Are We On-Boarded Yet?

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

On-boarding is yet another lip-service task that tends to fall short as new hires integrate into enterprises.  Somewhat like a new President, who pledges to acomplish miracles and fulfill campaign promises in the first one hundred days, we tend to think that we've finished the process at 100 days, and can move on to the next task.

Surprise, pizza party-breath!  You've only just begun.  And, the process(es) involved in SCM are mission-critical, given the constant changes in products, customers, channels, and designs>

One leadership guru promotes this 100-day action plan: Keep Going.  Keep Building.  Begin the process of continual evolution.  This three-step plan must span three critical areas.

Leadership: Gain feedback, and sharpen skills.  Figure out how to be more effective as teams and as an organization.

Practices: Design and evolve, based on changes in manifold dimensions, including circumstances.  Decide how and where to redeploy plans, tracking, and program management.

Culture: After 100 days your cultural insights are more insightful.  You are more clear about where and how you need to evolve the culture.  Close the gaps, and design an actionable plan for competitive advantage.

These Big Three, though, keep on going.  As you evolve processes, elements of what must continue beyond 100 days, continue in perpetuity, include prioritized attention to:

• Your Leadership, and its improvement
• People; development, talent acquisition, succession and contingency planning
• Plans, startegic reviews and refreshes
• Practices, business reviews, plan and milestone updates
• Program management, to leverage organizational capabulity and capacity
• Culture, contuing to redefine and close gaps
• Surprises, dealing with unexpected change, assessing degree and length of impact

The best-laid plans . . . The need to adjust and take decision on the fly is inevitable.

So, work on change-making with insufficient data - and deal with it.