This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
The Big Picture - Cutting Conduits for Free Flow -- In his Internet Time Blog posting, The Business Singularity, Jay Cross lays out a view of business environment as network.
Business organizations are evolving into networks. What happens inside the corporate walls is nowhere near as important as the overall flow of value from raw material to customer. Internal boundaries are obstacles to be overcome. Networks shared among suppliers, partners, and customers integrate the business into a commercial ecosystem that is, no surprise, a larger network. The real-time enterprise is being born.
Yup...the big picture.
"Internal boundaries are obstacles to be overcome." Now that I'm starting to get my project overload in control...well, maybe a bit more in control...I'm starting to work through some of those boundaries in my environment. (It's about time, Frank!) Some of the folks I've been working with have seen our project and account managers as the conduit for their outputs...the conduit to the users of their output. But I refuse to continue being a gatekeeper for project task handoffs...I refuse to continue being a boundary that slows down the movement to customer delivery. With a dozen or so projects on my plate, the "baton" of the handoff could sit in my inbox for hours or more before its noticed and forwarded to the next task owner. So I tell them who they should be handing off to (as if they need to be told), and tell them simply to copy me rather than rely on me to pass it along.
There's other boundaries to be dealt with...reviews of work that rarely require revision and that are destined for customer feedback and edits anyhow, and a few approval processes that get stuck on desks of managers as heavily loaded as I.
But hey, let it begin with me. I'm getting out of the conduit business.
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