Monday morning the 31st of August 2009. I must admit feeling a bit sad that this is the last post of the 31 Day Challenge to improve your IWMS Implementation. It has been a wonderful ride, and I have learned a lot from all your comments and participation.
Over the last month you have gathered a lot of information about your IWMS implementation. In addition to that, you have initiated several actions that will improve your IWMS information. Today you are going to organize this information and plan your next steps.
Today’s teaching
I will first start explaining the foundations of the 31 Day Challenge. It started a couple of months ago when I was exploring the possibilities for a 31 Day Challenge. I decided to make a mind map of the components of improving an existing IWMS implementation.
Mind Map
A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing. (Wikipedia)
Especially when you want to improve an IWMS implementation there are a lot of improvement possibilities and thoughts to be explored.
Although I could have written an entire series about improving your Space Management Module, Lease Management Module or Maintenance Management Module, I focused more on the organizational aspects of every IWMS implementation as a lot of improvements can be achieved in that area.
As you can see in the mind map above the 31 Day Challenge is based on a couple of major components which can help you to understand the context of the 31 Day Challenge. These components include:
- IWMS
- Monitoring
- Support
- Project
- Organizational
- Training
- Commercial
Creating this mind map allowed me to come up with ideas for the posts and explore the IWMS implementation literature further. In addition to that, I wanted to make a contribution to our industry resulting in improved IWMS implementations that will impact your bottom line, independently from the Integrated Workplace Management Solution you have implemented.
I would recommend you to use mind maps as well for your IWMS implementation as it will support you in identifying improvement possibilities that will maximize the contribution of the IWMS to your organization.
Mind mapping software
Although you could draw your mind maps on paper, I recommend using mind mapping software. There is lot of mind mapping software available in the marketplace today both propriety and open source.
Mind mapping software is used to create diagrams of relationships between ideas or other pieces of information. It has been suggested that the mind mapping technique can improve learning/study efficiency up to 15% over conventional note taking. (Wikipedia)
On http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mind_mapping_software you can find an excellent list of mind mapping software.
Posts of the 31 Day Challenge
As described above all posts are categorized in one of the key components. However, the posts themselves also had a thin red line. The themes of the post were centered on the following concepts:
- Evaluation / Monitoring
- Quality Improvement
- Communication and commitment
- Optimizing Usage
- Future Planning
Below you will find the concepts explained:
Evaluation / Monitoring
By evaluating your IWMS from different perspectives you are able to improve your IWMS as a whole. Hopefully, you have gained a lot of insights not only about your IWMS implementation, but about your organization as well.
In the posts I have described a few monitoring methodologies that you can use in your own organization and given practical advice on how you should implement these methodologies.
Quality Improvement
Both from a project perspective as well as from an organizational perspective Quality is extremely important. Improving the quality has a direct impact on the bottom line. It also helps your organization to cope with changes that occur on a daily basis in the dynamic organizational context.
Communication and commitment
If you want to have a successful IWMS implementation project, communication and commitment of individual actors are extremely important. You need the buy-in from the senior management, IWMS operational staff, and other people in your organization to make your IWMS project a great success. Therefore, some posts in different categories are about getting commitment and communicate effectively.
Optimizing usage
As described above the improvement of quality has a direct impact on the bottom line of your organization. So has the optimization of usage. By optimizing the usage of your IWMS and reducing the waste you do not need, you will impact the bottom line of your organization almost overnight. I have written a few posts that provide a guideline for you to reduce waste and optimize the usage of your IWMS.
Future Planning
Evaluation is extremely important, but you have to look forward to really start improving your IWMS implementation. Your evaluations just provide you with the tools to do so. Because I’m a strong advocate for future planning, a lot of posts have tasks centered on the planning / initiating of activities that will actually help you to improve your IWMS implementation. These are practical by nature meaning that you can start all those activities today.
Today’s task
In the past month you have gathered a lot of information about your IWMS implementation. Organizing this information in a proper way enables you to retrieve that information quickly.
On Day 1 of the 31 Day Challenge I have already proposed a way of organizing the content in a folder structure. In addition to that, you can also use a components based approach as described above in the mind map section.
Regarding the planning of your next steps you need to:
- Create one comprehensive planning that contains all activities described in the posts that are relevant to your organization
- Delegate activities accordingly
- Plan not more than two activities in a week
- Consider this improvement challenge as a project and thus define an end date
- Evaluate your planning as you go
Final Thoughts
I have enjoyed writing the 31 Day Challenge to Improve your IWMS implementation enormously and I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I had writing it.
The teachings and tasks can help you improve your IWMS implementation although not all might be relevant for your organization. I hope that you embrace this challenge to improve your IWMS implementation that will not only empower you, but will impact the bottom line of your organization.
I want to thank all of you for your wonderful support!
Yours Sincerely,
Steven Hanks
Can you give us the link where we can find the complete list of this 31 day series.
Hi Anand,
you can find the post here: http://www.iwmsnews.com/2009/09/31-days-to-improve-your-iwms-implementation-overview/
Yours Sincerely,
Steven