Follow-through
February 25, 2005
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Technology can help businesses and individuals accomplish great things,
but sometimes we set ourselves and others up for failure before we even
finish a technology project. While automating portions of a process can
be helpful, if you don’t automate the entire process, from end to
end, you might find your project doesn’t solve as many problems
as it creates. If you are starting a new project, or involved in one currently,
be sure to consider how the un-automated sections of a process might have
some unintended consequences for the whole project.
One step, two step, three step, four
The lack of follow-through on tech projects was brought to mind after
a consulting call with one of my individual clients. He needed some tutoring
in a new piece of office management software that was being installed
in the veterinary office where he works part time. As we worked through
the tutorial together he made an interesting comment. He noted that there
would not be a computer in the examining room where he works. Instead,
he would have to write all his notes on paper and then, at a shared station,
input the information into the system.
I have seen this type of problem before and it continues to bother me
on several levels. First, every step involved in entering data into a
system is sure to involve errors, both large and small. It is a simple
fact of human nature that we are fallible and prone to transposing numbers,
omitting information and simply forgetting exactly what we told someone
only minutes before. By not bringing the stations directly into the examining
room, the office is insuring that there will be even more errors than
were they to continue to use paper forms.
You can make the situation even worse by having someone else enter the
data after the fact. Now you have information twice-removed from its source
and no easy way to qualify whether they performed procedure X or procedure
Y. Those inputting the information will have to make guesses at the omitted
information or spend their days hunting down the individual who filled
out the form.
Finally, failing to provide end-to-end access to a system means that the
end user is putting information into a system where they cannot easily
refer to it later. This particular piece of software was designed to give
the care providers the entire history of a client, but instead the information
stays trapped in the “office” when it really needs to be at
the provider’s fingertips.
End-to-end
As you can already see from this one example, the failure to “follow-through”
on a technology project can have longstanding effects. Sure, parts of
the system might work well, but, in every case, the overall productivity
of staff and the quality of the data will suffer. In the case above, I
imagine the vet office wants to improve on its collection of billables
and better track and produce invoices for its clients. This is all well
and good, but it means they will be using only a fraction of their system’s
potential. They probably paid thousands of dollars for this software,
only to use 10% of its capabilities.
The same thing can happen when you are developing custom solutions for
you or your clients. You expend thousands of dollars only to wonder later
why the system didn’t help your business as much as planned. If
you look at the project carefully, you will start to see follow-through
failures that are diminishing the return on your investment. Perhaps staffers
have to take the output of an old, legacy purchasing system and manually
enter that data into your new system. Then, at the end of the process
they have to reverse the process and move information from the new system
to the old. I can guarantee you that each step involving re-entry of the
information will result in errors, sometimes, a lot of errors. Instead
of letting the system do the work, your staffers are running around trying
to reconcile differences between the systems.
There are many concerns when building complex technology systems, but
you must pay attention to the areas where manual processes run up against
the automated ones. Remove as many of the manual, usually redundant, processes
as you can. Otherwise, no matter how impressive the system, it will never
be better than these weak links.
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