”
  • Identify waste such as bottlenecks or delays (very important for IT!)
  • Allow teams to visualize the work and help the entire organization recognize how individuals and teams contribute to value.

How to Follow the Value and Map the Value Stream

No matter where you struggle with defining value or identifying the value IT drives, a value stream map is a place to start.

Mapping a value stream requires a cross-departmental team that includes IT. Silo thinking must not get in your way when you’re following the value stream, so include all stakeholders and make this an exercise in discovery.

To map a value stream, you have to define the focus of the map. A Value Stream Map doesn’t necessarily map all the paths that a process can take. It tracks one service or part of a process. So when mapping your value streams, start with services that have a role in the products or services that have the most impact on the organization. Ask yourselves what is the most valuable thing to the customer, what brings in the most revenue, or conversely, what costs the most for the organization? Start with focusing on the value streams where you get “biggest bang for your buck,” so to speak.

Map all the information including all the tasks being performed, who is performing them, and the technology involved with all of these tasks. It helps if you work backward. Work with the end outcome of a value stream and map out the process from there. Start with the end customer and the process will probably become much clearer.

In addition to mapping out each step in a process, be sure to map how information flows through each step in the process. Remember, you want all the key stakeholders in the room while you do this so that everyone knows how information flows and what is expected of them during each step of the process.

It’s also important to include timelines involved in each step of the process. Include lead time and actual time spent on production or in the product lifecycle to get an accurate view of how much time is needed for value to flow to the customer.

Finally, remember that value stream mapping is never a “one and done” activity. As new technology is introduced or customers’ needs change, your value stream maps will be revisited.

The next time you’re faced with a decision about an investment or project, take a look at the value stream. Using a value stream as your compass Following the value stream will always lead you to a path where you can contribute value to the organization.

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