Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It's always good to take a pause once in a while and look back at some of the podcast episodes that really stood out.
There are three episodes in particular that warrant special treatment. One such episode is our very first episode called Data and Information Management Challenges.
I will say it is still true today that we get phone calls from potential clients that say they can't find what they need when they need it.
This general statement is vague, yet so, so important. What information management challenges surround the problem of not being able to find what you want when you want it? What can you do to fix this problem? Once you determine that you want to take a stance and get organized, increase efficiency, and reduce the risk of unwanted, unnecessary documents and data across your organization, this episode will get things started. So let's take another listen to data and information management challenges.
Hello, thank you for joining us. This is what counts. A podcast created by Trailblazer Consulting. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company. We share our experience solving information management challenges, like creating and implementing a records retention schedule, creating an asset data hierarchy, or helping with email management. This is Lee, and in this episode, Maura and I will discuss how to face an information management problem within your organization.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Thanks, Lee. This is Maura and I am excited to get started on how do you face an information management problem? You're sitting in your office and you realize you can't find a document that you need. You've gotten the third email from a colleague in another part of the company asking you for the same information.
Been happening every three weeks for the past two months. And you're wondering, there's got to be a better way. This is often when we get a call. We're information management consultants, so we hear from people in a lot of different companies who have a lot of different questions.
They all come down to, we can't find what we need, when we need it. How can we make that better?
Even if you're in the company and you're not looking for consulting help, you still have that same challenge. We can't find what we need, when we need it. How can we make this better?
Okay, so we get that call first call, and someone on the other line says, I've got this problem, Laura. I can't find the business case documents that we have to have when we finish a project to show what we plan to get out of this project. How did we get approval for this project, especially a capital project? We've spent a lot of money and it was taken a couple of years. Did we actually get the benefit out of it that we were helping? That's a real problem. Someone called me and asked me that we also get.
We just need a retention schedule. We had our annual tax audit, our annual outside auditors, they came in and said, we need a retention schedule. So I don't know what that means, but we need one. Can you help us with that? Or it could be we've had an emergency and we couldn't find the information that we needed to respond. And now we're really worried because we thought we had everything we needed and yet our main office was shut off because of a flood, and we can't get into our record.
So any one of these is a good place to start, because what this is helping do, helping you do is focus in on the problem. Is the problem documents? A specific set of documents, like business case documents? Is the problem older data, financial data? We couldn't respond to an audit request. Or is it geographic? We can't get into our office now, what? That could lead you to a process solution, but it starts with information.
All right, so what do we do with that?
We had this question come up. Either you've talked to your office mate or somebody down the hall, or you called a consultant and we're having a conversation. Now, either way, where do we go from here?
So sometimes Sultans will say, we think what you need is this. You need our standard retention schedule, and then here's a policy. And we can also sell you some training. That's not the approach that we like to take. We'd rather help you figure out what's the best thing to tackle first. We call that you can call it preassessment. You can call it the problem statement. Basically, we're going to work with you and with other key people in your company to figure out where you should focus. And you can do this without a consultant, too. You can do this on your own, talk to your colleague. It's the same set of questions. So I'm going to stop doing that back and forth between it could be a consultant or it can be you. Everything I'm going to tell you, it could be you. All right, let's say the problem comes out of the legal department. Legal. Someone in legal says, I can't find these documents. I had to respond to an audit request. I had to respond to an Ediscovery, and we were trying to find data. We didn't know where to look. And we got in trouble. We missed a deadline. And so they reach out to somebody in It and they say, Where's all my stuff? How do I find this? In some firms, they skip it and they go to facilities and they end up in the off site storage location. And you got a lot of boxes full of stuff. But is that how people really work today?
So these are the questions we like to ask. Are you really using the paper documents that have been printed out and put in offsite storage. Is that how you're doing your business, or are you doing a lot of collaboration and managing your information and sharing information in email?
That's often the answer. Or do you have a really good set of enterprise wide systems and you're actually managing your whole business through a system? So everybody goes to the ERP system, the enterprise resource planning system, to get the answers that they need.
Each situation is different depending on the answers to that first question. That helps you move to the second question.
One of the things that we like to do when we come into a client is something called an assessment.
