Fun Friday

I’m used to (getting used to?) the full-time work-at-home schedule. I have lots of engagement outside of work and outside of the house. This morning was a joyful 1st Friday breakfast with my Academy brothers and sisters. Each month we gather for a 0700 breakfast at a local Irish pub/restaurant. We have been there for years, with a short gap for the COVID times, and have a large meeting room set aside for us with tables joined together for a large group. We have our own coffe and orange juice beverage station. Nice.

This month we had three new faces join us. Last week we had an evening dinner presentation on the COVID pandemic years from a USMA 1981 grad, Bill Browne. Bill spent 30 years as an Army doctor in the ICU, and is now a professor teaching at the University of Minnesota and practicing full-time. I must remember to write more on this in a separate blog post…. Bill joined us, as well as Bill’s across-the-street neighbor Jim Patterson, a 1971(?) Navy grad, and a 2011 USMA graduate, Joe Dokken, who joined his West Point roommate Reese Conrow. Both Joe and Reese are newly back in the Twin Cities, and present a promise of a younger set of grads who are ready to pick up some of the leadership of our group over time, eventually taking the mantle from Todd Loudenslager (class of 1980) and myself (USMA 1988).

The breakfast was normal, buffet style so we serve ourselves in both food choice and in quantity, and worked our way around the room with individual introductions. Always a pleasure, this breakfast seemed more upbeat than normal, optimistic and joyful. We had THREE Air Force graduates which is rare, and also speaks to the value people perceive from something as simple as a coordinated breakfast get-together. A nice beginning to a Friday.

Back home to the office, and a couple quick connections with my colleagues via Zoom–gentlemen in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Colorado, and me in Minnesota. Just chit-chat, connection on technology topics and personal happenings. We spent a good bit of time on Artificial Intelligence and its utility in our work, mostly ChatGPT. One of our colleagues, John Jackson, has been using ChatGPT to rewrite and recraft wording for our Client reports, and has found the practice useful as a significant time-saver. ChatGPT *does not* compose thoughts or words, but just rewords a longer narrative comment into 2-3 summarized bullets with the purpose of including those within a topical slide in our presentation deck. It is a promising look into using technology to do some of the heavy lifting of our work, the effort that does little to really add value to what we do. It allows John (and others) to focus on the things that really matter. Technology doing what it should do; eliminate the clutter of our daily tasks and allow us to do those things that add value to our lives, to the lives of those around us.

I have said for years that that is what an ERP system does–eliminate the repetitive and relaitvely low-level tasks from humans, things like data entry. Reduce the everyday work to those keystrokes or activities that are absolutely necessary to keep “the machine” moving, and allow technology to manage the running of the machine. It allows the human to engage in higher level thinking, thinking not about entering the data but instead thinking about the management of the process itself. It elevates the human being, enabling one person to accomplish much more in the same amount of time, or with a lot less effort. It is a grand pursuit, elevating human beings by removing mindless work from them. Good stuff.

Later that day I walked the AKF crew through a deeper look at the Demand Management toolset, focusing on the 2 parts of the process that require more dedication of brainpower and effort: Qualify Business Value and Gain Consensus on Priorities. We walked through the specifics on the three elements of business input: 1) User-Business value, 2) Time Criticality, and 3) Risks/Opportunities. We discussed in particular the level of detail to consider on each one, and how each aspect allowed for priorities to be gauged from a variety of different perspectives. For example, different departments may have valid business priorities, but if you examine Sales projects that have a direct impact on revenue, they may appear more importan than Finance or Purchasing projects that do not contribute to revenue (at least directly). The Time Criticality section allows an opportunity to express the importance of those projects, giving an even paying field to all initiatives.

Lots of good discussion with the crew today, and perhaps best, we had an opportunity to speak about how this model may be useful for some of our clients who struggle with making rational data-based decisions on priorities. We also found a clear delineation from this model, useful for companies still operating in a mostly top-down hierarchy for decisions, and companies operating as Product-led teams. Product-led teams work autonomously, making decisions within the realm of thei Product that are driven by market needs, not by a consensus of multiple people. It is the step of maturation past Demand Management.

The rest of the day was spent updating back-end configuration of some of the AKF tools, and reworking some of the Demand Management tools I shared, paticularly the methods and tools to manage the prioritization of Projects/Features based on the mathematics of the scoring applied by business and engineering professionals.

All in all, a very good day.