People, Processes & Tools

Daniel Tenner posted a good article about how to approach teamwork within an organization. It matches up well with what I’ve seen in large organizations.

to fix or improve something, first you need the right people, then you need the right processes to help those people work together, then finally you need the right tools to support those processes. People, processes, and tools—in that order.

I saw this firsthand a few years while working on a very expensive enterprise CRM implementation. The processes and tools had been pretty well worked out, but the ‘people’ side of the equation was a deal-killer for successful CRM: certain groups within the company didn’t want to share their customer information, while some business units wanted to participate but didn’t want to share cost because they didn’t see the value. This was a cultural problem that effectively killed the effort before it got started.

For example, many sales organisations try to get their salespeople to communicate everything they know about every client – but salespeople don’t want to do that, because it makes them more easily replaceable. Setting up a CRM tool doesn’t solve that problem, until you fix the people, by giving them the right incentives to do what you want (or, if that’s impossible, either changing what you want or changing the people).

This is exactly what happened.

Posted: October 24th, 2011
Filed under: Communication, Employees, Organization | No Comments »

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