Short answer: Yes!
Long answer: Still yes but with more research behind it.
Let’s start with everyone’s most divisive tech billionaire; Elon Musk. Not for click bait but for actually decent engineering principles. In an interview with The Everyday Astronaut about the design and building of the new v2 Raptor engines for SpaceX, he laid out his (probably not his but I couldnt find an alternate source) 5 rules for engineering:
Make the requirements less dumb
Delete the part or process
Simplify or optimise the design
Accelerate cycle time
Automate
“Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimise a thing that should not exist,” - Elon Musk
Of course, you can make something comprehensive or you can make something fast but if you do both you are not optimised for efficiency.
My personal bugbear with this is when organisations design a process where two departments need to interoperate and the flow between the two assumes the sender and receiver are newborn babies with no insight into their career path or the team they have worked at for the past 10 years and so 100% of all information is captured and shared even though only five or six pieces of information a) change and/or b) are of material use.
That's an easy example of where improvements can be made in any organisation using step 2.
Another one at a global media company was where there were two approval bodies for new platform deployment. Both processes required the approval of the other to proceed. Once premacy of the two forums was determined the flow was immeadiately transformed and operated with clean, clear accountability.
That's an example of step 3.
A very long time ago I worked in a call centre and a colleague realised he could absolutely ace his call handling time by recording a personal introduction to everyone who called in so his personal call time was 10-15 seconds faster than everyone elses. Once we all worked it out and copied that idea the performance organically became the best team in the country.
That's a, slightly wonky but fun, example of step 4
A UK telco company had a really well implemented event monitoring solution which gathered, triaged and discarded thousands of alarms a minute and only those which required intervention from an engineer were promoted.
That's an example of step 5
What about step 1? Well, that's where we should start and no one really spends enough time nailing down what is truly required to acheive a specific, strategic, business outcome. All business change has to factor in the current state including the people, the politics, the finances and the wider competitive landscape. That can be hard work when you already have a day job, a career and a million and one things that need your urgent attention.
You can contact SHE Ltd via patrick@slaughter.ltd to see if we can help by taking Step 1 off your desk and helping define robust and meaningful requirements for your team so that steps 2 through 5 can have the best chance of being successfully delivered and making your organisation efficient and effective.
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