The Triora Group

Over the years, I’ve often been reminded of a diagram in the book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  In Chapter 3, Steven Covey discusses the need to “Put First Things First” and includes a discussion about four types of activities that we all face at work.  Two of the activities are critical to success. 

The first type are those activities that are URGENT and IMPORTANT.  These are the crises we regularly face and which are often unexpected.  Working on these types of activities is very fulfilling and keeps the adrenalin going.  In some organizations these activities dominate the workload and everyone is tactically-focused.  The down side is that sometimes it seems that nothing gets done unless it’s a crisis!

The second type of activities are those that are IMPORTANT but NOT URGENT.  I like to think of these as the STRATEGIC activities that offer great rewards in the future but are not very exciting at the moment. Often these activities don’t get much attention since no one is running through walls of fire to save the day.

IMPORTANT and NOT URGENT activities involve more mundane tasks like testing, training, reviewing, planning, and evaluating.  Not the sort of stuff that’s going to get you the employee-of-the-month award…  However, in the book, the point made is that these types of activities (strategic) are where more emphasis should be made.

The book points out that many of the crises we spend time on are caused by a choosing not to work on the strategic IMPORTANT but NOT URGENT tasks.  Let’s admit it, often organizations reward tactical efforts better than strategic efforts.  The person who plans, evaluates and save the organization thousands in wasted effort gets little notice while the person who plays the action-hero part is given a lot of attention.  And the real question is this…

If your organization rewards action-heroes and ignores the contributions of the strategists doesn’t that lead to a culture that ignores problems until they become a crisis and then rewards whomever resolves it?

I was reminded of this because of some recent E-Business Suite Assessments we have been doing.  Many of them were initiated after a crises in the organization that occurred because there had been a lack of emphasis on getting the strategic IMPORTANT but NOT URGENT tasks done.

The strategic tasks of planning, testing, evaluating, and assessing had been pushed back because everyone was focusing on fighting fires and saving the day.  When the crises occurred, they realized that they needed to focus more time on strategy.  To get that started they needed some outside expertise, since they always seemed to be “up to their eyeballs in alligators”.

I offer this because it may be that your organization is doing the same thing.  Take this quick questionnaire and answer YES or NO to each statement regarding your E-Business Suite Applications environment.

1. Our management understands the software/hardware requirements to meet our applications changes and growth.
2. We have a defined plan for upgrading to Release 12 that includes a thorough analysis of the pros and cons for our organization.
3. Our environment is tuned and operating at a very efficient level that includes the appropriate, thoroughly tested, latest patches issued by Oracle.
4. Our Development, Test and Q/A environments are so efficiently managed we never see problems in our Production environment when new features are introduced.
5. We have the right skills, training and experience within our staff to manage our environment.
6. We have access to the best tools for managing and monitoring our environment.
7. We are staying ahead of the requests from our application users and they are very satisfied.
8. We haven’t had any serious production disruptions in the last year.

If you were able to answer YES on most of these, then you deserve a real pat on the back.  Keep up the good work and go ask your manager for a raise!

If you found that the NO answers were more common than the YES answers, then maybe it’s time to consider a better approach.  Everyone recognizes that juggling the responsibilities for operating the environment efficiently and at the same time planning/reviewing/assessing the environment are a challenge.  Even the military understands that tactics and strategy are two different issues!

That’s why a great option is to engage someone like the Triora Group with specific expertise and the ability  to focus on the strategic issues.  In less than a week we can usually assess your environment and provide you with a list of recommendations and improvements that you can start to tackle.  The result is that your environment is better prepared for the future and there’s a unified focus on “FIRST THINGS FIRST”.

I’ll close this entry with a comment from one of our clients, who said it best:

The Triora team is so knowledgeable.  They not only helped us improve our system’s performance but helped us improve our team’s performance too.  They took a big picture view of our situation and customized a solution that included specific and high-impact systems, people and process improvements.

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