We look at software as both an art and a science. In order to build good software, you have to have true designers involved along the way. If you don’t you could end up with a tool that doesn’t meet your needs – and you might not even know that it could be better. We’ve seen a lot of bad code over the years.

Here are the top 5 signs you’ve got bad software – explained.

• Unreliable Software

If your software breaks, and then suddenly isn’t broken, and then is broken again, but not in the same way - or even in the same way, but not in the same place – we’ve seen it before, and it’s bad software.

• Big effort for small output

If you need to do just as much work to accommodate your software as you would to do the job manually – it can be done better, and it’s bad software.

• Slow Software

If your software worked just fine before, but now at 300 users it grinds to a halt every Thursday at 2pm – it could have been planned better, and it’s bad software.

• Inconsistent Software

If you don’t know what your software is going to do because sometimes it does one thing and sometimes it does another – it wasn’t thought through, and it’s bad software.

• Irrelevant Information

If you login and have to click 18 times before you get to the information you need daily – you’re time is being wasted, and it’s bad software.

The goal of good software is to make a process out of repetitive tasks, reduce manual labor, increase productivity, take away human error and support decision-making.  All things that are not going well if you have any of the above symptoms!

The impact of bad software is that users get fed up with using a tool that was either not built with them in mind, not built well or is simply not worth their effort.  And then they stop using it. That is not only a waste of your company’s investment, but you’re now also missing out on organizational memory. If someone solves a problem manually, that experience benefits them as a single user. But that solution is probably actually relevant to a whole department or even facility, who don’t even know what they’re missing out on.

Software is meant to reduce the labor required by humans and free up those brain cycles for things that humans are great at – analytical thought, emotional thought. Machines can’t do the hard stuff (yet), but they can remove the repetitive formulaic work. Software should be awesome at that. By definition software is the formalization of the logic behind business processes and translating that into consistent, repeatable, scalable code. Software can be great. So if your software isn’t doing its job – for whatever reason – you’re losing out. Big time.

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The most important aspect of taking action is tracing the follow-through, measuring the result and then creating an efficient and effective feedback loop. With faster feedback come faster observations, faster orientation, faster decisions and faster action; in short a faster OODA loop. The faster you can make intelligent decisions the better positioned your company will be to compete. Keep a tight, documented connection between actions and consequences, and then keep that data in front of decision makers in actionable form.

He prefaced this statement with the observation that CEO’s and senior management tends to spend long days in meeting after meeting inundated in email and fighting fires. And they know that this way of working doesn’t serve them well – professionally or personally.

Look, every business has goals, and everyone knows that those goals need to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. But what businesses don’t know about goals is that they can be as well defined in the beginning as possible, but without consistent, fast follow through you’re unable to judge the effects of actions toward your goals, and they therefore are no longer measurable, meaning that you have no insight into their attainability, realism or potential timing.

In the software world, we call tracking of results ‘metrics’. SharePoint calls them Key Performance Indicators.  When we say you need tight feedback we mean that you need to see the effects of employee behavior both as quickly as possible and in terms that mean something – like performance change. If you are working with reports that are 6 months old, they are not useful. And if you are working with reports that don’t translate quickly into situational awareness, then you’re not going to be able to judge changes in departmental behavior fast enough to make effective decisions.

This is why we spend a lot of time with companies both understanding their goals and drivers, and understanding what information they need to keep at the forefront at all times. With this understanding we then develop a customized Business Intelligence design, usually involving at-a-glance dashboards, custom gauges, the ability to drill down into data and decide where to spend your time next and automatic updates and flags for the most important information. See in one sweeping glance what is going well, what is average, and what needs your immediate attention.

We have worked with many companies and consistently they need good markers to troubleshoot what matters most. For instance if profitability has gone down, what happened? Is your cost off? How is your revenue stream? If cost seems to be in line then look into your sales pipeline to see what’s going on there. And the absolute must: Measure it and then put it in front of decision makers in a way that is easy to process to make the next decision.  When you enable better decisions people can truly affect their own outcome.

With companies, it’s often not the things you know that you’re losing out on, it’s the things you are missing. Without measurable data, actions taken toward goals cannot be evaluated and improved upon. Take our previous example of profitability changes – if both your cost seems to be in line and your sales team seems to be on target, then you go to accounting with a drill-down. Maybe you’ll find out that hey, there’s an inventory of sold product that is sitting in a warehouse waiting on paperwork. And in a world with well-thought-out software solutions that match your business, you’ll be able to see all of that and make all of those decisions in just a few clicks, without ever leaving your desk, not to mention make a report about it, then potentially create a workflow to prevent a similar occurrence for the future.

