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Are Your Deviants Standard?
We all work with some people who, well, just aren't normal. They say about half the people are below average, and "strange" is in the eye of the beholder. When we first started using the MAT to measure process quality, I was excited to find out that there was a new measure we could use on our results -- finding deviants at your job site.
No, not the deviants that you see on TV. Or even the ones you meet at the water cooler. What we're looking for here is people who have radically different opinions on things: it's interesting to see where people agree on process quality, but its even more interesting to find out where people disagree the most. Or in scientific terms, not only can we use the average of opinions to determine our process quality, we can also use the standard deviation.
When we applied the very first pilot of the MAT, out in San Francisco a couple years ago, I was on a mentoring team charged with training a large organization. We assessed using the mentors as one group and the project managers as another. When we sat down and talked results, it was good to see that we could "nail down" exactly what needed fixing. But when we broke out the variance information, that's when things got really interesting. The three areas we disagreed about led to all kinds of information, for both sides. Turns out there was a project management initiative, the mentors had never heard about it. It also turns out that the tools they purchased weren't being used at all, which was news to the managers.
This is all information that we could have just shared with one another, but without a structured framework, a facilitation tool, who knows how long it would have taken. We were there three months and didn't communicate that information. The MAT got it out in less than 30 minutes. Don't know about you, but that sounds like a good use of time and money to me.
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Mmm, don't take this wrong, but this sounds a lot like a standard-issue description of yet another management initiative that the (A/B/C/D/...)-I-O decided was a "hot potato issue". (Based on his 7th tee discovery that the rest of the foursome's companies had already implemented a Thing Management System).
If I recall correctly, standard procedure calls for assigning 3 guys in "special projects" to evaluate the options, then spending $5M on 20 seats of Microsoft Breath and Heartbeat 2008. These are then delivered under the watchful eye of Systems Administration to a cage in the computer room. There they will be carefully guarded, their shrink wrap undisturbed for all time.
No-one is ever told of the acqusition, of course, because then they might want to use it. Imagine, end-users getting their grubby lttle hands all over our Breath and Heartbeat!
Did I miss something here?