Brad Power recently posted some thoughts about collaboration on his Harvard Business Review blog, including this:
Ford reengineered its global product development process so that an engineering plan designed in Detroit can drive the shop floor in a European factory. It's taken Ford inordinate amounts of internal collaboration to do this — to achieve simple-sounding things like a common language from the design studio to the shop floor and common electronic data standards. It was far easier to create the technology than to get the management agreement to use it across functions and country units. Ford keeps all the parties, including suppliers, up to date on the status of new products in its pipeline. Its tool and engineering cycle time dropped 50% from 2004 to 2009, costs went down and it produces higher-quality products. J.D. Power ranks Ford the highest in initial quality among non-luxury automotive brands.
The key word here is "inordinate" (Webster's: "exceeding reasonable limits"). The sense of "inordinate" here is that the effort needed to get standards working was out of line with the standards themselves. I don't think this is really fair.
Good standards are simple - as simple as they can be while still doing the job they're designed to do. That simplicity is only arrived at after lots of work. A standard is the result of sharing. It takes a lot of talking to arrive at a standard that helps people talk. So, when you deploy a standard, you're leveraging all the effort that went into building. It's like any good tool: users benefit from the analysis and design effort embodied in the tool.
But "management agreement" is an altogether different beast. The implication here is that managers in different silos were reluctant to sign up to standards, perhaps because of a misplaced desire to defend their organizational boundaries. Alternatively, maybe the resistance came from the "not invented here" syndrome. Maybe some managers felt insulted by the imposition of a common language emanating from outside their teams.
My observation is that standards need to be developed by the community that is going to use them. I'm guessing from this quote that the data standards champions at Ford were technology guys, and that line management got to hear about the standards after they were a done deal. In fact, neglecting to include the business in standards efforts right from the start is a big mistake. Inviting people to the standards party when it's already in full swing is no way to win hearts and minds.
Fear of change is natural. Managers in tough environments understandably don't want to make changes they perceive as unnecessary or inhibitory. But the move to common standards can be an important element in an organization's gaining a truly joined-up ethos. Include the business right from the start, and everyone will see that talking a common language isn't just a way of eliminating the costs of unnecessary incompatibility, but a crucial factor in streamlining delivery to the customer.
However, I don't really urge technologist to include business people in their standards initiatives. Not at all. What I recommend is that business people run the standards initiatives. Because standards are about business, not technology. The technology is just there to make the business flow correctly. And technologists are there to guide business people in the construction, selection or adaptation of appropriate standards. The technologists have to be on board. But it's the business that drives.
Comments