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People are pivotal
At VISION we believe that competitive advantages come from the fusion of people, processes and technology. Our work is rooted in an approach which begins and ends with the customer and which revolves around commitments people make to each other.
This methodology has won praise from a number of leading management authorities, including Peter Keen, the eminent IT academic, author and consultant. He described it as " a powerful tool for making customer satisfaction an integral part of the planning and design specifications for business design through IT".*
Pioneered by Fernando Flores and his colleagues at Business Design Associates (BDA), this approach has been practiced by VISION for 10 years and has produced enormous results for clients.
In 2000, VISION acquired an exclusive license for the intellectual property, assets, knowledge and tools of BDA, and then incorporated many of BDA's most able people under the VISION banner.
VISION's Commitment-Based Approach gives us a framework for rigorous work with the human side of enterprise. We reconstruct what makes enterprises tick as a network of commitments. With this framework, VISION has built a unique discipline for process and software design.
We start by identifying internal and external customers, and examining how well those customers are served. We involve those customers in the process of diagnosing opportunities and redesigning practices and tools from early in every project. The intimate involvement of the customer leads to results that come rapidly, in line with customer needs.
Effective coordination is essential for the success of any company. By building from observations about how people coordinate their actions in the operation of a business, our approach leads directly and rapidly to effective coordination among people, teams and entire departments, producing more value for customers and shareholders.
Poor coordination jeopardises important business commitments. It causes friction, produces delays, mistrust and waste that is not revealed by traditional process analyses. Examples:
- unreliable, expensive, unsatisfying services
- frustrated customers, employees, managers, suppliers and others
- projects that take a lot longer to complete than they need to
- bureaucratic administrative processes
- tremendous effort is required to get things done
- lots of resources poured into checking up, following up and handling the consequences of unfulfilled commitments.
Miscoordination erodes the kind of trust that is fundamental to building relationships with others. VISION works with clients to intervene in cycles of miscoordination and mistrust, and begin to reverse them.
VISION brings a distinctive perspective on the critical role of language in organisational life. People often dismiss the importance of language with clichés such as 'talk is cheap' and 'it's easier said than done.' This common perception of language hides an important fact - language is our primary means for starting and coordinating all our activities.
Our approach helps us to observe the way that everything that happens in an organisation affects the results customers see. This, in turn has an impact on the satisfaction of those organisations, even when we are looking at back-office or administrative work areas.
Peter Keen, in describing the impact of our approach, concluded: "Dialogue is the key to creating momentum for taking charge of change, but to turn dialogue into action we need simple ways of understanding business processes that are not simplistic."
Our approach, he said, "will be a foundation for the new discipline of the design of business and management that will emerge from the ongoing efforts of the best firms and their advisers to get ahead of the chance curve."
* Shaping the Future, Harvard Business School Press, 1991
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