This Means You

By Jared Harward
So, what’s in it for me? How does this affect me? Why should I care? I’m just the little guy. These are some of the questions that I would like to address. Within the Office of IT, we are a team and this affects all of us. Exciting changes are taking place that will help all of us come into unity.
Believe it or not, those to whom we provide services can tell when we are unified and when we are not. When we are all using the same processes, things work naturally and seamlessly. In my opinion, that is exactly what we want and what our customers want as well. By having a process that we all follow, we eliminate questions like: “How is this supposed to happen?”, “Who is responsible for the final decision?”, or “Why isn’t there any communication of what is happening?”.
Often we talk to someone in a different group, and they don’t understand what we are talking about, and we don’t understand what they are talking about. Come to find out, we were talking about the exact same thing, but using different terminology. This could be resolved by having a set process, following the same pattern, and using the same terminology,
thus eliminating confusion and conflict. That would be awesome!
When we become a process-oriented organization, we see that our meetings move along faster, they are more organized, and decisions are made quicker because we don’t need to worry about the processes since decisions have already been made. Efficiency!!! How cool is that? By having processes in place, we start feeling and acting as if we were a team. That is exactly what we are! We have a natural tendency to look out for each other and not try to pin the blame on anyone when problems occur. We start looking for what happened in the process instead of looking for a scapegoat. When we have well-defined processes and a problem does arise, we can track it and find the root cause faster and easier, making us more proficient in what we do.
Becoming of one mind, one heart, and one understanding helps us come together. Remember that unification is the key to helping us succeed. When all is said and done, we are coming together and fulfilling a need as a team. We need each other to do this well. Everyone is important! Our processes will show that through teamwork we can accomplish anything.