Let me give an advice for companies who have both a desire and resources to improve.

Many of the leaders that I meet are overwhelmed by a huge number of available concepts, strategies and recipes to improve their business. Look at the Wikipedia page outlining modern business strategies to get the idea of choise problem they face. Which one is the best, which will return the most on invested dollar - Toyota Production System? Business Process Management? ERP? CRM? Balanced Scorecard? or may be one of dozens of other alternatives?

Yet the number of options is only part of the problem, another one is absence of a framework to fit these concepts and methodologies into. Management gurus typically don’t care to define the scope precisely neither to consider interfaces with related disciplines. Everyone sells his recipe as a comprehensive and only worthy of attention.

Where does it lead?

• Buridan’s ass syndrome: a leader inclined to perfectionism doesn’t take anything because he is unable to make an optimal choice.
• Silver bullet syndrome: a leader inclined to adventures accepts the first theory which hooked him and which he can afford. BTW, this is generally not a bad strategy: apply more leadership and common sense, less bigotry - and almost every theory will lead to success.

For comparison let’s look at the related area of business software and IT consulting.

They provide enough ground for cricism; their promises should be divided by 4 (or even 16) but there is a significant difference: information technologies are structured. There is so-called stack of information technologies which looks like this:

Each stack level offers a number of alternatives and competing suppliers to choose from. But we do not choose between say a cable network and CRM system. It would be foolish to opt for CRM because this is what provides a real value for a salesman while the average user does not care about the network cables and switches.

But this is what happens when business and management concepts are considered! Hence I believe it’d be usefull to introduce a notion of Management Competencies Stack. (I use term “competency” rather than “technology” because business and management are more humanitarian than IT.) Here it is:

Some examples:

• customer relationship management, manufacturing planning, budgeting belong to functional management level (they relates to sales, production and finance respectively)
• BPM belongs to the process management level (not to be confused with BPMS which belongs to the middleware level of IT stack)
• Toyota System, Lean, Six Sigma and Theory of Constraints belong to the concepts level

The relationship between the levels here is the same as in IT: the bottom level without the top lacks the target while the top level without bottom lacks supporting technologies.

• Looking top-down, the bottom level is an enabler for the top. This is a gear connecting abstract ideas to specific activities performed by specific people.
• Looking bottom-up, the upper level is what gives a purpose to the activities of the lower level and multiply their impact.

Few examples to illustrate these relationships:

• An ordinary company can’t exist without competencies in sales, production or services (functional level).
• A company which has grown to certain size and level of maturity should put efforts to coordinate activities of functional units within an end-to-end business processes or projects (the process and project management level). Otherwise functional units increasingly work for themselves rather than on the client.
• The value chain theory (concepts level) specifies the purpose for business process initiatives (the process and project management level). Such initiative shouldn’t be only about doing things right, but also about doing the right things.
• Theory of constraints (concepts level) defines a procedure (”five steps”) which helps to pick the most promising business process for your process initiative i.e. the one which will maximise return. Business process initiatives lacking connection to the concepts level come down e.g. to analysis of six levels process hierarchy - a sound excercise indeed but not well rewarded in terms of company’s bottomline.

A lower level of the competence stack is the enabler for upper levels. But does upper levels skills have value in the absence of the lower?

I think yes, yet limited:

• If you try to implement process management in the absence of accounting then your achievements will be limited (if any): you’ll quickly find out that every business process operates with business objects managed by enterprise databases and applications. For example, if you target the “inquiry to order” process without a CRM system then after a while you will find yourself developing your own CRM within the BPM project. (It maybe justified in some cases but be aware that packaged CRM applications will likely be superiour to in-house development.) BPM is mostly for those who have ERP and CRM but aren’t happy with these.
• Lean implementation without competence in process management may be successfull at departmental level but it’ll be hard to extend this methodology to the enterprise level because BPM is the key competency in dealing with cross-functional business processes.

Conclusion: starting from top-level competency may only make sence to gain initial education and experience. Their full power is unleashed only when supporting competencies are presented at the lower level.

