With 35% of the global workforce using mobile technologies on the job by 2013, they must adopt their new platforms and new ways of conducting business in order to be effective.  In order to set the workforce free, we have to support them where they are and enable their performance when they need it.

Workforce adoption of any platform starts and ends with a solid strategy for workforce learning, performance support, and collaboration.  The strategy persists across projects so that it can be leveraged and exploited.  There are several factors involved when claiming victory with a rollout of a mobile business solution to a mobile workforce:

• Time to realization of the desired outcomes
• Sustainment of the outcomes Sustainment of the workforce enablement
• Employees “LIKE” the new ways to conduct their business

Mobility looks different to everyone.  Sometimes the application is deployed to untethered devices.  Therefore, the learning and performance support needs to align.  Sometimes, employee learning and performance support needs to be mobile to match the profile of the work whether there are any applications being employed or not.

Mobile devices were made for collaborating – phone, text, video, email, or all.  The trick to supporting collaborative learning is to identify and enable communities.  The communities will form around common needs, practices, interests, and traits.  The best thing leaders can do is to facilitate the communities and enable collaboration.

Innovation also looks different to everyone.  Most gravitate to the concept of technologies.  True innovation is when we get the greatest results with the least effort and time.  That often occurs through leveraging assets, tools, and methods.  The good news and bad news is that they are constantly evolving.  The magic occurs when we keep up but also when we can reuse existing content.  Sometimes, we can merely republish and repurpose content in order to satisfy.  New found mobility does not always mean we have to start from scratch.

Is your workforce mobile?

How do you reach them to enable learning, performance support, and collaboration?

How discussions have evolved:

• From a “seat at the table” TO a “voice at the table”
• Innovation focused on technology TO innovation focused on leveraged assets, methodologies, and efficiency
• Developing training TO developing relationships
• ROI TO impact
• Tracking training TO moving the needle
• Skills TO agility
• Justifying existence TO total integration

It was encouraging to hear people taking advancement in learning technologies for granted and focusing more on how they can support the strategy to promote learning and support performance. It was equally satisfying to hear discussions about the charter of the learning organization and CLO as opposed to the quantity of training that is offered.  The charter continues to evolve to support individual performance, organizational development, and business outcomes. What is better than that?

Fortunately, GP Strategies had been growing by acquisition and had incorporated over a dozen companies during the past five years. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised by the rapid planning, communication, and indoctrination activities that took place in our first 60 days. I will not boast that this was the smoothest acquisition on record, nor will I deny that we have had our share of growing pains over the past year, but in general, being acquired was a positive experience.

Like most professionals these days, I am running at breakneck speed and am not able to spend as much time as I would like reflecting on the past and applying lessons to my future endeavors. So, my consideration about RWD’s acquisition did not come about as I was looking pensively in the mirror. Rather, it came as I was leaving a recent meeting with one of my global consumer products clients. Although they export globally, they do not consider themselves to be a true “global” business, nor do they feel that their current business processes are particularly conducive to expanding organically in the global market. Their corporate leadership team has undergone some transition over the past year, and one of their new corporate initiatives is to increase sales by expanding globally through acquisition in established markets, a practice that had been put on hold over the past decade. At this point, they are in the market research and strategy formulation stage and are interested in our perspective and potential support in their strategy execution.

As I was driving home from this meeting, my mind was spinning over just the people-related impacts associated with an acquisition, not to mention all of the other variations within a business that a merger or acquisition could bring, knowing that each one will assume a different flavor. With all of the recent mergers and acquisitions activity occurring with my financial services and life sciences clients, and with my own experience within the GP Strategies family, I have personally witnessed that the firm being acquired may often have better business process models, more scalable technology platforms, a stronger marketing/sales mentality, or more efficient management structures. Simply looking at the needs of the people being acquired is only half of the equation.

So, as I put myself into the shoes of my consumer products client and then in the shoes of their forthcoming acquisition, I reflected on what a successful acquisition looks and feels like and will apply our collective best practices in promoting my client’s success.

These shifts make team leadership and team basics more important than ever. 

In the late 1990s, I completed a research paper about dispersed teams. Back then, most authors focused on the use of technology for virtual teams. Technology for teams in the late 90s typically consisted of email, teleconferences, desk phones, voice mail and faxes, all of which required team members to actually be in an office. The focus on technology was popular then because it was an enabler for one of the main shifts in team composition during the 90s: teams with dispersed members. That trend not only continues, but has accelerated. Most of us have also witnessed other workplace trends that have challenged our teams. Some of the trends include:

• Globalization  -  continues to increase
• Changing demographics  – cultural inconsistencies affect message and interaction quality
• Non-standard employee/employer relationships – changes how workers are engaged
• Breakdown of the traditional office – more remote workers, increased telecommuting
• 24/7 workplace – flexible work hours Clearly, technology has advanced tremendously in 1½ decades, and it continues to be a great enabler for teams.

