Inside ASI-AP

I wanted to report on one particular point of significance that has come out of the reviews so far. Over the past couple of years, in fact since we had the restructure in 2004 to create the 6 key groups we have now, we have been working on each group becoming better at what it does. For example, Project Delivery has achieved some great results in that time in methodology, on-time/on-budget delivery and utilisation. And each group has similar success stories.

This success has come in part from taking a 'black box' approach to each group, allowing us to work inside the black box (without much outside interference) to make it perform great, and telling all the other groups that work with it not to worry about what happens inside the black box, but just to feed it inputs and expect some outputs.

Getting further improvement now to our processes is becoming more difficult because of this black box approach. The word I have been hearing through the reviews has been 'compartmentalised'. For example, Project Delivery is now finding it difficult to further improve what they do because of incorrect expectations set by New Business/Customer Care in estimating services. There are many other examples: Customer Care not being wired into the customer following completion of implementation projects; New Business not getting the right sort of leads because they are not participating in the Marketing process.

So the time is right to now accept that each group is doing a good job on it's own, and to get the groups working together far more closely than ever before, so that we can all make improvements to everything that we do – and to help our customers achieve great things.

Time to become de-compartmentalised !