Multi-year automation projects are challenging to initiate, staff, and complete on time. How do you account for the predictable roadblocks/disasters? What about the unpredictable challenges?
I did some online research and found a few resources that talk about continuity/business continuity/continuity of operations (including wikipedia, FEMA):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_continuity
https://www.fema.gov/pdf/about/org/ncp/coop_brochure.pdf
Most of the information pertains to maintaining continuity during natural disasters. Even so, they were surprisingly relevant even though none were specifically about multi-year automation projects. The above sites break continuity into the 3 following areas of focus:
- Resilience
- Recovery
- Contingency
What is Resilience?
The oxford dictionary defines resilience as (1) The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. AND (2) The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/resilience
Resilience means one thing when it applies to people. Conversely, it means almost the opposite when it applies to objects. How do you enable people to be resilient-tough and enable the ideas they work on to be resilient-elastic? Multi-year automation projects require both types of resilience to assure their completion.
How do you engender tough resilience in people?
Resilient-tough is about empowering people to have clarity and resolve when it comes to the vision they are building.
- People achieve clarity by have a clear vision endpoint with understandable goals.
- Teams achieve resolve with an agreed upon path to reach the endpoint.
My method for building clarity and resolve has been empowering people to author and own their respective visions of the future. In addition, the owner of the vision builds a multi-year strategy to achieve that vision. Those strategies are presented to management for endorsement.
Following endorsement, the vision owner communicates the vision and strategy to the team(s) responsible for making the vision a reality. A big project will have many vision/strategy pairs with multiple interdependencies. Each of the vision owners meet yearly and discuss how their strategies are related to each other and document any time-gating dependencies.
How do you design strategies to have elastic resilience?
Resilient-elastic is about the need for vision and strategy to be flexible.
- Strategies lacking the flexibility to change when circumstances change are only valuable in an unchanging world.
- A vision loses its meaning if there is no method to adapt and refocus.
The best way to assure that a vision and associated strategy are resilient-elastic is to review and revise both yearly. The review includes a list of identified dependencies and their timelines. Any new commercially available projects, publications, and/or patents that may modify the vision or strategy are also included.
Risks identified that could delay the project are documented for communication to upper management. Opportunities to accelerate timelines are also noted. Presentation of the updated Vision, strategy, risks and opportunities are communicated along with the team’s suggestion for the path forward.
The presentation can include any or all of the following:
- request for additional resources (money or people) to address identified risk,
- endorsement of modified vision/strategy to realize identified opportunity, or
- a summary review suggesting no changes to vision or strategy
Why is documentation a big deal?
If the idea of documenting these things, is frustrating to you, you are not alone. Indeed, many people feel that documentation is simply a waste of time. It actually took me a long time to appreciate the value of documentation.
I have never been a fan of photographs. It is irritating to stop life to take the picture. It can also be difficult to look at the pictures after the fact because all I see are the imperfections.
Documenting a snapshot of a project under development is sort of like taking a photograph for the following reasons:
- It takes time and focus away from developing the project and
- The review often reveals shortfalls or challenges that benefit from another set of eyes.
Like the photograph, the snapshot is not the cause of the problems with the project. In fact, it just provides us with a different perspective. Upon occasion, it can even help us see just how far the project has come. All things considered, it’s not possible to know if you are on the right track if you don’t know where you were, where you are and where you want to be.
The final thing I wanted to mention about resilience is the need for time. It takes time and resources to build teams and to coach them as they work on their respective strategies. It may even be a few years before all multi-year strategies are drafted let alone undergoing yearly reviews. I’ve found that patience may be the most important quality as you try to guarantee resilience.
What is Recovery?
According to Wikipedia, business continuity requires “arrangements made to recover or restore critical and less critical business functions that fail for some reason”. Recovery of multi-year automation projects is about getting back up and running when a risk is realized that interferes with moving the project forward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_continuity
https://www.ready.gov/business/implementation/continuity
https://www.mha-it.com/2018/03/non-it-business-continuity/
In the innovation space, each failure mode that needs a recovery plan can be broken down into 3 general areas:
- People,
- technology, and
- logistics
What does it mean to have a recovery plan for people?
You need recovery plans for people because they are the most important component of an innovation plan and the loss of critical personnel is not only critically important, it’s also completely predictable. To start, think about personnel in the organization starting with yourself:
- Is there anything only you do or know that is business essential or enables business essential functions?
- What about other people on your team?
- What happens to the project when you or those people move on to other projects or leave the company altogether?
Training Your Way to Institutional knowledge
Institutional knowledge is valuable, easily lost, and requires systems to maintain and create it. So how do we create institutional knowledge? Through a combination of training programs, open communication lines and documentation of innovation efforts. Training programs are the best possible method of creating institutional knowledge AND protecting against the eventuality of essential personnel moving on to other opportunities. A rule of thumb that I follow when it comes to deciding whether to create a certification training program is based on the following questions:
What are the questions to determine if training is needed?