What has not changed is the set of core attributes that lead to successful team outcomes. Regardless of where the work is executed and how the team uses the many different technology options to interact, setting up and leading a team is still critical for success. Those main contributors to successful team outcomes include:

• Purpose: Why the team exists – a pertinent and compelling purpose pulls a team together
• Goals: The clear, simple and tangible outcomes the team is expected to achieve
• Team leadership and design: The leader skills and the make-up of the team
• Team processes: How the team interacts with one another and the tools they use -use of agendas;  how and when the team meets;  idea generation tools,  problem-solving and decision-making techniques
• Communication: How the team shares ideas and transmits information
• Closure: Knowing when the team has completed their work and has been successful

What Defines Team Success:

• Team output meets standards of quality and timeliness
• Process of doing the work builds the capability of the members
• Group experience contributes to the satisfaction and well-being of the members

For a good collection of current team articles, the following Harvard Business Review website explores many different aspects of teams and teamwork. http://hbr.org/special-collections/insight/the-secrets-of-great-teams

Read the rest of this article from Performance Matters Newsletter.

SharePoint 2010 in Life Sciences Companies and Medical Information

Anyone who hasn’t been hiding under a rock for the last few years could probably tell you that SharePoint has enjoyed widespread implementation within Life Sciences companies. The mystery at this time is why it has taken SharePoint so long to rise above the role as merely a departmental and collaboration file share. A lot of this issue has to do with the past history of SharePoint, which was based on its usage as an informal collaboration tool (often implemented as the departmental “fileshare”).

Trends in Global Medical Information

In a pharmaceutical company, the Medical Information group is responsible for processing medical inquiries from a wide audience (including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, other health care practitioners, and in some cases patients). Additionally, this group typically maintains a standardized library of medical documents for use with common inquiries and may be involved with the promotional review process within the company.

One of the more recent trends for Medical Information within Pharmaceutical companies is the establishment of a globalized Medical Information function. This function is responsible for the authoring and maintenance of a set of global standard letters as well as ensuring that responses are consistent globally.

These standard letters provide the core data for an appropriate response to commonly asked questions; however, these letters must be both translated to local languages and edited to comply with local country regulations (for example, removing non-indicated usages). These letters are typically authored to be highly standardized and structured to assist local Medical Information representatives quickly adopt these into locally applicable responses.

SharePoint to the Rescue

As a result of these local requirements (language and legal), there is the continued need to maintain separate libraries of documents based on geographic locale, as well as provide commonly used translations of content. Unfortunately, there is also the requirement to provide consistent answers, as well as keep documents up to date with changes released by global. As a first look, these would appear to be mutually exclusive requirements.

SharePoint 2010 offers a few features that can turn the tables on these problems. First, establishing separate Site collections can address the need for separate libraries with separate access privileges (Each geographic region can have a separate document repository. See Figure 1.) Documents can be tracked based on the SharePoint Document IDs of the document from which they were copied. This allows documents to be traced back to the source, global document. These libraries can even share consistent metadata definitions using Managed Metadata!

Figure 1 – Adoption of Content by Local Countries

The second feature is using notifications and alerts to maintain the validity of updates. If the global document is changed in any way, all related documents can be tracked and their current owners notified, as shown in Figure 2. This notification allows each region to maintain their library according to local policy and determine if a global change is applicable.

Figure 2 – Document IDs and Alerts Used to Keep Documents Current

Conclusions

SharePoint 2010 offers the ability to rapidly spin up new document libraries and sites for different geographic regions and also provides tools for keeping these disparate libraries in synchronization.

• Managed Metadata supports a global taxonomy between separate libraries.
• Document IDs can be used to track to the authorship and source of documents, even when those documents move between Site Collections and Farms.
• Workflows and alerts tied to Document IDs allow global authoring groups to push important changes out to relevant local country authors.

• Ownership: Sustainment’s Little Secret
• Building Communities of Practice One Village at a Time
• Avoid Sustainment Derailment
• Sustaining Change
• Are you Prepared for Day 2?
• Why Line Manager Coaching Often Doesn’t Work and What to do About it

Read the full issue here, or sign up to receive Performance Matters in your inbox!

