I appreciated the opportunity to speak with all of you yesterday. I received a fair amount of feedback from many of you and I will continue to do these calls on a more regular basis. Let me reiterate that as we work our way through the transformational process, I want your feedback, either directly or through the weekly Voice of the Culture survey.
As I mentioned in our discussion, we need to center our client relationships on business outcomes as the guiding principles of our value proposition. Understanding and contributing to meeting those objectives is the primary job responsibility of everyone at Tahzoo.
In my prior Desk of Brad, I asked each of you to go and read through our current thought leadership papers and review our Tahzoo Design Showcase – if you have not done so please take the time to complete this. It’s important that everyone understands our point of view and our solutions so that you can share with your clients, help us innovate and bring the best solutions to market.
I think Chris Hibbard said it best, we define business requirements, which become functional requirements, which become technology solutions, and then optimize the solution for continuous improvement. When you examine most of our solutions they are patterns of customer engagement that should be measurable, optimized with data, and improved over time. Grounding ourselves in these patterns will improve the quality of our solutions and the value to our clients. As I mentioned on the call, the methodologies that we apply to our client’s solutions should also be applied to Tahzoo. If we can utilize this thinking and create a continuous improvement mindset, we will steadily improve the company.
The last point to touch on is ambiguity. I read an article today from Brown University on how the tolerance of ambiguity improves collaboration. It’s an interesting read, and poignant, given the amount of cross-functional projects within the company. Take some time to reflect on how you might approach collaboration differently.
I mentioned some organizational realignment as we embark on this new phase. While I’ll be publishing an updated organization chart next week, this is not the North Star for solving problems at Tahzoo. The organizational chart is designed to provide clarity around areas of responsibility but not to be the end all be all of the decision-making within Tahzoo. We will always be a matrixed organization; there are times when your obligations are to the account team that you work on, or to a project that supports the company or helping your colleagues when they need additional support. An organizational chart will not provide all the guidance required to navigate these obligations. Look to the Tahzoo values, use good judgment, focus on collaboration, and remember that taking the initiative to solve problems is never a bad thing.
I will be working with all of the functional areas over the next week to define the goals for the next two quarters, and once those are solidified I will publish that in the Desk of Brad. Thanks for the hard work – I am excited about what we are going to be accomplishing over the next couple of quarters.
Thanks,
Brad
