7
6. Improving Skills - for life as well as employment
The skills you learn from problem management – structured problem solving, collaboration, working well in ad-hoc teams, facilitation and meeting management, reporting clearly to senior management about progress and outcomes, just to name a few – serve you well in your career and in your everyday life.
For example, in the last couple of years my wife and I decided to sell the house we lived in and make a move to another part of Melbourne, something we had talked about on and off for a few years. To make the decision, I used the techniques I had learned from structured problem solving to organise the information, zero in on the issues and work out exactly what criteria we needed to fulfil when deciding. It really helped!
You only have to look through the jobs being advertised to realise that problem solving is a widely sought after and highly prized skill. The World Economic Forum 2020 list of the ‘Top 10 Skills needed to survive in the fourth industrial revolution’ (a revolution that is now in progress, by the way) puts Complex Problem Solving as number 1. It was also number 1 on the 2015 list.
Problem management experience is easily transferable to other areas and into management, especially outside of technical areas. It is an example of how service management can evolve into enterprise service management.
Bottom line: The impact on skills, attitudes and culture is greater than it appears at first. Effective problem management makes positive changes to the way organisations operate.
Conclusion
Taken altogether, these bottom-line values make a compelling argument for running effective, structured problem management. So much so that I always promote it as a self-funding function, because the savings made from reduced fire-fighting and better delivery are greater than the costs of implementing structured problem management.
I hope you find something here that you can use to win better support for effective problem management in your organisation. Maybe just pick one of these as a starting point to build your argument, then add more features as support starts to grow. Sometimes you need to convert one person at a time, or perhaps one key stakeholder is who needs to be convinced. Think about what will make the most impact on the person you need to win over and start with that.
About the author:
Michael Hall has ten years’ experience in problem management in organisations large and small, global and local, backed by extensive research and study of problem management practices, problem solving techniques and the major service management toolsets. He uses a proven approach to deliver measurable results for customers through establishing and enhancing a structured methodology, focusing on the right problems and finding real root causes and complete solutions.
In 2012, he earned an MBA (Technology) from the Australian Graduate School of Management.
His book, Problem
Management, An
implementation guide for
the real world, was
published in November
2014 by BCS and is
available through Amazon
and the publisher