In this week's episode, Nicole and Ben discuss People, Process, and Technology as the threads of the fabric that make up Information Systems. They talk about understanding, in business terms, the relationship and dependency between these three concepts and how through these dependencies a business can build sustainable business solutions.
Mayhem and MISfits Episode 3
Nicole Grimm
Hello and welcome. My name is Nicole Grimm.
Ben Rockey
And I'm Ben Rockey
Nicole Grimm
And this is mayhem and misfits where we take a fun look at business gone awry. And the systems that save them today. We're going to talk about people, process and technology.
Ben Rockey
Great topic.
Nicole Grimm
Why are these three topics a focus? For many IT professionals? Around the world. That's what we're going to. Ask today and why does that matter? To our. Wonderful audience.
Ben Rockey
Pretty well woven into. The mindset for sure.
Nicole Grimm
Our fabric, if you happened upon any. Technology vendor websites. You may have seen this people process technology moniker if you will thrown across. Site here and there and you're maybe didn't even question it and you're just like, well, they always say this stuff. But I just want this technology end result and that's what I'm buying and maybe people get frustrated when those technology providers want to know more about. Who you are? How you operate. And how technology might help them. It can be somewhat annoying that this industry constantly harps on these topics and how they can intertwine them together into this sales process. So why do these? Industry terms matter and what's the origin of them? Why are they so important?
Ben Rockey
Well, like we sat there then. They want what make up the fabric. Of information systems at the end of it, and quite possibly what make up any really good business.
Nicole Grimm
Yeah, so it should be part of the process. If they don't mention people processing technology or you don't see. This glimmer of them in sort of a sales process or a review process with your business. Then there may be something wrong or something might come up that might be wrong. So let's go ahead and do a. A story that kind of outlines if you're missing. The balance of people, process and technology to give the audience an idea of what we mean.
Ben Rockey
Well, let's talk about Sammy. Sammy is in charge of grow relations and harvest for a winery, and Sammy's inherited this process that's been around for decades. Because this this winery has been around a while, and because it's been around a while, it started well before computers were invented. And so the harvest process. And the grower process. How how you pick and how you deliver and how you. Get the the. Grapes of the winery has been around for years and years and years. So Sammy comes into the process and inherits something that's clearly broken because what Sammy sees is some horrible things that happen. Sammy sees things like trucks that come into the winery carrying Merlot grapes that need to get crushed. But right now we're crushing Chardonnay, so we ask a driver. To go park their truck and wait and we'll come. Get them when we're ready to start crushing. Merlot, but no one tracked that they had somebody sitting around with a truck full of Merlot grape. And the person parked somewhere near the crushers way far away from where the people who are managing the trucks coming in and out to be able to visually see. And the people managing the crushing. They're not there to pay attention to what's going on with the trucks, so a truck driver might sit there for 23456 hours with nothing to do twiddling their thumbs idling their truck, wasting gas, not going, and picking up more material and possibly missing pulling their truck in to get their grapes crushed because. Since no one is watching them or paying attention to them, they could even get missed in this whole scenario and the whole. Process takes even longer. Then there's processes. That Sammy sees where people are dumping. Moorlough grapes in with Chardonnay grapes, because when that trucks come in, they're not being told to go the right crusher, or no one paying attention and doing any type of quality control checks to make sure that what's in the truck is supposed to go to that crusher. And now you're making a nice blush from blending your whites in your Reds, but that wasn't the goal.
Nicole Grimm
That wasn't in the order for the wine makers.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, that the wine makers do that later, not in the crusher. And so these kinds of very expensive problems start to creep up then. Then what Sammy is dealing with our growers that he has a relationship with who are wanting their grapes weighed at the right appropriate time, and making sure they're getting their full value out of what they've delivered to the winery. And want their truck drivers and trailers back so they can. Wide load up more grapes and get it back maybe to the to that winery or another winery. And so not managing that process gets really costly and expensive. And then. On top of all that. Sammy doesn't really understand necessarily what real capacity he has for crushing grapes and receiving grapes today, because everything is a manual process. Built off of people knowledge. Good, thoughtful, dedicated people, but people that have to be in a chair by a phone ready to answer a question and help with planning. And all those processes are being driven from a whiteboard, and there's nothing wrong with a whiteboard. A whiteboard is a very useful tool, but that whiteboard can't tell you anything. You have to go look at it. It's not going to alert you or help you look for problems. All it can do is just be a place to throw magnets and ink on a board to help. Track with what's going on. And so a process that started 203040 years ago. Now has the same problem of growth over twenty 30-40 years and so processes that were for something that was 20 years ago can't be the same process for a winery that's double tripled, quadrupled or more in size and capacity, because you're not actually growing with the growth of the company.
