When history of the UK’s response to coronavirus is written I’m confident that the cancellation of exams will be seen as a precipitate, unwise decision that had far reaching, negative consequences for a great number of young people.  For A-level students in particular, exam results can be critical to realising career ambitions.  With stiff competition for places at the best universities, achieving your target grades means getting onto the course you really want, or not.  One exam grade either way might mean getting a good start into your career of choice, or not.  Assembling a collection of students in a large hall for an exam, spaced a little further apart than normal, doesn’t seem like one of the harder problems organisations have had to solve for during this crisis.  And yet the cancellation of all exams was one of the first announcements when the lockdown started.  The consequence of this – having grades assessed by teachers – was always going to be unfair to many students despite the best efforts of those teachers.

Undergraduates have had a very rough time of it too, with campuses closed, exams either cancelled or open book and online tuition and assignments patchily delivered.  Given that the summer term is all about the lead up to exams, the whole thrust of the term has been somewhat lost in those universities where exams have not taken place.

Many students will have arranged summer placements or internships over the summer.  These can be invaluable in helping students learn how their skills might be applied to real-world jobs.  They will have the opportunity to deliver a project and experience team working.  For engineering students, they will be learning hands-on skills that they won’t experience at a university. They will also be finding out whether a particular sector or organisation is likely to enthuse them.

This year, sadly, it has been evident that many companies have cancelled their summer placements entirely, perhaps understandably given the battles that many are fighting just to stay in business.  Others, with offices temporarily closed to staff, have replaced what would have been an eight-week placement in an office or lab with a short internet-based experience, providing short talks and assignments.  This can only add to the feeling of disappointment many will be feeling.

Summer Placements at Plextek: The Practicalities

As CEO, I feel quite keenly the responsibility to keep our staff both physically and mentally healthy – this is a balance that needs to be re-evaluated on a weekly, if not sometimes daily basis at the moment.  Given the negative impact that undergraduates had already experienced this year, I was very eager to ensure that we did not let down the half dozen students that we were planning to host over the summer, and provide them with something like a normal experience.  Each of our students typically gets a self-contained project to work on over an eight-week period.  They are deliberately quite challenging, to get them thinking and stretch their ability.  The projects are almost always hands-on and practical in nature, so access to our labs and workshops are essential, as is guidance and mentoring from permanent staff.  However, given that most of our staff had been working from home since late March, it wasn’t immediately obvious how we could arrange this.

As it turned out we were able to align the students’ arrival for the summer with a partial opening up of our premises.  The latter followed implementation of the government guidelines for safe working in offices and labs, which resulted in a host of changes to the office layout and new working practices, including an electronic booking-in system to limit the numbers in the office on any given day.

Our HR team were busy making sure that everything was in place for the day that the students were welcomed onto our premises.  To ensure that support and advice was always available to the students, we organised a rota system so that a small number of senior staff would always be present each day.  Student supervisors and mentors agreed to come into the office during the students’ first week to introduce them to the company and get their projects started.

With typically about a third of our staff now in the building at any time there is plenty of space for everyone to social distance but there is a lively feel that has been absent since March.  The students have settled in and are in their second week of exploring the problems we have set.  I’m hoping to provide further progress reports as the summer holiday proceeds, including some news on the students’ progress, but it’s already gratifying to see the positive impact of this modest return to normality in an astonishingly disrupted year.

In Part 2 of this blog series, I described some of the less desirable side effects that an increase in the process over time can have, how it can have a negative impact on your business, and most importantly, started to show what to do to prevent it. In this, the final part of the blog series, I’ll complete my exploration of ways in which you prevent being dragged down by process by exploring the role of environment, business model and communications.

Environment

A single workspace and set of tools are unlikely to satisfy the needs of starters and finishers.

Early stages of a project, and starters, are more likely to require open spaces for lively group workshops, tools that support rapid prototyping and modelling and surroundings that inspire creativity. The latter stages of development, and finishers, will need quiet space for concentrated work, CAD systems, document management systems, and comprehensive test and verification facilities.

To be effective, the organisation needs to understand the difference and provide the right environment for everyone.

Business Model

The business of delivering ideation workshops, exploring product concepts or creating proof-of-principle demonstrations are examples of activities for which the outcome is ill-defined. The commercial engagement often comes down to ‘having a go’; sometimes one can pull a rabbit out of the hat, sometimes not. When it comes to the invention, for example, there are no guarantees. Perhaps the customer will like our design concepts, perhaps they won’t. Everyone understands that.

On the other hand, if we agree to develop a product for a customer and introduce it into manufacture, we are making very specific commitments to the deliverables at the end of the project. There will be a very precisely defined outcome, and we haven’t finished until we’ve ticked all the necessary boxes. There is a much higher degree of risk in this type of work. This risk must be considered in advance and it must be clear who carries it (us or our customer).