- Do we have enough people with this knowledge to provide timeline dependent support of innovation efforts essential to the long term vision?
- Yes: We have < 80% of our innovation capacity spoken → no training program needed
- No: We have > 80% of our innovative capacity utilized → Training program needed
- Does it take less than or greater than 3 months of self-directed study to master a topic?
- <3 mos → no training program needed
- >3 mos → Training program needed
- Do these innovation projects tend to burn people out?
- No → no training program needed
- Yes → Training program needed
Anything that is worth being known by 1 person is worth being known by 2 or more people. At its core, having only one person who knows how to work on something is a weakness for a company and guarantees delays and loss of critical institutional knowledge. Create a training program if two of the answers suggest a training program is needed.
One way to track and assure retention of institutional knowledge while also growing your innovation footprint is the inclusion of an innovation project as part of the training program. In example, we created training certification programs for liquid handling robots that included the requirement that each trainee complete a Journeyman project that not only demonstrates mastery of the training, but also completes an automated script that increases the company’s automation capabilities.
For another look at training to gain institional knowledge, check out, “Train scientists to become automation experts”.
How do I limit personnel turnover?
Companies that train excellent people may find themselves training their workforce for other companies to hire away. Turnover of personnel responsible for multi-year automation projects, is often avoidable if you are willing to do some of the leg work ahead of time. There are 2 things you can do to minimize this occurrence (if you think of a 3rd, let me know).
- Pay them what they’re worth:
- Know the market value of your people both before and after training them.
- After factoring in the cost of finding, replacing or training a replacement, it’s usually much cheaper just to compensate your innovators in line with the market.
- Make it about more than money:
- Challenge you innovators to build new thing and grow their skills, reward success with bigger challenges. Selflessly help innovators to get the credit they deserve for their efforts.
- Successful innovation builds on itself and innovators love building new things. Keeping innovators challenged keeps them happier and spending less time looking for new positions.
Being the only person with essential knowledge can also lead to burnout. I once went on vacation and spent the entire time worried about a tool I had built that nobody else could support. This prompted the discovery that a vacation coverage plan is actually a great way to build succession plans for essential innovation support. Identify a support plan for an innovator when they go on vacation and use that support plan as your coverage plan. Write that plan down, review it yearly, and change it if personnel changes require it.
Recovering from personnel turnover
Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose a valuable innovator and the fastest way to recover from this is to establish a clear plan to cover that person’s essential functions by other staff during the hiring process. Again this sounds like an obvious solution, but I am constantly amazed by companies that have only 1 person who truly understands and supports essential innovation projects. Even in a lean organization, it is possible to split the essential functions of an individual between 2 or more people.
Contingency
Contingency plans account for eventualities that are unlikely, but would result in catastrophic consequences. Preparations constitute a last-resort response if resilience and recovery arrangements should prove inadequate in practice. The issues that have most haunted me as they apply to needing contingency planning have to do with things completely outside my control, such as eventualities that will negatively impact technology that I depend on.
If your multi-year automation projects is dependent upon external technologies, you need to understand there will be failures that may be completely outside your control. The only thing you can do is identify the risks and work with your technology providers to avoid surprises.
How do I identify essential technologies
What technologies are essential to realize your innovative vision? If a technology is essential, how difficult would it be to institute a change to an alternative?
If you are in the position that an essential technology has an equivalent in the marketplace, you need to investigate that alternative and to figure out how difficult it will be to change systems. Revisit that investigation at least every other year to make sure that it is still true.
The challenge of model changes is significant. This is especially true if the change requires additional changes to the training and or operating procedures. Thankfully, these changes are the easiest to recover from because there is usually plenty of warning before they take place. Build a relationship with the sales rep and make it clear that you need that information as soon as it becomes available. If you are in the process of buying a piece of technology, take the time to ask the sales rep if there is an imminent model upgrade. With all that said you need to not over-rely on a vendor for making technology decisions.
If the company supplying your essential tool stopped supporting the model you have invested significant time training people on, what does this mean for your project?
How do I identify vendors with suspect stability?
Are any of the companies that produce your technologies having financial troubles? What will happen to your plans if a company you rely on no longer exists?
Business changes that affect supply or support of an essential technology often come as a surprise. This is even true for people working in the company so the best way to ask this question and evaluate the answers you get includes monitoring the stock price of the company if its publicly traded.
If anybody has suggestions for resources that look at continuity of multi-year automation projects in a different way, I’d welcome your suggestions or posts of those resources. #continuity #resiliency #recovery #contingency
