Organisational transformation – how to save big bucks in one simple step

If you are one of the none CEOs who read my blog, you are immediately hooked.

“What is this magic step?! Hope it is better than those three magic beans I bought last year! … Maybe I shouldn’t have bought them refried…”

If that is your chain of thought, you are exactly in the right place!

So without further ado….. dum dum dum… it’s friendship! Wait, no… not friendship. It’s trust.

“F**k sake.”

Hold on, hold on. No need to shout.

Imagine two utopian/dystopian organisations.

In the first organisation, everyone understands what is a priority, how things fit together and what and when needs to be done. And that is getting done. There is no formality, things just happen. Everyone has the same understanding of what a priority is, how do they fit into the plan or organisation and what role they play to get things done.

In the second one, everything has to be formally defined. It has its perfect specification, expectation, SLAs and penalties for missing them. If something goes wrong there is no decision to make and everything follows what has been formalised beforehand. Every single thing gets quadruple-checked and compared against SLAs.

Hopefully, it’s clear that running one of them will be significantly cheaper than the other.

So what is utopian about them?

In the first one, everyone would have to have the same and perfect understanding of everything that is happening. If something needs to get done everyone immediately knows that it makes perfect sense and what role they play.

In the second one, every possibility of what can happen can be formalised and written down, agreed on and followed. It could mean that it’s fully automated as well, but that’s a different thought experiment.

If you think about what most SaaS contracts look like. What do you formalise? High-level functionality, uptime, priorities and resolution times for raised issues. You don’t tend to describe every little scenario that can possibly happen.

What is filling the rest of it then? Yes, you got it right – THE trust (drumroll). The trust that a company developing a SaaS system doesn’t turn around and make an absolute unusable mess out of it. They won’t look at the contract and think “We could absolutely break all of this and there is nothing they can do about it.”

Within your organisation, you probably try to stay away from formality.

Now, for argument’s sake, let’s imagine you are somewhere on the scale from 1st to 2nd. Different processes, systems, teams, and projects will be somewhere else on that scale. I don’t think it’s too important to try to figure out where you are. It is much more important to know:

• staying closer to 1st utopian scenario takes a lot of constant effort.
• it is much easier to move from 1st to 2nd than the other way around.
• closer to 1st you are, the cheaper it is to run.

And it’s not that there would be a silver bullet approach. It’s just that the movement on that scale often happens unintentionally.