To hit pay dirt

Any business development starts with process organization. Before starting a new business or expanding an existing business, we need to have clearly defined processes and a clear understanding of these processes. If we don’t, we will only increase the chaos. We even risk destroying any good assets which we have, including our relationships with customers. If we are just starting our business, we are also going to need a clear understanding of which processes we will need.

It does not matter how many people there are. If there are a lot of people and departments, then processes will be distributed among the departments and people. If there are not enough people, each person will need to perform more functions, and we will know what people we need based on the number and types of functions. In a startup, often one person wears many hats.

So what would we do first?

According to the guide ISO 9001, businesses are divided into the following process groups:

• management processes;
• main processes;
• supporting processes.

The processes in the first group and the third group are almost the same for different businesses. 

The Management processes are the activity of creating the strategy and forming the development direction, management model and principles. 

This first group includes the following processes:

1)   Strategic Management;

2)   Quality Management;

3)    Organization Management;

4)    Contractor Management;

5)    Customer Management;

6)    Partner Management;

7)    Public Relations Management;

8)    Financial Planning and Budgeting.

The main processes are the activities directly assumed by the charter company documents and forming the main product for the market/society.

How would we know these main processes? 

The main processes depend on what kind of business you have.

At the beginning we need the clear understanding your goal. After that we have to formulate the main tasks which you will want decide to reach your goal.  

So, we know our main processes.

Auxiliary/supporting processes are activities, which are necessary to support the main processes, to form a single platform and typical rules of the unit and processes interaction within all other processes.

This third group includes the following processes:

1)  Regulatory Information Management;

2)  Project Management;

3)  Information Technology and Security Management;

4)  Workflow Document Management;

5)  Archive Documents storage;

6)  Stuff Management;

7)   Transportation Management;

8) Administrative Management

9)   Supply Chain Management.

When we know our processes we have to describe their inputs and outputs. Process inputs and outputs can be material, financial and information. Each business has own inputs and outputs.

If we only create a company, we describe our company model. If we already have a company, we also describe the model, in this case we don't need to think about our current structure when you make description, we have to think about your goals and tasks for reaching these goals. When we will get the model we can compare our current processes and our model, we will see what we have and what we have not. After process description, we can write the plan for transfer from the current processes to the model processes.

Information about the process description will be in the next article.

I'll always glad to get your feed back and questions.

New Year is coming very soon. So…it’s time for taking stocks and for new trends. I think the most important things which has been affected of all people in outgoing year were the artificial intelligence and using robots. A lot of people worry when they see how quickly these things are developing, growing up and see how they could be dangerous for people. 

But for my opinion we have to remember that these thing are only our technologies. Only people can decide how they will use. 

At this point I’d like to mention Antonio Guterres, Secretary General, United Nations, who said, that the main rules in the IT, in the using new technologies are that IT and new technologies must be safety and ethical. He said this in his speech on the Web Summit in Lisbon, November 2018, which called “Nurturing a digital future that is safe and beneficial for all”. I was there, I had listen him and it was really inspiring.

And I completely agree with him. Only if people will use new technologies, including AI and robots, in this way humans will go to next level their development. 

A lot of people feel fear that robots could change the people, but for the now it's not possible. Just look at the example from  China Xinhua News. Their experiment with the robot as a news ancor was fail, because it was not interesting to see the robot, the robot had had a voice and appearance modelled on Zhang Zhao, a real ancor with Xinhua. But a lot of people didn’t like it because there is no emotions, it was some monotonously.  And yesterday I had got the “2019 PMO Predictions: 4 trends for the digital workplace” by changpoint.com.  I see an interesting thing in these trends because they all concern the above problem.

The first trend is “Digital disruption requires new skill set from your people…but remember, they’re only human”. It means higher demand of the soft skills. We can see it now too when people must have not only technical skills, but it’s very important to have the empathy, flexibility, communication skills, emotional intelligence, creativity, the ability to teach other people, etc.   

The second trend is “Digitalization requires an adaptive mindset…and a panoramic view of the landscape”. It means that to have the ability to look at the problem from above, to understand the world processes, to know new technologies, to be flexible for changing the working methods and tools, to think strategically.

The third trend is “Adaptive technology is your friend…and your transformativeally”. It means that we have to enjoy these technologies and find the best using of them in our activities and agile technologies.

The forth trend is “Collaboration…the blending of people skills and digital delivery”. Digital delivery will continue growing up, and it could be very useful in any businesses. 

We can't also deny robot and AI father development and, for my opinion we could find the ways of effectivness collaboration, it will give us a lot of benefits. 

I'd like to propose to listen a talk between Rao Dalio and Garry Kasparov on the Web Summit 2018 “Artificial intelligence is making more and more of our decisions for us. If this capacity limitless or are there some things only human intuition can determine?”

https://youtu.be/KvLsMQPo-Hc

It would be interesting to know your view point. Don't hesitate, leave your comment. Have a nice day and successful stories!

At work I was being asked to say about differencies between Scrum, Kanban and eXtreme Programming. And I'd like to share my thoughts with you. 

So, there are different methodologies you can use to manage project.
I think the main weakness in all these methodologies is poor knowledge about product. And sometimes we are trying to develop existence products when we need to create new system.
We need to choose methodology or to combine methodology tools in depending from kind of project and its scope. We need to take cognisances of experience, qualifications and conditions.