Nicole Grimm
Right, and they probably did have some technology mixed in there by this time on this example story.
Ben Rockey
They did, but the technology was still around. Very specific needs, not necessarily a part of the whole process.
Nicole Grimm
Right, so maybe they had spreadsheets or something like that.
Ben Rockey
Excel documents might track where they're getting their loads from, and would record how much was crushed. But again, just having that technology available is good. It's still better than nothing, but it isn't an active system where decisions can get made be alerted. And be useful for planning in. The form that it's in at that moment.
Speaker
Right?
Nicole Grimm
Right? So these people process and technology. Topics need to be equally weighted I suppose around this concept. If you look at them as almost like this three legged stool in order to make a 3 legged stool, all the legs should be. The same amount of weight. For example, and they're all pointing to the center that holds the. Overall system together. That's how we paint the picture of people, process and technology.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, the last thing that thing you want is a stool with one leg too long or one leg too short. You want balance. They should be able to evenly distribute the load.
Nicole Grimm
Right, or a stick of a leg and a thicker version of a leg. Once you actually get on the stool, it's probably not going to evenly support you.
Ben Rockey
It may hold the weight. You might be able to sit on it, but you're not. Comfortable and you don't feel stable.
Nicole Grimm
You're going to lean. So it's important that all of these topics in our industry have. Some thought and structure around them. However, we would say that they kind of go in order.
Ben Rockey
They do. They do follow an an order or a process if you.
Nicole Grimm
Will and there's a reason why we say people process and technology in that order? They'd essentially start and finish that way. So the 1st. Priority is the people. The people define the process and then that in ties to the technology solution.
Ben Rockey
That helps accelerates the process and supports the people.
Nicole Grimm
Right, we've read the book. Good to great by Jim Collins and he kind of. Structures a bit of his topics around this similar idea that we'd see reflected. I suppose in this people process technology and that's. Not even really a technology book, but the technical industry will use those. Same pillars of thought if you will around. That's how we apply technology to business. It's the same kind of ideas if you will.
Ben Rockey
It's interchangeable. In different formats for sure.
Nicole Grimm
And you can see it reflected. In different business applications. So in our example in this book good degrate by Jim Collins, he starts with first with who, then with what? Then you get into discipline and then you use technology last as an accelerator. And we would say yes to that general approach. Obviously I'm paraphrasing the approach of his book. If you like more about it, you can definitely dive into that, but I think we see these concepts reflected a lot in general business applications, yeah?
Ben Rockey
Well, let's talk about what we mean by people. I think that needs some definition, because does that mean I have to hire a bunch of?
Speaker
Right?
Nicole Grimm
Step one.
Ben Rockey
People what what does? People mean in the people process and technique. Oh jeez.
Nicole Grimm
Right, so people will have different roles in an organization. If we bullet point if you will. Some of the roles that we would. Typically see or would like to see within the people. They should be very dedicated understanding the process, the whole the vision of where they're trying to go and what they're trying to do. So as an example, in this Sammy portion of our story, he inherited a process. And a tradition if you will in this business. We always do harvest. We always know when it comes. We always know what the goals are. We know what the vision is. Get the material in and out of the facility as fast as possible. Make sure our quality check is there. We're getting the right weight and tonnage. If you will so that we can report back to our vendors. Otherwise growers. All these kinds of. Processes fall onto the person's lap and they have to understand it, manage it, be informed, communicate about it. Support it and guide it.
Ben Rockey
And I think most importantly know what to ask for so they can do all those things.
Nicole Grimm
Right and then guide the whole thing along the growth trajectory that the company is doing. So that is where they need to take it through a maturity process and that person needs to have. Of that role or responsibility.
