John Stokdyk has fascinating insights on the difficulties faced by practices seeking to go paper-less. He quotes Charles Verrier who I knew in the pre-MYOB days:
The paperless office is a whole new concept for many practices. Electronic document management makes demands on users they’re not used to dealing with…Many partners and departments do things in different ways, so they’re effectively a bunch of sole traders who share an office and letterheads. The rules in the document management system will force staff to work in a consistent way – and protect them from taking shortcuts that can lead to mistakes.
This is worrying. Without a cohesive practice, making change stick is almost impossible. And as for innovation – forget it. Yet the scenario Charles paints is all too familiar. Even the largest practices are characterised by regional operations that differ wildly. I’ve recently spoken with several well known firms where offices in different parts of the country where there is so little commonality in procedures, they might as well be on different planets.
John goes on to cite use cases where practices have spent many months planning change. But nowhere was John able to report what was in it for users. Sure, there’s plenty of talk about buy-in and training. No problem. But unless you make a case for user benefit, no amount of training will work.
The piece also talks about partner buy-in. As someone who’s managed technology change I know from personal experience just how tough that can be. In our practice, the introduction of new technology exposed divisions that existed between different parts of the practice and which needed resolution before we could contemplate change. In hindsight, I should have brought in an external mentor who could objectively assess where we, as partners, needed to take action. But at the time, and I suspect is the case in many practices today, pride gets in the way, making it difficult to contemplate the need for external help. Treat it as an opportunity and you get a much better result.
Today, I believe bottom up buy in is critical. It is the junior and mid-level staff who do the heavy lifting and it is they who feel the greatest impact. I believe that can be overcome by fostering internal communications around simple blog/wiki. Experimenting with this medium over a 3-6 month period can help staff get used to new ways of interacting with each other so that the traditional barriers between tax, audit, advisory and so on are broken down. In this sense, I see practices as no different to enterprises. The functions may be different, but the power domains look the same. Breaking those down for the greater good has to be the goal. Because it is those practices which understand the value of operating end-to-end, client focused processes that prosper.
If professionals are to bring the kind of change that benefits clients and reduces functional friction, then improved communications is vital. This is no touchy feely thing. This is tough. It might require completely reorganising the business so that specific partner skill sets are recognised in a different manner. Maybe ditching the traditional titles ‘tax partner,’ ‘audit partner’ and so on. But if you want to kill innovation, just do as most do and slap a technology fix onto a broken business. Works every time.
Technorati Tags: client relationships, education, employee relationships, innovation