Unfortunately the existence of different levels of management competencies and relationship between them is not realized by managers and consultants. I guess this is the background of some dramatic failures.

A likely scenario:

1. Assume that Company A has made impressive progress in transforming its business. The information about this success become public.
2. Consultants participated in A’s project wrapped up the experience into a new methodology X and started to promote agressively the X and themselves. This is how TQM (Xerox), Lean (Toyota), Six Sigma (Motorola) were invented.
3. Company Q decided to use the X methodology and repeat A’s success. Yet the books about X tell little about the necessary Y and Z competencies - mostly because Y and Z are taken for granted at A. Besides, any pre-conditions would have negative impact on sales of X-based services.
4. As a result the Q’s project fails. A succeeded and Q failed because A posessed necessary low-level competencies while Q decided not to waste time and take the shortest route to “success”.

Failure to understand the relations between competence levels also leads to wrong assesment of investments effectiveness. For example, it’s widely known BPM projects compare favorably to ERP in terms of ROI. Given that ERP belong to functional competence and BPM belongs to the higher level of process competence, it is not surprising. ERP implementation gives some immediate effect but probably more important is that without ERP you can not benefit from BPM and other skills of the upper levels. Similarly, you can not effectively implement Lean without BPM.

Summing up, here are the promised advices:

1. Do not approach full-scale implementation of upper level competency before mastering the lower-level competencies it depends on - the return will not match the expectations.
2. Don’t stop after implementing a low-level competency - the most part of the reward comes from implementing top-level competencies that become accessible.

Single-move thinking isn’t enough in business - sometimes you need to plan combinations like in chess. Consider not only material gains (current income) but also the position in the play (acquisition of basic competencies) and the tempo (business agility).

This game isn’t for short-thinking minds indeed. There is also a risk that your successor will harvest after your combination.

Explaining such a combination to shareholders is another tough task. Yet I hope that proposed competense stack is simple yet helpfull for this task.

But probably the toughest question is - what to do if the company has came to the edge already? Well, “Only the paranoid survive.” For others it’s always too early to think forward until suddenly it becomes too late.

If you suddenly found yourself in a swamp fighting with crocodiles you have to think both about the nearest crocodile and draining the swamp.

The following posts consider various aspects of the management competence stack:

• Separate Business Methodology from Process Discipline
• Action vs. Feedback
• Choosing Betwen Competencies of Same Level
• Inhouse vs. Borrowed Competence
• Business-IT Consulting Gap

First picking the moment to ask an account from Google, then waiting it for two months and looking for a time slot to dig into Google Wave and experiment with it… OK, finally I’m ready to share my first impressions.

Let me start with the conclusion: a useful thing, too bad I didn’t join earlier.

Now to the details. The primary references:

• About Google Wave
• When to use Google Wave

A quote from the above: “Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration.” Got it? Damned if I did. So let me compare it with familiar things. Google Wave consists of… hm… waves.  In order to avoid confusion I’ll call them “gwaves” and the service itself “GW”.

So what is a gwave? Please imagine a MS Word text. Now imagine that:

• It’s stored on a Google server and you access it via GW webpage from your browser.
• Formatting features are very basic: fonts, colors, margins, headers, lists, images. You may have attachments though like you do with email.
• All changes are recoded (who, what, when).
• It is filled with comments, questions, answers, discussions. Not aside of the text like in Word but framed text blocks right in it. Formatting capabilities are the same as for the main text.
• The text and comments can be deleted by any participant so you can get the accurate text output at the end if you wish. But all the moves are recorded and there is a replay button showing how the document progressed.
• Participants are the gwave creator and other GW users he invited into the gwave.
• The real-time means this: when one participant is doing something with the gwave you can see how letters are typed and words are added to the document, provided that your GW page is open.
• Collaboration means that I can enter text into one section while others fill theirs and in so doing we throw each other comments, remarks and questions. No locking and hopefully no conflicts, thanks to real-time communication (didn’t try to provoke conflicts though).