Pretty broad statement, but we really just want to understand what's going on. What's the current state? How are people managing information? How are they using it on a daily basis to do their job? How are they sharing information across the company from one team to another? And how are they storing it so that they can know where to go find it the next time they need it? All right, so let me go back to that client who called me and said, I can't find the business case document. So she was working for an infrastructure organization. It's a big was an airport, big airport, lots going on. And they were entering into a big capital campaign. They were going to build new pieces to the airport, upgrade some things and build some new things.
Lots of money being spent. And each project had its own separate business case, and each little group in the airport was advocating for one project over another. And there was a process they had put in place, a pretty strong process around how did business cases get approved.
But a year into this program, they were trying to do us kind of a check in point. Were they getting what they wanted, what they planned out of the project?
And they couldn't go back, couldn't trace their steps back to those business case documents.
So she asked us to come in. And we didn't know a lot about this airport when we started, but we took a look at it, we did some research. We knew it was about 80 years old. We knew it was very busy. We knew that the last infrastructure, the last big capital growth, was many years in the past, more than ten years in the past. And one of the things that the client told us up front was the systems that they were using to manage the capital projects were old. They had a document management system that was five versions out of date. It connected in a sort of tangential way to a maintenance management system that contained a list of all the existing assets. And that system was nine years, nine versions out of date, and actually was very unstable.
But still, she thought this was a document management problem, and they were depending heavily on a file server they had a special name for it, their file server. I like to think of it as District Nine.
It was something like that. And they were using Box, which is a third party cloud based document storage location.
So we came in and we said, all right, you've laid this out. You've got a problem with finding these business case documents. But you've also mentioned that you have these multiple locations where you are storing documents that relate to these capital projects. You're storing them in the document management system, in your file servers, and in Box.
And also in your introduction, you threw out the fact that the maintenance data that contains all the asset data and obviously there is a connection between capital projects and assets because you're adding assets, you're pulling out assets, you're adding new parts to this campus.
You mentioned that it's not in great shape either. So I think we should talk to people. I think we should talk to a couple of different people across these different parts of the organization because they all have a stake in how does this capital campaign happen, how does it get played out? So we talked to this main client who'd called us, and she pulled us into a conversation with the head of construction and also the head of engineering. That was the initial conversation. That was a phone call.
Then we all agreed we would come in, we would talk to a few people. That was how they laid it out. And it was a two week blitz, as it turned out. And we talked to 64 people in that two week period, because as we started talking the first day, we were kind of not getting very far on day one. But the first couple of people we talked to suggested we talked to a couple more. And on the third day, we finally talked in detail with the chief operating officer and that head of engineering again. And we got so much information thrown at us and also about 25 more people he wanted us to go talk to. And that really opened the floodgates. So one week into this two week intensive interview process and we had identified a different problem. This was not a document management problem. The document management issue was really a symptom, was kind of an outcome of the problem. The problem was an asset data problem. They were having a really hard time finding all of the data, whether it was data in a system or data trapped in a document or data in drawings that had to do with the assets. So the boilers, the elevators, the lights and the railings, all of the pieces that made up the airport that went into a space, went into a terminal, went into a gate.
Keeping track of all that data in an 80 year old airport that's now going through a massive growth step is really hard to do. And so that turned out to be the heart of the problem.
So we'd gotten through at this point when we kind of came up with this new hypothesis, and this was all based on what the people were telling us inside the airport. This is what all the different groups were telling us. And we talked to it. Construction, engineering, finance, and the commercial side, where they're bringing in the retailers and the shop owners and the restaurants and everything. We talked to all of those different people and they all were telling us that their biggest challenge was when they went to do a repair, they couldn't find the data. So then for the second half of our interviews, we were really focusing in on, okay, where do they see the challenges? Where are the bottlenecks and what's the right next step?
[00:13:00] Speaker C: I think it's excellent that you were able to pinpoint that it was an asset data problem. That was really the problem statement at this particular airport. As I was listening to you, what occurred to me was technology was the problem because what you said before, do people take paper and put it in a box and put it in storage? Well, if you think about that, that's a really simple process. And if you keep the right records of where it is in storage, you can pull back that information and you can have it in front of you here.
