Whiplash

I want to identify a major problem I see with companies that are spiraling out of control. So feel free to add this to your Risk Analysis.

History

Big Bad Wolf Company is a company of 70 employees. They have a cash burn of 550k a month. The company has been in the red for 5 years and they have 250 customers. They offer an online patient portal system for clinics and hospitals to track Electronic Health Records. The company has so many bugs in the system that the developers can only afford to do High Critical or High issues with virtually almost no time to develop anything new.

Big Bad Wolf Company was targeting a niche market and was ever changing its company strategy. In any business you run it’s important to be able to shift your company strategy to meet the demands of any industry. Many successful companies of today have done this and if they had not, then they would have gone out of business or they would have stayed in the “living dead” category. (Where business just make enough to plateau but no longer have any growth.)

What fixed the problem of Big Bad Wolf and made them a successful company?

Problem:

The Executive team continually shifted strategy every three months, they continued to bring in a new COO who had his/her own ideas about where the company should and shouldn’t go. During which time each COO came in, assessed the company problems, proposed new solutions which included new technologies to get them from “here” to “there”. So begins the hiring of new employees with these skillsets and conversion of older products to meet the demand and fill in the gaps of the new products. Old time employees became obsolete except to maintain the “legacy” system, Managers were retrained towards the new strategy, etc.

Bottom line: If you find that every project you start at your company never gets finished and you continually start a new one and then a new one. You might be living the world of Big Bad Wolf Company.

Here is an image of a company’s strategy and how it flows:

As you can see the plan is made by the executive team with them in the middle of the company. The plan flows out to each member until finally reaching the developer. The waterfall effect: Executive à Middle Manager à Business Expert à Developer.

I apologize for my crud drawing as I didn’t want to put all my time into the image. There is more to the process then just my titles I’ve listed here but everybody pretty much breaks down into these categories. (From my perspective).

Later the company changes strategies and the image might look like this:

The open arrows represent the new strategy. But as you can see there is a disconnect between middle management and the business expert, which in turn affects the developer.  Given only one strategy change this might not be as bad of an issue as you think. But as time goes by and more strategies are introduced the employees on the outside of this image get the Whiplash from the changes.

So as a saying that I’ve picked up in the industry is this:

“If you ever find yourself in a hole….Stop Digging!”

Solution Ideas:

1.  Foster Open Communication: Make sure the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.
2.  Buy into a Common Vision: Make sure that your team has cohesion and everybody knows what they are doing on the project and what other people are doing on the project. Make sure they all buy into and understand the needs.
3.  Accountability and Responsibility: It’s way too easy in today’s workforce to “ride” on the wings of others. Each team member should be defined in what role they are to play for the vision.
4. Expect Change: understand that change is going to happen and plan for it, you can do this by risk analysis meetings.
5. Push for Quality: Quality is relative, each day a product or service could be getting better or worse. But it will never stand still
6. Learn: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”