Introduction

Stephen Covey advised us to “begin with the end in mind.” That would seem an obvious place to start whether we are designing a process, a product, or a software application. However, it’s surprising how many designs seem to have anyone but the end user in mind. In this piece we’ll take a look at several examples of where designs fall short, and suggest how good requirements practices can help produce sound designs.

This is such a simple but such a critical question.  And it has several critical elements:

Build – meaning this is going to take some time and it will start at one level and grow to another level.

Improvement – in other words we want to have an organization that wants to keep improving itself, which is necessary for any organization to succeed.  If it doesn’t grow, it dies.  But here the word is improvement – keep getting better, probably in several arenas.

Culture – the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization–a corporate culture could be  focused on the bottom line

Let’s define success first.  How would you know that you had an improvement culture?  What would you measure and what would your score be?

Here are four determinants you could use:

“Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is . . . not a benefit.”– William Pollard

BPM and Lean Six Sigma are not the same, but should they be enemies or partners?

BPM is defined by BPMInstitute.org as:

Business Process Management is the definition, improvement and management of a firm’s end-to-end enterprise business processes in order to achieve three outcomes crucial to a performance-based, customer-driven firm:

Difficult people can disrupt any meeting, and we all know their frequent styles and behaviors from face-to-face meetings.  These are people such as the Heavy Talker, the Technical Expert, and the Know It All.  Below are some more difficult people that apply in the virtual meeting.  (Of course many of these roles apply in the face-to-face meeting as well.) 

The Late Comer.  You need to have the virtual tool set up at least 15 minutes ahead for a long meeting (over 2 hours) and 10 minutes before for a shorter meeting.  Welcome people as they come on.  Then at the start time, tell everyone you will start now or wait for 2 more minutes, and then start.  When new people come in, welcome them and move along.