This doesn’t just affect the project delivery processes, as described above, it influences our business model and has a big impact on the sales process. The overhead involved in early-stage projects tends to be very low because the risk is low, whereas the overhead involved in later-stage projects can be huge because of the degree of detailed analysis that is required before a timescale and price can be agreed upon.
Be clear about which it is before you start bidding for a project.

Internal Communications

One day you are exhorting staff to focus on efficiency, process optimisation, risk reduction and refining company systems so that projects can be delivered on time and within budget; the next day you are emphasising the benefits of taking time out for navel-gazing and experimenting with nebulous ideas in the name of innovation. Not surprisingly staff can be very confused by such mixed messages: “how am I expected to spend quiet time following a train of thought that might lead to some new insight when I have a project manager chasing me to meet a critical deadline on Friday?”

You are going to have to set things up such that the tension between these two modes of working is balanced in some way.

You’ll rightly have some processes that make project delivery manageable, repeatable and efficient.

Resource managers will be putting staff into teams to best match supply (new projects that need resource) to demand (staff with the right skills for the job). Project managers will be making sure that their teams stay focussed on project deliverables.

But clearly, if you want to ensure that your staff have the space for some quality ‘off the clock’ time they will need that time allocated. And done in such a way that resource managers recognise it as equally valid to ‘on the clock’ project time. You might need a project manager for off the clock time to make sure the time is being put in.

External Communications

A somewhat analogous situation exists in external communications. Your organisation may genuinely be able to execute pacey, short, speculative projects and also large, complex, rigorous and demanding projects, but you will have a difficult job getting that message across to customers.

The sort of shop window that would attract a potential customer who is looking for some very rapid ideas development or a ‘quick and dirty’ proof-of-the-possible demonstration will not attract a customer who is looking for rigorous design methodology, highly detailed work breakdown, thorough verification plans and precise deliverables. The former will be looking for evidence of disruptive thinkers who can create novel opportunities, the latter a team who can precisely specify and then deliver reliably what it promises, with a high degree of risk management.

CONCLUSION

About two years ago Plextek started thinking about how to introduce new innovation strategy and design services to our business, to complement our existing technology and engineering services. All the tensions discussed above were very much in our minds. The people needed to deliver these services would have a very different mindset to our engineers, even those at the ‘starter’ end of the spectrum. Processes would need to be minimal to allow the maximum amount of flexibility and pace. The environment needed to be open, inspiring, suitable for interactive workshops rather than functional and lab-based. The office culture would be quite different, led by ‘creatives’ rather than scientists and engineers. It would be difficult to present our traditional services and our new services within one marketing ‘shop window’.

After much discussion, we concluded that the tensions were just too great to exist within one entity, so we made the decision to set up Ignite Exponential as a separate business unit to provide these new services. Although it was closely coupled to our existing business, Ignite Exponential would have the freedom it needed to support its own flavour of people, process, business model, environment and marketing.

This is an extreme example, where it seemed it was not possible to create sufficient space for two such different ways of working under one roof. It’s important that a business can recognise when this is the right solution. But it must also be prepared to work hard to allow very different ways of working co-exist under one roof wherever possible, to suit the type of project being undertaken.

As a keen traveller, what I learned from this is that I needed a new checklist. It’s called ‘Minimal Gear’. The rules work in the opposite sense to my traditional ones. When I come back from a trip I look at what I took that I didn’t need or could have done without, and cross it off the checklist. The list gets shorter and shorter over time rather than longer, and I regain that ability to make ad hoc decisions without feeling encumbered by heavy bags or the value of what I’m carrying. I haven’t thrown away the old checklists: quite often they are appropriate to use. But I now have the luxury of two modes of travel, with a system that can support both of them.

In Part 1 of this blog I described how, for well-intentioned reasons, the trajectory of the business process is always in the same direction: increasing over time. In this part of the blog, I’ll describe some of the less desirable side effects that this increase in the process can have, how it can have a negative impact on your business, and most importantly, what to do to prevent it.

THE EFFECTS

All of these well-intentioned drivers add positive value to a business because most of the time they are attempting to ensure best practice is followed. However, they also add friction and reduce flexibility, hindering the organisation’s ability to execute projects with short timescales or react swiftly to changes of scope.

A typical tendency of process improvement is to apply it across the board. So if a process is introduced or changed as part of a remedial action that came out of one project, it will be applied to all areas under the guise of ‘preventative action’. The improvement that was relevant for one instance in one project is now attempting to fix problems that may not have existed in other projects but just adds friction to the process. In effect, the height of the quality ‘bar’ is pushed up to that which the most demanding project demands. But now all projects have to get over that bar, whether it is appropriate or not.

