Musk Deer & Best Practices

Musk deer and its search for the musk smell - is often quoted as an analogy for-

"Searching outside for what is within".

A lot has been written about this on the spiritual aspects, however this is applicable tactically too in managing operations.

Organizations have several best practices that are practiced within smaller groups that can be harnessed for scale.

Some of the benefits of identifying and deploying such practices are:

• The ease of change management – “it’s been done here.”

• The people with practical deployment experience are at hand and

• The proof of success is at hand.

The Musk analogy works not only for the organization – as it didn’t know of the best practice existing within and searched for benchmarks outside but also for the teams as they also don’t know that their “regular” practices are best practices and can help others.

Here’s how we went about and what we learned - when we took this premise and deployed this on the ground.

Entity where deployed: 2000 FTEs – 10 teams, working for several fortune 50 clients, providing similar services.

Process:

1. Collation: Practices were collated from teams based on certain categories. E.g., pitching strategies, email strategies

2. Synthesis: Received practices were reviewed by process excellence team and final practices were created – with two primary categories

   1. Expected Practices: Each team must abide by them.

   2. Best Practices: Teams to review and deploy.

3. Review: Document shared with teams to review

4. Deployment of selected practices

Highlights:

• A total of 172 practices within various categories were found – we were surprised that we could mark 60% of these as expected practices and some teams were not already practicing them

• Average of 20% practices were found be practiced by one regional team but not by the other for the same program.

• Approximately 20 best practices per team were identified by the teams to deploy.

• The effort benefit ratio for each team was determined to be very high on benefits vs low effort.

• Post deployment – Improvements were seen metric achievement for team that could be directly contributed to the practices.

EasyProblemSolving provides managed services in the areas of transformation, process excellence, process documentation, project management and HR expertise areas. Know more about our managed services offerings, here.