Shamrock Organisations

Ten years ago Charles Handy in his seminal book, The Age of Unreason declared that we humans were entering an era of rapid and highly discontinuous change.

In such a world - of unreasonable, discontinuous change, all the established rules are vulnerable. We need to respond with discontinuous, upside-down thinking. We need new kinds of organizations, new approaches to work, new types of schools, and new ideas about being in the world.

Alongside a number of interesting paradigms including 'inverted doughnuts' and 'portfolio lives' he talked extensively about 'Shamrock Organisations'. Essentially the idea is that each business should only do the things that represented core capabilities, everything else should be shared out to specialists. It's an incredible concept and 6 years on is evan more valid

Many companies use these principles today through partner alliances bound by Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA's) and inter-company service level agreements. My personal view is that this is akin to signing a pre-nuptial agreement and a contract for services prior to getting married. It doesn't bode too well if you have to plan for failure at the start!

MINX is a rapidly growing business with a reputation for delivering great service at incredibly high levels of quality. I'm really proud of our achievements and we constantly strive to improve and broaden our capabilities.

Frequently our customers ask us to help them with things that are simply outside our core field of expertise. It's a fantastic compliment and shows real trust in our business. We have to make sure that we can fully support their requirements and deliver a result that both the client and MINX can be proud of.

We have been truly fortunate over the years in finding great businesses partners where the management teams have similar values to MINX. We don't need to worry that they will look after our customers and we fully reciprocate this when they ask for our help. This close working partnership has to be seen as a long game, not project by project. At times we will forward an opportunity where we know a partner has a real good chance of securing some business evan where our company has been ruled out, it's what friends do and it pays dividends for our relationship and the consideration is often reciprocated.

A key part of a great relationship is monogomy, if we have several partners in any one area it's going to create tensions as we choose who to work with on a particular project. We can also fully expect the same treatment back! It's much more effective to have one close partnership than several weak relationships.

It's also important to accept that, occasionally, things go wrong and this is where a good partnership can make all the difference. We can be open, honest and focus on making good rather than pulling out the T&C's. We had one example recently where client, partner and MINX all under-estimated the amount of training required post-implementation. The project had been signed-off but the client was experiencing a degree of pain. We arranged a three way call, route-caused the symptoms and immediately planned out additional on-site support from MINX and top-up training from our partner. The client was not asked to pay any additional costs and we didn't get into a game of contract trumps with the partner which would probably have worked out far more expensive!

Delivering Great Projects

Over the years an awful lot of literature and technology has sprung up to help us manage work more effectively but it's important to remember that all we're trying to do here is deliver a great end result to a client. The most elaborate project schedule and comprehensive project methodology is pointless if the end result fails to delight the client!

In one of my previous roles I used to look after an awful lot of concurrent projects, the last time I counted they numbered 816! Each followed a rigorous internal set of standards intended to assure success. I also had a large team (around 100 Project Manager's) to look after these projects, each had been accredited and was reasonable experienced. Despite this many went off the rails and only a few could really be deemed a real success by the client. Perhaps interestingly, some of the most successful ones were those that had not only left the tracks but had demolished several buildings en route! In each case I set up a 'War Room' with all the key stakeholders to understand what had happened and what we needed to do to re-track.

The key characteristic of these sessions was the breaking down of organisational boundaries and an honest appraisal of not just the stated requirements but the business drivers. Essentially we sat down with the client to work out what we all wanted to achieve to be successful. It didn't just feel good to us, our clients were initially cautious but soon loved being this close to a real project. No more sanitised project reports or filtered issues and risks, we all saw the full picture and worked as a team to deliver the end result.

I won't try to kid anyone here, working for an outsourcing business does put up a number of boundaries, this approach only worked where we could wheel in some senior people and the client was prepared to meet us half way. However, it did open my eyes to how a project delivery organisation could work!

It should come as no surprise then that we apply a very unique aproach to running projects at MINX. We don't try to nail our clients into a set of T&C's that will protect us in the event of a dispute. Instead we try to build a deep understanding of requirements, business drivers and add our own input in terms of deeply skilled and experienced consultants to help define the best end result we can. We accept that things change but rather than just protect ourselves with a change process we help our clients to factor in room for those changes.

The result has been consistent Cisco Excellence achievement from the Customer Satisfaction programme. We also measure our own performance via a comprehensive questionnaire. Across the past quarter we have averaged 97% across all categories. We use these scores to help us target performance improvements. Its also a great way to measure people as its a measure that they can directly relate to and affect.