Ben Rockey
And responsibility and and you need to have somebody who's also the accountability. So that first step, especially if you reference the good to great from Jim Collins, is that you start with people who care about. What you're trying to achieve? Are accountable for what needs to happen. And they're also responsible to make it happen and you bring them into a space where they can call out what they need to do their job and call out what they're missing. Ask for more of what they need, and then take that forward into process.
Nicole Grimm
Right and have things for which they can be measured right? If you have a process that you've inherited and you can measure something, you can track its progress. To the next level maturity process, if you will, in our case sometimes.
Ben Rockey
So in Sammy's case, the there were several people that he needed to to call out. He needed someone who's going to manage their relationship with the growers and manage when that. That grape was going to come in. He needed someone who was going to manage the actual intake when the truck showed up and need to be weighed, quality checked and then scheduled for where it would go. For the crushers, you needed somebody at the at the crush at the crushers to actually manage that process of directing traffic, making sure that the trucks that were in in lane were not blocking each other stopped at an appropriate place. Doing another quick quality check. Before they go into the crusher. Managing the crusher team and the seller team to get the juice out and where it needs. To go and then making sure that as the trucker was was leaving the environment, the driver was leaving the environment. That that was being tagged in catalog so you knew what your load was at the time.
Nicole Grimm
Right, and you've already dovetailed, I suppose in this story into this. There's people into process how they're very tightly integrated.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, once you've identified how these people have these responsibilities and they're accountable for these things, now they can come back and say, hey, this is what I need to do that I need something to track where these trucks are at. I need something I need a way to communicate with the the the grower. I need a way to. Maybe communicate with the driver when they get here. What does that process look like? What about? How do I track it? Where is it going to go? Who's going to be responsible for making sure these things happen and that's that's where the process costs process conversation comes in.
Nicole Grimm
Right, they need to build consistency aligned to what would be the ideal process. And then a realistic process and then an exception to your process. So you have kind of three layers even within that area. What what it would look like in a perfect case scenario in a worst case scenario and any range in between? Then continuously building on top of them. That's what they should be doing. Now that's a little bit difficult in the harvest cycle that a lot of our customers would go through where you only visit this once a year so you have to try to remember where you left off last year, and we may see this come up a lot. Because a lot of our customers may have seasonal employees that come back. But The thing is that a lot of them they're the same people that come back every year.
Ben Rockey
Year after. Show up in August. Leave in December.
Nicole Grimm
Right, so maybe they come with ideas of how it could be better than last year. Another piece to improving it that we alluded to in the beginning was sometimes you inherit this long traditional process, but you're in a new world. You're twice as big. You're four times as big. Let's say in this case it was a fourth generation 5th generation 6th generation. You could imagine that as you go through the generations, hopefully the business has grown. The process has grown complexities have grown and requirements. Or the reporting or tracking mechanisms have also increased in their complexity or demands.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, quality requests are higher. You're a part of a supply chain.
Nicole Grimm
Food safety issues have come up right, which may or may not have been in generation one or even required of a smaller organization a A mom and pop winery whose may be bottling. A small case for friends, right? This kind of thing up into millions of cases that you're trying to get out the door. This is a very different scale of opportunity that you have to improve upon.
Ben Rockey
This is then, this is how you delivered to your customer, whether that customer be a direct direct to consumer or to another you. Know B to B. Someone else is waiting on you to do something, and so the better you can do your job and show your work, the more trust you get and the higher, higher quality product you can live or deliver.
Nicole Grimm
Right, so these are kind of the baseline processes that Sammy is dealing with. In his scenario. He's got to look at these things to see how they interact.
