From mess to an organized environment

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The work on organizations can be sometimes a completely mess.

I’m working on an initiative to turn this “mess” into a more organized and efficient delivery.

The basic approach we are following is:

  1. To have a clear, complete and detailed organizational chart.
  2. Understand what are the governance rules defined by contract with the customer.
  3. Define role and responsibilities for the different players (using a RACI).
  4. Communicate the roles, expectations and a defined reporting templates.
  5. Promote escalations on specific conflicts that could arise, work on these aspects and refine the RACI.
  6. Prioritize the focus on the major, critical hurdles.
  7. Work always on practical scenarios, avoid just to define theory.
  8. Lead by example.
  9. Promote ITIL, PMI, Six Sigma best practices.
  10. Repeat the process again and again.

After 1 month of work, results start to show green signals, but we are still RED :-(

Fintonic, FinScore

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I have discovered this page after digging into other concepts.

The story goes like this. The banks in Spain classifies the customer with respect your FinScore, that goes from 0 to 900.

Fintonic helps you to understand your Finscore and understand how it fits into the market, and it offers you specific products aligned with your possibilities.

It’s free, well, you have to show-up your finance profile to obtain the right score, so they know how you are in terms of finance conditions.

The other point I do not like is that to work on it, they ask your access credentials to obtain data from your bank. I’m sorry but at this minute this does not work to me.

https://www.fintonic.com/app/landing/home.do

 

VRoom’s Expectancy theory

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Expectancy theory proposes an individual will behave or act in a certain way because they are motivated to select a specific behavior over other behaviors due to what they expect the result of that selected behavior will be.

Expectancy theory has three components:

  1. Expectancy: effort → performance (E→P)
  2. Instrumentality: performance → outcome (P→O)
  3. Valence: V(R) outcome → reward

Motivational Force (MF) = Expectancy x Instrumentality x Valence

“If I work hard and do well, I will be rewarded with something I find valuable”

SWAT or Rapid Response Team

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I’m engaged on a team where rapid interventions are required to fulfill a specific goal.

Basically these interventions are set when an escalation comes from senior customer stakeholder or there are signals of contract breach.

The typical cycle of these interventions are composed by a 12 weeks interventions, with weekly reports to the project sponsor and escalation points with different relevant people of the organization. After the 12 weeks the intervention is evaluated and if extra time is required other period of intervention is prepared with new goals.

Project charter is the formal vehicle used to obtain the formal approval and authorization to work on these activities. If not, I continue working on my account delivery activities of my formal customer.

The initial stage is to analyze the situation (2 weeks), determine short term and medium term goals. Once done, chase the completion of these goals during the next 10 weeks.

Chase, escalate and get the things done is the more time consuming tasks. They are also the ones that consumes more energy: from the existing team, and from myself.

During the analysis is important to gather as much relevant data as possible, contrast the data and turn these facts into indications or root causes of a detected issue. It’s important to contrast the findings and get a common consensus of what happens.

I’m using a mind map tool to enable a visual representation of the root cause vs the proposed short term actions. This helps to senior managers to quickly understand the situation.

Conflicts will arise as soon as special pain points of relevant decisions are touched. In any case, the only goal is to fix the short term action and forget about what happened in the past. The goal of the SWAT team is not to perform a forensic analysis, it’s to fix the issues.

HIPAA + SRA Tool

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What is HIPAA?

In 1996, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or the HIPAA was endorsed by the U.S. Congress. The HIPAA Privacy Rule, also called the Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information, provided the first nationally-recognizable regulations for the use/disclosure of an individual’s health information. Essentially, the Privacy Rule defines how covered entities use individually-identifiable health information or the PHI (Personal Health Information). ‘Covered entities’ is a term often used in HIPAA-compliant guidelines.

Security Risk Assessment Tool

The SRA Tool is a self-contained, operating system (OS) independent application that can be run on various environments including Windows OS’s for desktop and laptop computers and Apple’s iOS for iPad only.

The SRA Tool takes you through each HIPAA requirement by presenting a question about your organization’s activities. Your “yes” or “no” answer will show you if you need to take corrective action for that particular item. There are a total of 156 questions.

The undoing project

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This book is making me to think about some habits and false concepts we use to fall in a daily basis. There are some interesting parts of the book for re-read from time to time.

People regretted what they have done, and what they wished they hadn’t done, far more than what they had not done and perhaps should have. The pain that is experienced when the loss is caused by an act that modified the status quo is significantly greater than the pain that is experienced when the decision led to the retention of the status quo.

 

When choosing between sure things and gambles, people’s desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure pain.

 

People did not chose between things. They chose between descriptions of things. Economists, and anyone else who wanted to believe that human beings were rational, could rationalize, or try to rationalize, loss aversion.

 

The endowment effect was a psychological idea with economic consequences. People attached some strange extra value to what ever they happened to own, simply because they owned it, and so proved surprisingly reluctant to part with their possessions, or endowments, even when trading them made economic sense.

 

The emotions of unrealized possibility: these emotions could be described using simple math. Their intensity was a product of two variables: the desirability of the alternative and the possibility of the alternative.

 

Microsoft Power BI

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I have created an account to use Power BI and check how it’s working on.

For small amount of data that is just managed by one person it does not make sense. You can use excel and share it through SharePoint Services. “Power BI publisher for Excel” plug-in supports this need.

For specific projects where different people has to work on same data sets modifying the data, there is a benefit of using Power BI.

I have to invest more time on this. :-)