“A problem cannot be solved with the same mindset that created it.” – Albert Einstein. This quote from Einstein helps guide our thought processes as we work with our clients to identify problems and recommend solutions. One key thing we have learned: To achieve our key business objective, we have to work with our customers and use the right context for assessment and improvement - a context that will allow us to assess and improve the entire problem area, not just part of it. We apply Systems Thinking to provide us with the right context.

How we interact with you the customer - the business processes we use and even the quality of the solution we provide you - are shaped by our Heinsights Values.

Systems Thinking

Probably one of your most important goals is to ensure the effectiveness of the corporation. To be effective requires Systems Thinking! A system is a combination of the human participants and the tools (process & technology) they use, operating within an organizational system and culture to attain a defined goal. Simply put, to be effective, an organization has to consider the combination of improvements that are needed by the people, processes, technology and culture that comprise your work systems - see Figure 1 for an illustration. You will notice we said combination of improvements - since these are the important components of your organizations/work systems they all may play an important part in the implemented improvements. 

Let's use the People-Process-Technology-Culture Model in Figure 1 to clarify how these may affect organizational improvements. The components in the model are the key assets of a corporation, which are needed to make it run. Let’s put these components into perspective: In our opinion, People are the most important assets, the Foundation, of our organizations; Processes provide the HOW TOs to conduct our businesses - they exist to support our People, to make them more effective; Tools (e.g., Technology) exist to integrate with our processes, automate them and make our people more productive (not replace them). And our Cultures provide the glue - the values, expectations, freedoms, and constraints - that ties them all together.

Becoming effective in the Internet Age may require us to make major sustained changes over a period of time. There are usually no short cuts (silver bullets) we can take, although we continue to try. We help you to fully identify problem areas, including root causes, and propose alternative solutions. And we assist you in choosing and implementing the right solution. We do heavily consider your culture and the skill levels in our solution recommendations and implementations. Training and mentoring play a vital change implementation role.

A Values-Driven Business Approach

Clearly, our Heinsights Values shape what we do as a company and how we do it. They provide us the framework for business strategy, business development, and our entire cycle of customer interaction, including all of our product and service deliveries. They provide us the guidance for continues improvement – in our services, our business practices, and in our business relationships. And they guide us to develop “common sense” solutions for our clients and “common sense” practices to deliver these solutions.

“Common Sense” Solutions

We don’t provide cookie cutter solutions. We work with you to design and implement solutions tailored to your people and culture – meeting your content, quality, cost and schedule requirements. We provide you with reusable process, technology and training components. We strongly believe in reusability – integrating components form our Heinsights library, from industry libraries, and from your own libraries as applicable. We don’t reinvent when we don’t have to – saving you and us time and money. We also don’t over-engineer a solution – we keep it simple, but flexible, with future growth in mind.

“Common Sense” Business Practices

 We use practices and standards that make sense for the type, size and complexity of your engagement. We make the appropriate choice of practices needed when we plan your engagements. We plan our efforts carefully with you and consider all of you requirements, including content, quality, cultural, cost and schedule constraints, and other requirements as applicable. Accordingly, we assemble project practices appropriate for the effort – project management and control, partner management (including requirements definition and management), process assessment, design, construction, training development & delivery, and organizational deployment and communication. In other words we don’t use a cookie cutter approach in our business practices either – all are tailored to your specific engagement.

Figure 1. People-Process-Technology-Culture Model