Obie’s consulting and solution architecture work emphasizes the advantages of enterprise technology to enable process optimization. He comprehends the technology landscape and architects multi-faceted solutions to achieve business objectives.   

A primary focus for Obie is excellent customer service and he has a true desire to be a customer advocate. After more than a decade in the field, Obie realizes that in the technology consulting industry, it is rare to find consulting groups with expertise to deploy the wide range of enterprise technology needed to meet complex business objectives. So over his career, he has developed strategic partnerships with a variety of world class technology consulting firms, implementation organizations and key subject matter experts. He understands how and when to engage with these partners to deliver end-to-end solutions that maximize results and never loses sight of his client’s best interests.

Obie's addition to the team solidifies PerSyst's ability to meet our client’s varying needs to integrate the best technology with the best supporting processes for unsurpassed results.

The dynamic way the Red Cross determines dependencies between projects, departments and states provide a real-life model for making decisions in an ever-changing environment.  In Life or Death Decision-Making:  What Businesses Can Learn from the Red Cross, Fast Company outlines how this non-profit quickly moves forward.  For companies whose economic landscape changes, this is a lesson on moving forward quickly and decisively.

Though this is an overstatement it helps make a point about a key difference between the two practices. Project management designs a plan that scope, budget and timeline. Change management is about executing that plan and understanding the inevitable emotional and behavioral impacts.

Let’s look at one…trust. Leaders and team members need to feel comfortable that hand-offs will go smoothly and work will be completed at high level. There is second trust behavior which is just as important…perhaps even more than the first. Trust is also feeling comfortable with others and being able to admit mistakes and ask for help in a safe environment.

This type trust sounds obvious but it’s difficult to achieve…particularly today. In a completive work environment, it takes courage to ask for help or admit you’re wrong. This can be interpreted as showing weakness in front of peers. However it’s exactly the sort of behavior and courage that allows one to be successful in assessing and adjusting action. Change is fluid and frequently reactive. You need to trust in each other to allow for rapid course correction without the worry of perception and finger pointing.

You should be looking at areas of service and behavior that have seen historical failure in your industry, or common complaints that are specific about your local competitors.  A rich area to mine information is local forums and postings.  This is not to say that competency isn’t important, it’s the baseline structure that you build your business upon, it’s just not enough. Great examples are contractors and tradesman. These are frequently small or even one-person businesses. Communication and customer follow up are difficult due to lack of office or administrative staff. However, a company that follows up quickly on a customer request or better yet, answers the phone on the first call is frequently far ahead of their competitors.

Find a similar example for your business and simple actions can truly separate you.  

I am a process person.  I see life from a process perspective and, as a result, I see the beauty in change as a means to make life easier, more enjoyable and as a means to achieve desired outcomes.  Even as someone who enjoys change, however, as I look back over my life, it is clear that my attempts at making change far outweigh the number of times I have actually sustained changes and enjoyed the outcomes that were my target.  There are the multiple times that I have set out to improve my health by changing my eating habits.  Often, I have succeeded at one or more elements of change such as the content of my diet or the “what.”  Meanwhile, the “when,” “why” and “how much” elements of my diet have not changed through the years in spite of attempts to change most of these aspects.  The same can be said of my attempts to simplify life by exercising the use of the word “no” more often.

Neurologists suggest that making major changes are physiologically challenging for our brains.  Have you ever changed a piece of software on your network only to have three or four other systems start having problems?  Making a major life change may have an analogous impact on your brain as the change of software does to your computer network.  There are just so many connections and alterations that have to be readied for the change, that you are bound to suffer some speed bumps along the way.

There is a way to make change successfully and as painless as possible.  First, identify the psychological win for the people involved.  Dr. Dean Ornish has demonstrated the value of focusing on the joy that change can create in getting people to make dietary changes to impact their health.  Change is best when it has a logical benefit as opposed to change for the sake of change.  Once you have identified the rationale for the change, associate the logic to the emotional benefits.  If a needed change will make life easier on the people in the effort, then they will be happier and have more free time on their hands.  Make the emotional benefits real.  Paint the picture of the emotion that will persist if the change is not achieved.  Some people are motivated by movement toward pleasure; others are motivated by movement away from pain.  Lastly, slice changes into bite-size pieces.  Recognize progress, reward the wins and build momentum for continued change. The medical community suggests that learning new habits is one key to warding off brain malfunction.  So, if we give ourselves the opportunity to experience change we are fueling brain health along the way.     

Steve had a 23 year theme park career with that started with Walt Disney World. He describes his time with Disney as “summer job that lasted 21 years”. Steve led operations staffs of over 500 employees, in some of the most challenging and high volume hospitality environments in the world. Steve will tell you, that his passion for world class customer experience was learned and perfected while at Disney. Steve had the privilege of working alongside some of the world’s best creative minds and storytellers in developing new theme parks while with Walt Disney Company and Universal Studios. Steve has significant expertise in the flow and management of people and activity through an environment and has helped to create desired experience for targeted participants.

Following Disney and Universal, Steve had a diverse career at Starbucks serving in multiple Director Positions. His experience ranged from building process and support teams critical to the scalable and highly profitable growth of Licensed Stores to the redevelopment of design criteria for all Starbucks stores resulting in many of the key features found in today’s retail stores.

Steve’s experience and breadth of functional knowledge position him to provide thought leadership and executive coaching to companies looking to close the gap between strategy and execution. His addition to the PerSyst team brings extensive depth of experience to our group as we continue to grow and deliver exceptional results to our clients.

Have you added new technology in your company in the last several years?  Are your systems documented with graphical depictions or illustrations that provide current information about your server environment, external security, internal security, and your back up system?  Do you know how your virus software is updated and company and client personal and confidential information is secured?   How up to date are your mission critical systems and what productivity gains are you missing as a result of older versions of software?  Does your business intelligence provide you the information that you need readily and in the most efficient and reliable manner?  Is your reporting capability timely and hassle-free?  What is your plan for a single point of failure contact for your IT system?  What plan is in place if that contact is not available?  Do you have a disaster recovery plan?  These are just a few of the questions that can plague an IT environment if these issues are not thought through, provisioned for and properly documented before an incident occurs.  An annual IT audit is a sound annual business practice. 

Conversations based on learning are usually marked by questions and listening. The intent is discovery and journey towards the best answer. These conversations can still have plenty of opinions and debate but they are not limited to viewpoints that existed before they started. When behavior shifts to learning, outputs are much richer, informed, and usable. Think about your conversation’s motivation before you start next time.

• ·         Integrated employee skills assessment and development
• ·         IT infrastructure audit and recommendations for legacy system integration/upgrade
• ·         Risk assessment
• ·         Order to cash cycle improvement
• ·         Sales cycle improvement

Attention to any of these critical efforts will positively impact revenues, profits or cash flow and possibly some combination of those. 

This is the second in a series of blogs on business intelligence. 

However, there is a downside to a “consensus first” environment…that is, the avoidance of conflict. Great solutions and initiatives are frequently the result of debate…and yes, disagreement. The arguments that produce disagreement can be uncomfortable, but they can produce a more holistic view of issues and root cause problem assessment.

Agreement on the “answers” is less important than agreement on the “problem”.  Creating a common understanding of a problem or what is preventing success is critical to having a shared sense of urgency. Without which, collegial and collaborative behavior is not truly achievable.