kumonami principles for engagement

people

Any company is fundamentally a collection of people working together to provide goods or services. People operate the functions of a company. Any change starts and ends with people. People choose the policies, processes, and partners the company uses in pursuit of objectives. Data, systems, and technology facilitate the choices people make to run each function within a company. Functions may evolve without much engagement from people but revolutions require people. These principles promote the primacy of people to transform an organization, its offerings, and operations.

policy

The discretionary business rules established by an organization are excellent indicators of company values. While people determine how the group will handle business to create consistency, reliability and trust are required to efficiently grow (aka “scale”) company operations. Business policies have a profound impact on the productivity of business functions targeting scaled growth and deserve refinement as frequently as budgets, performance, or product strategy.

product

Defining a product and its commercial options is critical for creating a plan to organize people, policies, processes, and platforms. As product feature combinations, materials, or engineering inputs evolve, the fundamental “what” that a prospect or customer buys intersects with “who” is selling it and “why” the transaction details are important are vital inputs for effective solution designs related to business processes and application platforms. Having a clear document of who is selling what and why its done the way it is will accelerate the resolution of many challenges.

process

Actors, actions, sequence, precedence, and policy interplay as company processes like procure-to-pay, record-to-report, lead-to-cash, and hire-to-retire are deconstructed into their component tasks. The escalating orchestration of these tasks to be completed by people or platforms is the essential substance of business process architecture. Process redesign may challenge settled policies as changes interact with people and platform inertia in the organization.

platform

Assigning the platforms and methods for each activity as part of the solution design thinking collaboration is done with care. Choosing which platform partners will steward these cornerstones of the business operations is critically important to the integrity and sustainability of the resulting solution ecosystem. Taken in balance with the financial, organizational, security, and scheduling factors, platform selection should be made in concert with the other principles to catalyze an expected result.