Improvement Through Analyzation

In a previous posting I discussed the importance of Collecting Data to Improve Your Business. Having the data available you need for a thorough analysis of your business operation is certainly important, but it is only one component of the improvement process. Jack Vinison, in his post
Measures should drive the goal discusses the importance of knowing what to do with your data once you have collected it. The most prominent take a way from Jack's article for me is that if your measurements don't relate to getting things done faster there is no point in collecting them.

The KM Executive project and task management features were designed around the principle of measuring performance and being able to process the measurements seamlessly to both plan ahead and look back in time to discover weaknesses. Each of the bullet points that Jack identifies for project measurements are addresses in the following manner:

• Tasks (activities) automatically log who created the task and when along with a modifiable start and end date. Each task is allowed a time budget. Various reports allow easy reference to this information to determine how much time is left for a task, where the task is at in relation to schedule, etc.


• The ability to tag each activity and arrange reports by these tags provides a backward looking analysis of task performance. By using one tag to identify a project and separate tags to identify and group tasks it is easy to see at a glance which projects exceeded budget and then drill down further to identify which tasks or groups of tasks within the project caused the most problem. Through consistent tagging it is easy to look across multiple projects to identify specific areas that demand improvement. This allows you to focus your innovation efforts in the areas that will have the most impact on performance.


• Activity load reports provide a quick analysis of which resources are overloaded and which are underutilized.

The conclusion that the overall goal of project improvements is to be able to get projects done as quickly as possible is very poignant.

Is Your Software an Asset or a Liability?

Many people have the misconception that their house is an asset. The reality is that your house is a liability, assuming you don’t own it outright. If you have a mortgage, your house is an asset to your lender.

I believe this analogy applies to software that companies invest in. Under traditional software models a company makes a large up-front investment to purchase a software package. At that point the company views the software as an asset. The reality may be that the software is a liability. Time must be spent learning the software and integrating it into your company’s operation. Then you can start looking forward to steady outlays of cash to keep up with upgrades, patches, and support if required. Eventually companies reach a point that they cannot afford to switch to a new package even if they are not happy. The cost in time and money invested simply becomes too great to warrant any change.

These problems can be magnified if you are not getting the exact results you require from a specific application. Additional time needs to be spent to try to tweak the software to your needs, or additional manpower is required to massage the output into the format you need. Perhaps you even end up needing a second package altogether.

A specific example of this scenario I am familiar with involves an accounting software package. After paying the shocking sticker price and absorbing months and months of technical support and training time the software would not give us all of the reports we needed. We could not absorb the same type of hit to 'try' a new package so we had to set up a parallel manual system that would glean the information we required. At the end of the day, this software package did not save any money and indeed increased operating costs.

A company's real asset is it's information. A more practical model is to be able to control your information and have the ability to transfer it between software packages that fit your needs. Or, equally important, be able to try different solutions inexpensively to see what fits best. The emergence of Software As A Service shows promise in both regards. Although there is still a long way to go to standardize the data used for these packages, the idea of being able to pay a small periodic fee to manipulate your data in a manner that best suits your needs is definitely the wave of the future. Faster feature upgrade and bug fix cycles also make Saas ideal for providing a connection between the features you need and the software developer.

USA Today, in the article Software-as-a-service gives small business powerful tools calls attention to the fact that SaaS applications are growing into a legitimate solution for any size business. The fact that this growing field of applications can allow small business to "go toe-to-toe with big business" should not be overlooked.

Collecting Data to Improve Your Business

In his New York Times Magazine article 'The Data-Driven Life' Gary Wolf illustrates a very interesting view on data collection. I found a couple of particular clips from that article that relate directly to business:

"We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention....These weaknesses put us at a disadvantage. We make decisions with partial information. We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with our gut."

"If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data."

This human characteristic led to the creation of KM Executive. In order to make informed decisions about the operation of your business you need to be able to see trends and in order to see trends you need to be able to track information. People are not apt to do this on their own no matter how many forms or how much paperwork you try to force them to fill out. I believe this is because people somehow know they are not going to like what they see. The idea is to have a way to glean information from the stream of data that your business generates by doing what it does.

KMX was initially established as a tool to organize business process documentation, with a focus on systematic improvement. We soon realized that the tracking of metrics required to measure improvement had to be closely tied to the documentation system if people were going to use it. Ultimately we concluded that both of these processes must be an integrated part of the operation's daily workflow so that people were not maintaining two systems. We learned that if people had to go very far out of their way to contribute to system improvement they were less likely to do so. What the company ends up with, in that event, is partial information.

Additionally, people generally do have a poor sense of time. Gathering precise data about where time is going is the objective. For many businesses time is going to be the primary metric of the effectiveness of a business process. KMX integrates project, task, time, and process management into one tool that allows businesses to capture and track the data they need to implement innovative change.