It’s the customers who count

The place to start in allocating our precious resources against process changes at any time is the customer. And with a new ERP in sight, that work becomes urgent. A glance at the best companies in America shows that most of them care enough about their customers to measure and improve customer-facing performance. Their ERPs facilitate within-function performance to be sure, but they also make it easy to measure and improve cross-functional performance. A bad ERP implementation is inhumane; a good one amplifies the human side of customer service. The measures we use to redesign the processes that the ERP manages should be the same ones that we use to measure our process performance and strive for continuous improvement. The few measures that we know quantitatively have the highest impact on stakeholder satisfaction (with the most attainable resource expenditure) are our critical measures and reside within our critical processes. Fix them first.

Waste happens at handoffs

Along any process, backlogs, loopbacks, false starts, and dead ends proliferate. These wastes are more visible in manufacturing organizations but no less pernicious in service functions or organizations. And the most likely locations for waste creation are at the intersection of functional areas. That’s where misunderstandings, incongruent goals, and data mismatches occur. So our enterprise spring cleaning before the implementation storm should focus at exactly these places―critical handoffs within critical customer-serving processes. In the absence of objective data, we need to “go to the floor” to quantify and design out these inefficiencies. A good place to start is with the experts working along each process by asking them, “What are the flaws in the inputs you receive along the path to servicing our customers?”

At this point we need some magic to occur. Instead of redesigning processes for local improvements, we must enable and empower global improvement. Instead of focusing on cost, we must focus on benefits. Instead of the short term, we must design for the long term. This isn’t a trick, and the benefits can indeed be magical, but siloed thinking and parochial mindsets can make it seem more like pulling teeth from a rabbit than pulling the rabbit from a hat.

The ERP can be your controller

The ERP that drives and is driven by these now processes can now take on a new role of measuring and maintaining the process excellence that we have designed it for. It’s a continuous battle to keep the critical processes stable, but by leveraging Six Sigma, we can get there. It’s a whole other battle to drive out creeping waste, but by leveraging Lean, we can get there, too. The ERP now provides us with low-level measures at the personal accountability level that cascade all the way to improved profit, delivery, quality, and safety at the top of the organization.

It ain’t over yet

And these changes can and should take hold. Until the first major dislocation occurs. A business downturn, a competitive resurgence, a shift in scale or scope. Each of these will drive needed changes in the critical customer-facing processes that we have struggled to improve. And each change will in turn drive needed changes in the ERP if is to facilitate the changes and enable further improvement. Continuous improvement is continuous work. Just when we think our recipe is good, the baking has to start all over again. If we are not planning for better and better baking, well then our goose is cooked.

The topic was Learning Trends 2012. We discussed specific examples, but the trends were at a higher level.  The overall trend is not new but continues to get increased focus, attention, and investment—Learning is Personal. Learning has always been personal, but given the scrutiny of investments from the business and demands for effectiveness, there is a growing vitality to the theme.

Another continuing trend is the practice of bringing together our subject matter experts (SMEs) and individual performers on the front line. Those connections continue to be face-to-face but increasingly electronic. It allows the expertise to be exploited regardless of location and time zone.

Another shift is the turn of the phrase “Do more with less.” People are becoming ever more aware that they really want to “do less with less for more,” thus demonstrating extreme efficiency and effectiveness of our teams chartered with the business of learning and performance.

Lastly, we addressed the need to integrate assets and interventions into business processes of the worker. Support people where they are, when they need support, and keep them focused on the work.

Another reality in business in 2012 is the fact that learners are under no obligation to learn. They may be obliged to partake of specific events and assets, but only they can learn, acquiring new information and skills. What is developed centrally for them must be compelling to the individual as well as management so that the desired outcomes are realized. From the financial perspective—we want to raise the top line of revenue and lower the expense line at the bottom. For organizations that are public or private, this balance sheet is where decisions are ultimately made about value.

Our diverse workforce (age, gender, tenure, geography) and our business leaders are driving this trend of personalization more than ever before. It’s not really surprising. Who does not want to be relevant and effective these days?

I urge you to ask colleagues about their most valuable learning and performance support experiences. Count how many times they use the words “I” and “me.” Feel free to comment back to us with your results!

The problem is that change is constant, as the saying goes. People change, roles change, processes change, and technologies change. Therefore, the change management strategy, activities, and assets must be active and sustained. If a component of the strategy is the visibility and involvement of business leaders, that visibility and involvement must persist. The same is true for collaboration among users and experts. Rather than cutting the ties at go-live, those ties need to strengthen every day in order to keep those arms and ears open.

It can be tiring to think of constant change, but isn’t that the nature of business? What business is static? What business can afford a static workforce? Just as we address the maintenance of software, we recognize the return on our investment when we also address the maintenance of our people. They are adopting the “new” solution every day, not just day one.