Avoiding the Allure of the Hunt
Posted Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 05:27pm | 27 commentsIt’s important that you take time, with some regularity, to step back and observe what’s really going on in your organization or business. Look around and see what’s going well and what’s not. What could you change to increase the efficiency or effectiveness of the team of people that you lead? This is part of what I call business development and it’s critical to you being able to step beyond where you are today and move forward to where your vision is taking you tomorrow.
In the Hunt
If you’re always in the moment then you’re focus is always on the the “now” and many times that’s a distraction or a diversion from where you envision yourself to be in the future. I call this being “in the hunt.” I’m a technician at heart; I’m a doer. I am happiest when I’m getting lots of stuff done. To me, it’s kind of like being in the process of hunting, tracking, or chasing something down. It’s exciting to me. My natural tendency is to react to things. You have a problem, I have a solution. There’s a fire, let me put it out. And on and on the list goes. These types of people are great people to have working for you in your organization. We like problem solvers and doers. But, they’re not necessarily the type of people that you want shaping and forging where your business is headed.
The point is, if you’re head is always down, working on whatever the problem of the day is (and believe me, there are problems every day), you never take the time to stand up, look around, and identify what the cause of the problem was in the first place. And though you may be able to make it past all of the problems that come your way in a day, you may never get beyond the problems of the days to come. This will seriously hinder your ability to make progress.
If you’re a leader within your organization (i.e. maybe you own your own business or you’re managing a team of people), your job is not fighting the fires or in the trenches fighting side-by-side with your troops. Your job is figuring out why there’s a fire in the first place and fixing that, or why you’re fighting someone else at all when you should be working together for the greater good.
Business Development
If you are a technician or a doer like me, this next little bit will likely sound like a really good idea and will make perfect sense, but will be excruciatingly painful for you to implement in your day-to-day lives. I’ll make some suggestions in this section of the article that will hopefully give you some tools for implementing the practice of business development slowly into your regular routines.
I’m a software engineer by trade. The work that I’m trained to do is software development. If you’ve ever been involved with a software development team, the process of software development is broken up into phases. Each of these phases together comprise the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) . I believe that these same formal practices that are used by software development teams to successfully deliver software can be applied to the problem of business development. The practices that together make up the SDLC are listed below.
- Analysis: Understanding the problem or requirements and determining a solution or plan.
- Design: What the solution will look like and how it will fit into the overall architecture.
- Implementation: Sitting down and doing the work to implement the solution as it has been defined by the analysis and design steps above.
- Testing: Determine whether the newly implemented functionality meets the requirements and doesn’t break any of the existing functionality.
- Documentation: It’s critical that newly created processes or features are documented so that the value that they add can be fully realized.
- Maintenance and Support: Keeping the code and documentation clean and up to date and keeping the customers happy.
One final phase that is sometimes built into more formal and advanced SDLCs and that I would sneak in somewhere between testing and maintenance/support is the practice of gathering metrics.
- Metrics Gathering: Measures how effectively the goals of the organization were attained.
The practice of business development requires that you take yourself out of the hunt long enough that you can really look at or analyze a situation, come up with a practical design that will produce more advantageous results in the future, implement the new process or procedures within your organization, define tests to determine whether the new process is operating acceptably, define and capture metrics that will help you indicate the new procedures efficacy, and then finally document the new procedure for communication and training purposes. The maintenance and support of the new procedure is the process of putting your weight behind it as a leader and ensuring that the people on your team understand why things are changing.
It sounds like a lot of work, I know. But the truth of the matter is that if you’re not doing something each day to increase your business’s or team’s ability to operate more effectively and efficiently then, at best, you’re standing still and making no progress toward your vision of what you want your business or organization to be. If you take the time regularly in your day to really look at what’s going on around you in your business or organization, you’ll see more and more opportunities for improvements that, if acted upon as I’ve suggested, will accelerate your journey down the path to realizing your vision of what you want your business to be. And, if you’re working for someone else and applying these principles for them, the people around you will quickly realize the value that you add to the organization, which will surely ensure your ascension to the upper echelons within the organization.
