Have you ever driven through downtown Boston? If so, you
might scratch your head as to why some streets wind and twist seemingly at
random, driving you around in circles, sometimes literally, while raising your
blood pressure like Clark W. Griswold trying to exit from London’s Lambeth
Bridge roundabout.
As legend has it, the streets in the downtown quarter were
the old livestock and dirt roads used by the first colonists, and have stayed
relatively the same for hundreds of years.
When you embark on a new BPM, ECM or SharePoint project, it
is important to not jam a superhighway of sharing and productivity on top of
the cow path. Enshrining an illogical, unrefined and often unplanned path is
not the ideal method of project execution or user adoption. The best question
you should ask before working on any new project is, “Why?”
- Why are things being done a certain way?
- Why should they stay the same?
- Why should they be changed?
You have a wide variety of options here, ranging from hiring
a dedicated PM, diagramming things in Visio, or even drawing a process on a
whiteboard. I think the critical component is actually seeing what a workflow
or system currently looks like before you embark on changing or refining it. If
you can understand the process first, and the people involved, then adding
technology to improve things is easy.
So have you ever paved a cow path on a project? Narrowly
averted disaster? Leave a comment below and let me know.