Ben Rockey
So in this process scenario he he takes all this. This intake in from. The harvest team. The crush team, the grower, the grower team, or people I should say in these scenarios. And in this scenario, some of these people are in fact year round full time employees and others are really just showing up four months out of the year to come do this. Work so the people that have been around. Have some ideas and they know what the bigger. Plan is and the people that are only there for the four months might be very focused on just their aspect of the job. 'cause that's all. They were here for. And he has to. Take all of that into account. And they're also all relying on on each other. So the person who's managing the intake is now is is absolutely relying on the girl relations teams scheduling and communicating. If there were any kind of problems with inbound trucks. The crush team is 100% relying on the intake team to communicate what trucks are here are we. Are we ready to change to another varietal and start crushing that there's a lot of interdependency. How they handled that before was very baton based. It was like a long race and you essentially took a baton. If you will you you would move with a note that says, hey, now that we're here, we're ready to crush this. And and then you would retool and the Gore relations communication. It was only as as current as that morning when the schedule was written out and handed off and. What Sammy was looking for was something that could be. More real time, more clear. So the first step we took was mapping out what all the requests were. What is the correlation team need to do? Here's how they're doing it today and then. This is the information they're collecting. They're talking the grower. They're validating with the wine team that the quality of the grape is ready to come in and get crushed. They're notifying the grower that the grower can go ahead and start crushing. And then, or start harvesting and bringing in their grape and then and then scheduling for the day of their delivery and then hands off to the harvest team. Harvesting has a grid of who's coming in for the day, understands how they're going to manage the team or manage the truck, and made a new process that had nothing to do with technology. Per say that to change one of the first big changes that we see out of Sammy was. Instead of having the trailers come in and having the drivers sit, why don't we move to a mechanism where we actually have these trailers available that bringing material in and then we park the trailers and now the driver can leave either with a fresh trailer or go back to their grower and whatever trailers they grow or have. And now we'll manage the trailers. Here on site. Or at least a large portion of them. And now we're managing the material of the grape itself and not relying on this poor drivers whim and commit the process to manage that. And in the scenarios where we do have to manage a driver, how are we going to manage the driver? Because today we're completely reliance on knocking on a window and actually having it written down, and then for the crush team, having a communication plan for they know what's here and ready to be crushed so they can start making decisions about what are we going to work on right now.
Nicole Grimm
Right and all this then folds into the responsive technology you mentioned information we would usually dub information as a source of technology or an information system. As we've walked our audience through that in previous episodes. So we have information we need to share, communicate, and ideally broadcast. So your example had. Previously there was a baton paper shuffling around these kinds of manual processes around this. Flow now we'd like to. Add technology to accelerate the improvements in process that he's already started to make.
Ben Rockey
So this is where Sammy takes a beat and goes. I know my team can help me here, so Sammy has taken the time to get his team right and have the resources in the right place. And then he's taking the time to really understand his work, and now he wants to involve the team and getting that. System that process digitized if you will. How do I take this to the next level and actually have a piece of software and some technology that will actually help me manage all this? Now there's a lot of ways to come at that, and the 1st way that Sammy thought about coming at it was, hey, we already have some software here that we use to manage. We make wine. Can we invest in building out more software to do that well? Sometimes the challenge is we can. But you're asking to add this to our existing system, so we have to think about what that means. There's downtime for the system if we're going to make those changes. We have other programming going on. It's something we can do, but it's something we'll have to schedule 'cause that's kind of. A massive upgrade OK. Sammy asked the question what can we do now? There has been answered to now and the answer was. Well, we could use something like an online tool, and in this case SharePoint Microsoft SharePoint that has lists that can like an Excel document track. Columns of information. But because it's in SharePoint, it can be easily shared across multiple computers real time so that when a grow relations puts into a schedule. When a truck can show up, someone in the. Harvest Team who's managing that intake can tag when that truck came in, and how much that truck has and the quality level that it's at. And the other details about the quality load of the of the grapes that are in the trailer and then the parking lot spot where they've parked it. And in a case where a driver. May stay with the material. A pager that they were handed to alert them when their truck was ready to be pulled in.
Nicole Grimm
Right? The idea would be here then it you could. Overthink it or do a Big Bang Theory or really tightly integrate this technology solution across the board. But since technology does like the process to be well defined, repeatable, and what have you, the more you get into that larger thinking version of it. The more you have to be more steadfast and solid on your feet. O if you do. End up using an entry level low point entry level application, some sort of lightweight version of technology to kind of get your feet wet.
Ben Rockey
Low code, no code.