Is such a combination better enough than MS Word + email to justify studying another tool? I believe yes. GW avoids the questions like “where is the latest version of the document?” or “does it contain my last edits?”. As Keith Swenson rightly points out (here and here) we are exposed to “email addiction” so this is the right cure.

The first gwaves I experimented with:

1. At work we discussed whether to accept an invitation to a conference. We decided to go and hence the discussion went further: the event schedule, assignments, brainstorming, etc. connecting more and more people. Without GW everything would have been in the email - much less convenient and efficient.
2. At home we discussed the movie player upgrade with the son. It lasted a few days: defining the criteria, comparing models and looking for a good price. Again, more handy than email indeed.

What else a gwave can be compared with:

• A forum thread. A gwave with large number of comments resembles it. Comments hierarchy (comments to the comments) is supported. The difference is thatyou can edit the main text and comments any time.
• A photo site with comments. You can publish a photo as a gwave and discuss it with friends.
• A Document Management System in general and wiki in particular. The same teamwork but the difference is the real-time in GW. The discussion is not on a separate page like in wiki but embedded into the text. I like both features. Trivial access policy: members can do everything, the rest nothing. No contents pages or rigid classification, only tags. Conclusion: wiki is for memories and GW is for ad-hoc temporary things.
• A bugtracking system - it’s arranged by cases, too with attached files and ongoing discussions. By contrast, GW has no structure which is hardly acceptable in bugtracking.

GW pros:

• Very easy to learn, the user interface is problem-free. Only one essential hint: double-click into the text body to edit it or add a comment.
• Extensibility. Plugins (gadgets) are actively developed by third parties; didn’t get into it yet. By default there are Google maps and voting (yes/no/maybe). So if you are thinking about skiing with a company of friends then you’ll be able to mark the place and discuss who goes, who doesn’t  not, when exactly etc.

Cons and questions. (Some of them may be my problems rather than GW’s because I didn’t explore it fully yet.)

• No notification of changes in your gwaves. If the GW page is opened in a browser, the tab title indicates changes: “Google Wave (3)” means there are thress changes in the waves you follow. People comment on this intensively on GW’s ideas webpage. Some say that Google tries to kill email this way. Dont think so, they must be realists and consider it as a supplement, not replacement. So I hope to see email and RSS notifications in the final version. In fact I’d prefer the latter because I keep the Google Reader page open anyway.
• Permanent address (URL) of the gwave is another must-have. Right now I can’t see how to integrate a gwave into the web e.g. to embed the link into email message or blog post.  By linking to a gwave we’ll be able to add ad-hoc functionality wherever we may need it. SAP has made it with the Gravity plugin (BPMN designer for GW). Yet I believe it’s more natural to go opposite way - it’s much easier to reference a gwave say by the “Link” field of MS Project task rather than implement Project as a plugin. <updated>gwave’s URL is displayed in the browser address field when a gwave is selected. That easy!</updated>
• Numbered lists are not supported. It’s weird because there is a bulleted list in the formatting toolbar.
• The biggest problem: all gwave  participants must be registered GW users. This is quite a barrier. By contrast, you don’t need an account to start using Google maps or search. The Google mail, too doesn’t require the adressee to have gmail account. Google’s picasaweb photobank lets you send a “secret” reference to your private album to grant access to it - it’d be great if something like this was implemented in GW finally to let a casual participant without permanent account see the gwave. I am sure Google will do something to facilitate GW adoption.

Now how to get a GW account? To start with, you should have a google mailbox (@gmail.com). The easiest way is to ask someone already having GW account - each of us have 25 invitations. Alternatively you can apply directly to Google but be prepared to wait. It may happen Google will make the service generally available before you got your invitation. By contrast, an invitation from existing GW account comes almost immediately.

<updated>Usefull links:

• Google Wave 101
• The Complete Guide to Google Wave
• Ultimate List of Google Wave Gadgets and Tools
• How to Install a Google Wave Gadget Extension

Happy waving!</updated>