What the Teamwork and Coordination Vehicle Does

Why Teamwork Is So Important

Making your business ready for the new era of commerce is what opentaps is about. The User Manual has devoted several chapters and sections to the set-up of your business on the opentaps model so that operating processes are automated for your best practices, for consistent process execution, and for guiding the company team to perform according to your "rules". That is, opentaps provides an excellent way to solve half of your business operations challenge when it provides all of the integrated processing services.

Then opentaps goes the rest of the way, by providing a set of teamwork services that complement the operating process services. How important is this, and why do we say it is the other half of the complete solution for business operations. The simple answer is that teamwork is absolutely essential if you want any of the following things:

• You want to grow your business with grace and with reasonable effort
• You want to provide consistent high quality customer service and support
• You want to produce consistent business performance results over an extended period of time
• You want to be really competitive in the 24/7, global domains of your business opportunity

There is really only one way that is currently available to do these things, and that is to implement a teamwork environment and make it hum like a smooth running engine. But, that is easier said than done. Business environments are fraught with surprises, interruptions, exceptions abound, and the "noise" level of information and mis-information is often very high.

To make this situation manageable and to facilitate the necessary teamwork to deal with the environment (without constantly interrupting the business owner or management) requires a system, or framework for supporting the teamwork. (It also requires that owners and managers enable teamwork through the way they organize, train, and empower their staff members and teams to perform within their system. This subject is beyond the scope of our User Guide, but we have provided some useful references on relevant topics.) In the sections that follow, we will describe how opentaps provides the necessary system for teamwork, and how opentaps Users can employ that system.

An Internal Teamwork Viewpoint

Figure 7 illustrates one of the important viewpoints about Teamwork, which is the way in which opentaps' business processing services and unified real-time data resources work to create the framework for what we like to call "real-time contextual collaboration".

When teams are function at peak performance, they must have access to consistent, real-time information about any issues or events that might come up, and about what other Company teams are doing. This is especially true when issues and events fall outside of the normal operational processing services which were introduced in Figure 2, thumb. These kinds of challenges are often the "exceptions" to our processes, which can only be handled by the team or teams working very smoothly together.

As illustrated in the figure, opentaps assembles a complete picture of what is going on, and delivers the critical items to our teams in real-time via secure internet connections to any location where a team member is working:

• Context of the Customer and transactions
• Actions that any team member may be taking (or has taken)
• Communications of any kind undertaken by team members or Customers

The information needed is recorded by any of the company's operational processing services or teamwork processes (see the next section) into the unified database, and can be recovered in real-time to support team member activity, when the team member has been given access privileges consistent with their job and teamwork roles.

Examples of companies failing to respond well to Customer's calls or requests are, unfortunately, very common. Most companies that grow beyond a very small size have terrible problems in this area of handling exceptions, often making the Customer experience almost intolerably bad. We have all had experiences with really terrible responses to our calsl for support, and have seen the evidence of a company's teams that cannot get accurate or current information they require, and that do not know what the other teams are doing to try and help us. So, they end up failing to help us very much, or very quickly.

There are some very basic reasons why so many companies are unable to avoid or resolve such failures in Customer service and support. The reasons usually include these:

• They don't have a comprehensive business operations management vehicle like opentaps but instead they rely on a patch work of "tools" and individual productivity software instead.
• They have no unified database repository for business information from which team members can obtain critical status information in real-time.
• They are not organized to handle exceptions and team members are trained to handle question only within a very narrow scope of one operating process.
• They do nothing to mitigate the "points of communications" problem.

The Points of Communications Challenge

As we mentioned in the introduction to this User Manual, one of the most challenging problems that must be solved by any growing business is a problem we call the "points of communication" challenge. This problem is about communicating, time, and distractions which play havoc with what we think of as our "real job". The story goes like this.

"There are only so many hours in a day. My real job takes most of my time, if I actually do my real job. But, I have many interruptions every day, mostly about exceptions or surprises that must be resolved. Anyway, these things are distractions that force me to communicate with so many people, and dig around for information, that my time disappears and my job doesn't get done very well. Too often the disruptions don't get resolved very well either."

As the company grows the points of communication (people and places that must be contacted) increase MUCH FASTER than the size of the company. Look at this simple example of the number of people in a company versus the number of points of communications that may need to be informed about any issues:

  Number of people     Points of Contact
          2                    1
          3                    3
          5                    10
          7                    21
          10                   45

Little wonder that as the organization grows the amount of time spent communicating with all the right people can get out of hand very quickly. This is why the system support for Teamwork Processes (and the team training and empowerment) are so important.