Nicole Grimm
Prove out the case, but really start to make improvements. That's really something that's accessible to so many people and. Really is like you said, low code, low entry. You don't need to know a lot of how this stuff works, even though he did have to go to the IIS department it can be. Challenging and. Intimidating, I think to get into this technology realm because it is some what we hear a lot from our clients. Kind of like a black box. They don't really know what happens, it just you put stuff in and it kind of gives stuff out. But I don't know where it went or this kind of stuff can be tide up in this technology. Response to these needs that they have.
Ben Rockey
And that's the that. That response. To their needs is what the challenge is with something that's a large solution. Like hey, we're going to wire frame this. Have a development plan. Do some agile all these terms and we're going to build into our corporate program or our company program. This fix for the problem. And it will solve it, but with a low code, no code solution. Such as SharePoint or there's there's other things as well as with Google and Google Docs and the like where you have some automation and some tracking and some reporting. You can do that, just requires someone with the knowledge of how to use the tool and that usually starts with the IST more. Or some type of eyes consultant, but can be taught by. Anyone who wants to take the time to learn why that wireframing process can actually be the process you used to start with, and that's what Sammy did in this case by building out SharePoint lists that could capture the data he needs to capture and then run his. Business that he was responsible for. Run that team, that he was responsible for through that simple no code interface and then collect information from it to go back into the continuous improvement process.
Nicole Grimm
Great and from that point. Now you have information, data, managerial tracking points, things to have conversations with people that are actually. Something that they can see and you can make a case for how important or how much improvement that you can make or have made and start celebrating your win. In this process, by adding that visibility to it, maybe even communicating it throughout the process to new and different parties within the business to share updates. Or even give them critical information for their next piece to move on.
Ben Rockey
And that's what happened with Sammy, one of the big initiatives at the company Sammy worked for was they want to introduce Lean concepts, and we're not going to get into lean today, but one of the concepts around Lean is is understanding the time it takes to do your work. Because Sammy had adopted this solution. That could track activity by tracking when the line that said this truck came in at this time it's parked. It's at the crusher. It's been crushed. It left all that activity was tracked in SharePoint. When the lean person came in to ask questions about do you have an idea of of how much time it takes for each of these trucks to come in and where they're coming from and? Some type of logistics data in years past, no, there was no way to track that without someone literally going around with a stopwatch and following a series of a sample of trucks to figure it out. But because they'd adopted this system, they now had a real time. Live database of information that can tell them how long it took for a truck after it got on site to get to the crusher and how long it was at the crusher and then the whole time the of that truck life cycle on site.
Nicole Grimm
Right, there's many opportunities. There's also opportunity to have it generate. Different alerts and errors based off things that have gone awry. So if you do have a mayhem issue that has come up, you've forgotten a truck the truck didn't check out where did it go? These kinds of opportunities are also presented in this process, so there's there's even things that they didn't even know they needed.
Ben Rockey
Showed up in the list and every time they found it. An exception because they had a process in place that had a framework to work within. They could introduce a new idea to to capture it and solve it.
Nicole Grimm
Right and then it will go back up to step one in the people monitoring the process, utilizing technology to complete this full loop. If you will of continuous improvement that we've shared before you constantly watch do ACT, refine. And repeat the process again. So all of those things tying together creates that momentum and technology can be an accelerator to make sure that it actually runs faster and smoother with each time you have a record of what happened the year before. So when you have your seasonal employees return. You have everything kind of documented outlined. The computer remembers it doesn't need to be reminded, didn't know what you. Did last year. And you can pick up essentially where you left off last time. You might have less bumps. And then you can improve even further than the year before. And be ready for simulating if you would do a plan on growing, or if the business does grow from harvest to harvest, you can be prepared for that prior to the actual event of harvest.
Ben Rockey
And have. The ability to be somewhat interchange. People once you have this process documented and the and the people that you brought in to help you establish it. If they're busy or they're going to do something else, or if you just have, you know people retiring when the next person comes in, they're going to have a process and technology in place to get them up to speed and to follow. Given the cues they need. To know how to how to be responsible for their position.
Nicole Grimm
Right? I think that just about wraps it up. All right, everyone? Thanks for listening. We hope you found some value in this conversation today. Please join us next time for some more mayhem and misfits.