I’m going to get a little personal here. And no, that doesn’t mean that I’m going to share family pictures from the recent holiday celebrations, or my innermost dreams and desires. I am, however, going to let you in on a little bit of the reason as to why we wanted to develop MosaiQ™, and what it means to us at APQC.
We’ve been working on MosaiQ internally for more than a year. In this time, we’ve gone through all of the things one needs to develop in order to bring a new product to market, from product designs, to development, to marketing information, financial projections, and more. Because we are a process oriented company, we’ve also taken great pains to create a process framework for MosaiQ as a living, breathing, thing. Something with a lifecycle. OF COURSE, we used APQC’s Process Classification Framework® (PCF) to do this.
The problem comes in that while we were developing MosaiQ, the best repository we had for managing the MosaiQ related content was our official corporate SharePoint instance. This means that we created a site, a document library, a bunch of folders, and then started uploading things. Does this sound familiar? (Actually, because we’re never one to take the simple, painless way of doing things, we created a multi-layer, inter-dependent document list and a different list containing the process decomposition. The two are linked and let me define processes in one place and use them in various other places in the site.)
No fewer than 1,024 times did the MosaiQ team say, sometimes in unison, “MAN, I WISH WE HAD MOSAIQ RIGHT NOW!”
How could MosaiQ have helped us to manage the new business processes? That’s easy, here are three core reasons:
- It could have simplified the creation of the initial framework. MosaiQ would have let the core stakeholders develop the highest level of what it meant for MosaiQ to exist – based on the best practices in the PCF and the data essential to smart process management. The development could have taken place in a simple purpose-built interface, saving loads of time and complexity; but instead it had to be made in a generic document-based repository which only tangentially met our needs and required loads of non-value-add work.
- It could have provided a set of process-based end points for experts to build upon. MosaiQ allows frameworks to be built from the top down or from the bottom up. Top-down frameworks typically start with high-level categories and grow downward organically. Bottom-up frameworks in the MosaiQ context are richly and thoroughly defined to the activity level from the beginning. Had MosaiQ been available to us when we were developing the supporting processes, I could have asked Sarah, my marketing resource, to fill out the marketing section to the best of her ability, and based on PCF and internal APQC best practices.
- It could have been a contender. I work at APQC and therefore have access to almost any benchmark that we’ve ever done. Seeing these benchmarks in the context of the customized MosaiQ processes still required herculean efforts to integrate. We used the marketing category with little alterations and therefore should be able to readily integrate with APQC benchmarks and measures. In our current SharePoint-based environment, this requires manual maintenance and regular upkeep. In MosaiQ, it “just works”.
This is but one of the reasons why we wanted to develop MosaiQ: to simplify process management. In our real-world story, we were working with a new product offering. But how different is that from bringing a poorly documented process under control? I expect that had MosaiQ been at our fingertips, we could have saved dozens of hours of upfront work and literally thousands of hours over the life of our processes for MosaiQ in reducing the number of times that out of date or inconsistent documentation was made available. And that’s just related to out-of-date or inconsistent process documentation, I’m not even beginning to estimate the opportunity cost currently being paid to support inefficient systems. How much more awesome could you be with MosaiQ?
You can follow John on Twitter @JohnGTesmer and join APQC’s Process Classification Framework LinkedIn Group