I can't even remember the amount of systems that you just mentioned. Right. ERP was one of them. Box was another one. File Servers maintenance Management System a Document Management System email content Enterprise content Management contract Management SharePoint These are all systems that contain documents. And so kind of trying to figure out and weed through the plethora of systems that are out there and the select information that each system is giving you causes a problem. It causes people to get confused, especially when you're talking about department to department, possibly using different systems in each department to house their particular data. And it does take an analysis of the workflow. An analysis of what's? The handoff, the appropriate handoff from department to department as well, so that you can gather the correct information that needs.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: No, you're right, Lee. Technology does breed complexity, which is ironic, I think. Usually you're trying to introduce technology to simplify things intuitively. We think, oh, we'll just scan that and that'll make it easier. I can't tell you how many times people tell me, oh, well, I just scanned that. But when you ask them, Where is it? Well, how did you scan that? Where did you put it? And how did you name it? Because I just scanned that. If you scan something on a hand scanner, a standalone scanner, it gets a file name that means nothing. XYZ 123-4567. Typical file name for a scanned object. It might have the date you scanned it in there, it might not. So then where do you put it? Oh, I put it in the folder that's called mora. Well, how many things are in the folder called mora now? So that's what happened here at this airport is people were storing things in their own file folder on their share drive or on their personal network drive. And then if they needed to give it to somebody else, they would email it or they would put it in box or both. Sometimes they would email it and then the person couldn't find it, so they'd put it in box.
When you were listing out all the things that I had mentioned, that was not even the tip of the iceberg of all the systems that we ended up uncovering during the course of this project.
But we don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves. We're still in this two week period trying to figure out what to do next. And we were able to pull together the leadership of the key groups here. So the critical groups were construction because they were in the midst of this big capital campaign, and engineering because they were the ones responsible for keeping the airport running from a physical standpoint. The elevators had to work, the lights had to work. You needed all the guardrails, and they had to be ready to do that as soon as a new part of the airport opened up, when the capital campaign moved on, when each construction project finished. And so those two were our co sponsors for the project that we took on after this.
At the beginning of this, they had very different views about what the problem was. And you mentioned handovers lee and handover is one of those things that seems very innocuous. We're going to go from one step to the next. We're going to hand over the information that is needed to carry over from one step to the next.
But what came out was a lot of finger pointing. Well, you didn't give us what we needed. You were late giving that to us. You didn't have the right information when we started, so we had to start over again. It's all your fault. It's all your fault. That went on for a while. And that's kind of a sideline to our problem statement work is we got to scope out how do people feel about this project and how is that going to help us move forward or not. And that's the same in every situation.
No one ever sees things exactly the same way. You got to come to a shared understanding, an agreement on how to move forward, on how to uncover specific issues and how to address them in a collaborative and productive way and not in a finger pointing way. And we did spend a lot of time on that in this project.
But again, trying not to get ahead of myself here. We had those two key people and we had to bring them together to say what was next. And this pre assessment problem statement activity.
We got most of it done in that two week period. But that wasn't the end. We revisited that problem statement almost every day for the next year as we brought more stakeholders into the mix. So the CFO was brought in the COO they'd been in at the beginning. They'd offered their opinions. But as we started to form a plan and to come up with a solution and a path forward, they had to be brought back in. They had to agree. They had to be part of figuring it out. So that initial activity, bringing all those voices together, hearing everything they had to say, and we're going to talk in a different episode. We'll talk about how we build the question set for our interview. But it's also the questions are prompts. What we want is for people to talk. We want people to talk about how they do their job, what data they need to do their job, where they get it, and what do they do with it. And if we talk to enough people and get enough different viewpoints in an organization about that, we have a good understanding from an enterprise perspective of what's happening with information and how to proceed into our next step of actually doing a full assessment and then figuring out, all right, what's the biggest issue? What's the one what's the where we're going to get the most bang for their buck? What's going to help the most to get us back to that first problem here that we said at the very beginning, I can't find what I need when I need it.
[00:20:13] Speaker C: I think that's an excellent representation of that first conversation or conversation on a preassessment.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: It's a good illustration of many things.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: I think we threw out a whole bunch of stuff in this episode. And I want to say that in future episodes, we will cover a lot of this information in greater detail. If you have any questions, please send us an email at info at trailblazer us.com or look us up on the web at www dot trailblazer us. Thank you for listening and please tune into our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you, the listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake, who created our music.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: Thanks, Lee. And thanks, everyone. See you next time.