Every company already has a great deal of information, but if it’s scattered and you have to track it down, you’re losing valuable time. Get good software that provides you with good data, in actionable form, puts it in front of decision makers, and provides a direct feedback loop. Move through the OODA loop as quickly as possible with data that is accessible, measurable, available for ad-hoc reporting and in a central location.

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"We react to what's in front of us, whether it truly matters or not." Tony Schwartz, Harvard Business Review Blog

Know what is most important, and keep that front and center at all times. Your success comes from being one step ahead of the competition and, at the same time, being prepared to react to changing circumstances. Well-informed and agile decisions are essential to your leadership and your team’s success. How do you split your time between two areas of your business that are not performing well? What should be the top priority for your scarce resource? Sophisticated software tools can help your brain get to a good conclusion faster.

If you have followed our previous suggestions, you’re ready. You’ve got the absolute best data available, in one central location, up-to-date, at a glance and flagged for action. You have all the inputs needed to make a decision. As you drill-down from your flagged dashboard, you start to see important information, color coded by priority. If multiple are high priority, this is where the brilliance of the human brain works best – we’ve automated everything we can to get you here. Now take your time to review the information at your fingertips, run scenarios of what consequences your potential actions could have. Now you can go with your gut, knowing that you have truly combined the science of decision making with the millennia of human experience and development that have created a machine beyond anything man-made.

After you've made a decision, it's time to move forward. Stick to your decision. Consider how you're going to implement it. Then go!  The great thing about automation is that if you change the core, everything that sources from it updates as a result. And you can automatically send notifications out to anyone affected by your change.  And remember, the next step in the OODA loop is to follow-through and measure the result. In our next article, we will examine cycling through the OODA Loop and improving from one decision to the next as new situations occur.

"Most leaders don't get to pick the situations the lead in. They become known as leaders by how they lead in the situations they are in." Chief Master Sgt. Jeff Howard

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You’re busy. The faster you can make informed decisions, the better. Every moment you spend poring over charts and numbers is a moment that could have gone to changing your business for the better. Even with the absolute best data available, if it’s not in a form that gives you immediate insight into what to do, you are losing valuable time. You should always know exactly where to get the latest, best information. And that data should immediately guide a decision.

Situational awareness drives decisions that mean the life or death of your business. A good dashboard is essential to any fighter pilot’s ability to orient within the Air Force ‘Observe, Orient, Decide, Act loop’. Dashboards display the information you need most at-a-glance so that you’re poised for action. With key performance indicators that flag items needing attention, spend your time on what matters most.

Every business has a set of metrics that tell you the direction you’re headed, whether you’re on the right path, and what you need to look out for along the way. We listen carefully to what drives your decisions and then customize your tools to reflect the way you work. Unleash SharePoint’s true power with PerformancePoint; dashboards and custom key performance indicators (KPIs) based on real-time data – either from SharePoint itself or from integrated line of business systems. Critical gauges put you in the pilot’s seat and direct your attention to the action most vital to your business.

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If you look at the way you gather and maintain information about your business, and it involves multiple users entering data by hand, a complicated excel sheet with variants owned by different people, or a highly trained engineer chugging through data for days to create a report, then you could get better quality data faster. Your competition probably already is.

In our last post we talked about how to compete in the fast-paced energy market by making faster, better decisions all the way down the line. With our own Air Force captain on staff, we look at speeding up and improving your decision-making in military terms. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. Let’s drill down into ‘Observe’ to make sure that you are gathering good data and verifying it. Huge improvements to your bottom line can already happen when you work based on the absolute best observational data.

The accuracy of your decision-driving reports depends on the quality of data they are based on and the thoroughness of your data quality management process. A rigorous quality control process for the information that runs your business is absolutely essential. If your decisions are not based on valid, timely data, you are losing both time and money. You might be basing important financial decisions on incomplete or old data, you might be drilling based on probabilities that have since been disproven. Whatever the symptom, if you get better data to your decision makers, you get better decisions.   

Entrance can improve your data quality by automatically sourcing from existing data repositories, creating custom validation logic around input forms, as well as automatically screening invalid inputs. Our SharePoint team can give you better quality data by centralizing business data for ease of access, user experience consistency, an easily maintained infrastructure and permission control.

We help you get the quality data that leads to quality decisions. 

Up next:

Orient:  Integrate your data into real-time information. Once you have good data, you need to make sure it can easily translate to good choices.

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