Seeing the Vision

Visions are the driving forces behind just about everything we do.  They are the future you see when you close your eyes, they give us direction and they give us purpose. 

And … you know that your vision has been realised when you open your eyes and it’s still there.

Having the vision in the first place is one thing, having the skills and resources to lift that vision into the light and then to carry it towards reality is something else. If you are going to see your vision realised, it’s very likely that you are going to need some help.

The Realities of Realising the Vision

There are three categories of business:

• big – can allocate resources and teams to tasks
• notsobig – resources concentrated on delivering existing services
• new – looking out over a green field

Big organisations are generally well served by employees and are therefore able to build and deploy teams from within, as necessary.  These organisations can then focus efforts on developing new products and services at the same time as supporting the primary operation.

Where additional resource is required, either to supplement existing skills or to increase the team capacity, headcount can be increased without it being a big deal.

Notsobig organisations focus primarily on delivering their products and services to their customers.  The delivery of the primary service can include business support and troubleshooting functions to ensure the smooth running of the business operation, but business support and troubleshooting functions are not development.

Where development is required, either to enhance existing services or to deliver new services, increasing headcount can become more of a headache.  Depending on the nature of the business, increasing the headcount may mean anything from taking on a couple of specialist developers to having to build a complete and diverse team, for the duration of the project.

New organisations are those starting from nothing although the reality might be that the “new” organisation is actually a spin-off from a bigger organisation, in the process of developing a new business stream.  For this reason, new organisations may or may not have access to the skills and resources necessary to realise the driving vision for which they were created.

The predicaments facing “new” organisations could be categorised as “big” organisation challenges or “notsobig” organisation challenges, and it may also be the case that no such distinctions are necessary. 

Definitions aside, the challenges facing each category of organisation are pretty much the same.

A Common Challenge

Time is of the essence … actually time is the essence, and the delivery imperative that we feel exists mainly because of the timing of release schedules and launch dates.  

Whilst there is nothing wrong with having targets and goals, especially if they are driven by a vision that you can see, it does mean that there is likely to be a mismatch between the needs of your delivery and the availability and skills of your resources.

The mismatch between what you need and what you have available will be different, and the nature of the differences will depend on the type of business and the size of your organisation.

Without the right resources to match your requirements at the time you need them, you are going to be missing some vital spokes on your Skill Wheel, which is going to prevent it from turning properly.  It may be that some of the skills you need, you may not need for long, or it may be a resource capacity issue.  Either way, without the right people in the right place at the right time, climbing the stairs may be problematic.   

The scale might be different, but big businesses and notsobig businesses have one thing in common: they don’t always have all the people and all the skills they need, all the time.

A Common Solution

One way of aligning your resourcing requirements to your resourcing needs is to plan your delivery dates around your resources.  If it works for you, it works. 

But, I’m not sure it’s much of a plan … if time is the essence.

If you want to do it now rather than later, you are going to have to fill the gaps in your skills and resources. 

The resourcing needs of every business is going to vary over time … but the success of any business will be determined, at least to some degree, by the ability of the business to match resources, especially the human ones, to the resourcing needs identified.

Engage a team of delivery professionals … or strengthen your own with the specialists you need.