One of the biggest hurdles to overcome is a process that’s been in place forever. “But we’ve always done it this way,” or “We never had to do that before.” The current process is what users know and their day is carefully balanced to play out like a complex orchestral suite: the slow intro to the day with morning reviews of emails and follow ups from the night before, working into a more upbeat tempo of managing new tasks, running reports and answering questions. Then, Allegro! The tempo jumps and a flurry of zipping through legacy systems, pulling data, compiling, emailing, running around, and copy-paste, copy-paste, copy-paste begins. It all culminates in an anti-climactic, hurry up and wait at the printer, sign, stamp, double stamp and hand off or file and deciding what emails to leave for the next morning. Encore!
To keep with the musical metaphor, there is no way you can just walk into that and suddenly change the score. These are your users and they make the current process work. It doesn’t matter how broken things are or how many steps have to be taken to get to the desired outcome. These people know how to do it with what they have and they’re comfortable with it. In fact, they’d almost rather have a broken, inefficient process they know and can work around than have a new process they have to learn all over again. The worst thing to do would be to just hand them a new process and say, “Here you go, do it this way from now on.”
A most important step in beginning any change to their process is to start with the people and engage them. They need to know you’re here to help them, that any change will be driven by their needs. It’s as simple as asking them what their pain points are with their current day-to-day and what they wish they could have different. You need to partner with them and help deliver “their” solution. Remember, you’re supposed to be the guy with “people skills”, or even better, you’re the conductor. Everyone plays their part and it all comes together.
In the end, when you walk away and have improved the process, they should be feeling like they accomplished something, and everyone takes a bow.
Love the new picture. Is that chocolate frosting?