If you are writing software for critical applications, such as aerospace or medical device, you rightly need a consistent and rigorous approach, accurate specification, careful execution, painstaking verification and lots of checks and balances. So your organisation builds these features into the quality procedures for writing software. But somewhere else in the business someone is trying to rapidly put together a technology demonstrator for a new product idea. The demonstrator is built around a Raspberry Pi and needs some quickly written code to show how the product might interact with a user. Someone argues that although this demonstrator is only there to show how something might work and not actually deliver a solution, there’s a danger that some of the code might get carried over into a subsequently developed product. So you apply the full-blown software quality process just in case. And you find you can’t possibly get the job done in the timescale available and the cost is out of all proportion to the task.

The similar setting of the quality bar according to the highest need can happen everywhere. For example in the sales process (when the controls appropriate for selling the largest jobs get applied to small ones), or project management (when the process used to start, run and close a project have been scaled to handle the largest, most complex projects and put an unacceptable overhead on smaller projects). This may have been done with the best of intentions, but reflects that fact that it’s much easier to argue for more process than less. The latter is seen as risk-avoiding and so “good”, the latter inviting risk and thus “bad”.

Over time it is easy to get into a situation in which a company is very well set up for executing the largest, most complex, most difficult projects, but has lost the ability to both sell and execute the more pacey, short or risky projects. The organisation has become too slow and too expensive because of the process overhead that has accreted to the business.

In this mode, the organisation is behaving like a railway train, following a carefully controlled path to a pre-defined destination, with specified milestones along the way, and with a large amount of scrutiny, oversight and supervision. So how can we get it to behave like a 4×4 when we need it to, possibly just exploring the landscape, possibly finding the shortest route to the destination, constrained only by the terrain? In disrupted times like we are currently experiencing, these questions become even more pertinent.

THE SOLUTIONS

The first step to avoiding this situation is becoming aware of the problem and realising that action is needed.
A business will typically see an inevitable slow accretion of process over time, so something must be put in place to push back against this tendency. And that takes conscious action. The dialogue must be changed from one of risk-taking versus risk-aversion, which inevitably tends to favour the latter, to around the benefits versus potential costs of any proposed increase in the process. Any business contains a mass of compromises, and finding the right balance is key, but you can’t do that if only one side of the equation is considered.
Many businesses would benefit from the ability to be schizophrenic: sometimes rigorous and risk-averse, sometimes pacey and adventurous. When developing a medical device or aerospace product, design staff need to be able to work in an entirely different mode to when they are brainstorming ideas and putting together experimental models and prototypes. Although process and standards must be applied across the business, a one-size-fits-all template should be avoided. I’ll illustrate this with some examples of how this could be applied in practice.

Process

Overhaul company procedures with the aim of reducing the mandatory process to the minimum. All activities must comply with these, so think very hard about the cost and benefit of each individual requirement before putting it in place. Handle more complex or demanding projects by adding in an additional process that is tailored to that project’s requirements.
Company procedures can end up containing a large amount of excellent advice that has accrued over time. While much of this may be useful it has two detrimental impacts. Firstly it contributes to procedures growing very large and nobody will read long quality documents. Secondly, it may not be clear where the end of the mandatory instructions and the guidance begins. Address this by stripping out all of the guidance and putting it into separate documents that can be referred to when needed.

People

In order to work across the full range of potential projects, we must recognise that different people are more comfortable with different types of project activity. This is nothing to do with their technical specialism: it is about where they sit on an axis that we could call “starter-finisher”. Those at the “starter” end of the scale will be more comfortable with the typical early stages of a project: more experimental, more open-ended, riskier, less well defined. Those at the “finisher” end of the scale will be more comfortable working on the later stages of a typical project: with a clearly specified requirement, with a strong process or framework, with clear boundaries around who is responsible for what and with a desire to push on until every bug is fixed and verification step is complete.

The starters will be great at getting fresh ideas on the table and demonstrating what could be achieved but will get bored long before the product hits the production line. The finishers won’t cope at all well with the somewhat nebulous and ill-defined state of the early project but will make sure we deliver the fully finished article that the customer needs. There’s nothing wrong with this, though both starters and finishers may have difficulty understanding each other!

What is important is that the business recognises these traits and realises that starters work best with minimal process whereas finishers work best where there is a strong process. Accommodating this in a single business is not always easy.

In Part 3 of this blog, I’ll continue to show what you can do to prevent being dragged down by process, to be able to be both rigorous and a fleet of foot, discussing the role of environment, business model and communications.