Collaborative working...

Well the week in Malmo draws to a close.  Not the easiest day, I am still at the 'Forming'or 'Storming' phase of working with the Miss Mooses out here.  Actually most of the Miss Mooses are just fine and dandy.  It's the Mr. Mooses to whom a mere Miss Mouse is, apparently, invisible.  Anyway, it got me to thinking about business relationships and collaborative working.

To cut a long story short I'm here because of outsourcing.  I'm sure you all know what outsourcing is, but if you don't, it's the selling off of the responsibility for a providing a service and buying that service back from a Service Provider.  Let's take cheese as an example.  To make cheese you need milk, and a churning device.  And you need a culture to start off the cheese process.  Let's assume that the farmer who used to do this in his barn no longer wants the responsibility of keeping cows and making cheese, but he wants it made, to his specification, to sell in his farm shop.  To give a parallel to my current role, let's assume the milk production and churning bit is outsourced to one Service Provider, and the provision of the culture, and the packaging of the finished product to another.  In order to make the cheese, the farmer has to specify what kind of cheese he wants, how much, what colour etc.  If it is a significant cheese order we call it a Project.  If it is a Cheese Project I am the link between the farmer and the two Service Providers.  Still with me?  However, if just a small amount of cheese is required the farmer can order it himself.  Yes. Keep up.  However, the Service Provider who produces milk, actually bought the farmer's old cows, so the farmer thinks he can just ask for milk and get it tomorrow, like he used to be able to do when the cows were in the barn at the bottom of the field. (Actually they are still there, but owned by someone else now).  And the culture and packaging people used to be his milking maids.  But they, too, now work for someone else.  And the milking maids can no longer milk the cows because they work for different companies. So - old process:-

Farmer tells milking maids he wants to make cheese. Maids milk cows and put milk into churns with culture.  Cheese.

New process:- 

Farmer wants cheese.  Raises requirements document for 'cheese'.  Comes to me.  I ask if 'cheese' project is in his project plan.  It is.  I send back requirements saying 'cheese' is not good enough - revise.  Farmer returns requirements document asking for 15kg of Red Leicester cheese, churned for exactly 36 hours and matured for a week in an oak casket, to be delivered by next Wednesday.  I tell farmer he can no longer specify HOW cheese is made as that process belongs to the Service Providers. Nor can he specify delivery dates.  He must plan better and order cheese well before he needs it. He will also not get any cheese unless he raises a cheese order.  Farmer grumbles.  I raise the Cheese Project Request.  It goes to committee to decide if it's one or two Service Providers (if the cheese is not required to be wrapped, the culture can be ordered as a standard product and it becomes single supplier).  It is multi supplier.  Each Supplier examines the requirements and individually send back proposals for cheese components.  I put them together and have it reviewed by the cheese standards board.  When they approve the cheese design I send it to the farmer for approval.  If a new type of cheese is required then this is a new cheese product, so this stage can take some time whilst the cheese commercials (price per kilo etc) are agreed.  Farmer agrees cheese proposal and authorises order.  Passes order details back to me.  I pass order details to Mouse Head Office and Miss Kitty, in Germany, raises the cheese order into the system.  Cheese is ordered and will delivered within the agreed timescales if the cows are in the mood to produce the milk and nothing goes wrong with the culture.  Cheese is delivered to farmer. I issue cheese acceptance forms to farmer.  Farmer signs them. Suppliers invoice farmer.

In the meantime the farm shop has gone bust.

Now - try doing all this again, but this time, in Swedish, with fish instead of cheese.  You can see why the Miss Mooses, who used to have as efficient a process as the farmer with his cheese, get cheesed off with me and think it's my fault.

Well slowly, slowly, I am sure we will make this work, but only by working together, so bear with me Miss Mooses.  I would come to your main Moose meeting and explain it all to you, but the top man Mister Moose won't let me as I'm only a Mouse, qualified only in cheese, not fish.  But we will get there.  But collaborative working is the only way to do it, and the Miss Mooses and I went to lunch together today to start on that very collaboration.

Collaboratively yours, as always,

Mouse. x