Towers

This section provides explanation about the Towers in the MINCE Maturity Model.

Towers: overview

Each of the six MINCE Towers represents crucial organizational aspects that correlate to organizational maturity.

Figure 7 – Six MINCE Towers

In order to be able to get a clear look-out, any castle will (or should have) a couple of Towers, allowing for the inhabitants to check which threats or opportunities are approaching. The higher such a Tower, the higher the maturity level is, so consequently the higher the sooner anyone moving towards the castle and its contents will be noticed. A low Tower will be less beneficial in defending the castle's precious contents. A certain number of Towers will be necessary in order to have a proper view over the landscape, into the fields beyond. It should be clear now that the Towers are the main part of the MINCE construction work. There are six of them and each one has a Roman number attached to it:

1. People (→glossary);
2. Methods & Techniques (→glossary);
3. Customer (→glossary);
4. Realization (→glossary);
5. Knowledge (→glossary);
6. Supporting Services (→glossary);

These Towers determine the main aspects of organizations with regard to the maturity level. Each Tower has a connection to the environment via Criteria. The combination of Tower and Criterion reflects a certain level of maturity. So you'll obtain as many maturity levels with each Tower as there are Criteria: In effect there are five maturity levels with each. Each of the Towers is briefly described below.

Tower I: People

People is Tower I in the MINCE model. And this is for a reason. People are the most important asset of an organization. This is certainly the case during periods of change, but probably also in the absence of change. Machines can be altered or replaced without much difficulty. Staff are not as easily adapted or replaced. Managers should not consider machines and people to be interchangeable items. People, from the perspective of MINCE, do not need to be a particular level of type. We are not focusing on the board of directors. Neither are we singularly interested in the staff carrying out project tasks or in people cleaning the place. People, according to MINCE, addresses all people in the organization, from the receptionists, via the secretary, all the way up to the production technicians, the management team and further. When focusing on people, we look towards the Criteria in order to determine the degree to which our people are behaving like leaders (Leadership is a Criterion), dealing with staff matters (Staff is another Criterion), knowing of and contributing to corporate policy (Policy as a Criterion), utilizing the means (the Criterion named Means) available to them and acting according to regulations (the Criterion Instructions), i.e. are they taking steps in terms of getting these instructions known, understood and followed-up down the hiërarchical line?

Tower II: Methods & Techniques

Methods & Techniques are positioned as Tower II in the MINCE model, since even the best qualified people in the world need to have these both available in order to accomplish meaningful results. This is an important maturity indicator. Methods & Techniques have a feeling to them of boredom and dust. This should not be the case, since the topic without much effort can be transformed into a stimulating and fascinating subject that acts as the foundation of your organization. Firstly, Methods & Techniques are a matter of selection. Just pick any documented Method & Technique and you will perform better in comparison to a competitor who does not take such action. Any choice is better than none. If you're smart, you obviously pick your Method & Technique on the basis of well-prepared criteria. The latter approach will of course bring better results. In order to decide, you'll need to have a clear understanding of what a method is, in comparison to a technique. That is addressed as such:

• A method is a described way of dealing with business topics.
  Examples: The method describing project management (e.g. PRINCE2), programme management (e.g. MSP), test management (e.g. TMAP), service management (e.g. ITIL), functional application management (e.g. ASL), software development (e.g. RUP) or quality management (e.g. EFQM).
• A technique is the prepared way by which you bring the method into practice.
  Examples: The particular way you use MS Office products for the inception of your project management documentation. Or a technical programming approach you have selected, that determines how you develop the software products that your organization sells. Or the way in which you collect questionnaire results via a web-based eForm.

The combination of Method & Techniques in fact represents the quality with which your people perform tasks and in that respect should be considered as an indication of the quality level, associated with your organization.

Tower III: Customer

At first glance there seems little you can do about Tower III, your Customer. Is not it a fact that the maturity indicator induced by your customer is out of your influential sphere? To be honost, it is obviously not always easy to change anything about the maturity influence your customer induces. It is however not impossible to influence just that. Why should you accept the laissez-faire attitude of a low level customer? If you go into business with customers that gave accomplished little or no maturity themselves, this will influence your business in a negative way. So perhaps you should try to avoid such customers and instead focus on finding others, with a fair idea about a quality relationship between (service) provider and customer organization. If your organization is aiming to provide quality solutions and/or quality products, you should aim to produce these for the clientèle base able to make proper use of them. You should not avoid injecting quality into your customer base and stimulating them to absorb it. If they make serious attempts to adopt these invitations, both you and your customer will benefit, since quality radiates reliability and durability – both of which are aspects that any organization will want to display. If you succeed into moving up to the level of higher quality organizations, if you are indeed able to improve the quality of your business chain, this will also make it easier for your organization to search for new, high quality customers to add to your business chain.

Tower IV: Realization

No matter how much effort you put into your people, methods & techniques and customer chain, if you fail to execute your project oriented tasks, one of which is implementing changes into your organization, little good will come from it. Tower IV is about the way you execute the operations and projects in your organization. Obviously, one of the most important project oriented tasks in relation to MINCE is improving your own organization. Examples of such MINCE related project oriented tasks are not difficult to find. Changing a product line, swo that the quality of the end product improves. Training your staff in order to improve the way they implement your products on behalf of your customers. Developing an entirely new service that your organization will offer to a niche market. Enhancing the image of your organization via carefully selected printed media in combination with an eye-catching series of (online) advertisements. In this respect it is important to keep in mind that Realization is exclusively about project oriented activities. Whst is considered project oriented? Project oriented is the implementation of a predetermined change results, during a predetermined period of time, against a budget made available for the purpose, using a temporarily set up organization. Before such a project commences, we should have carefully thought about:

• scope: what should the precise results be: what are the short term, mid term and long term outcomes? (no fuzzy language allowed here!);
• budget: the cost/result-ratio should be positive in a reasonable period of time (usually <1 year);
• timespan: it should provide output in the short term (quick wins) and longer term (king-size wins);
• quality: how accurately do we expect to run the project in terms of reliability and repeatability? (phrase it in a way that allows for objective checking of goal versus reality!);

and ways to effectively measure the above, so that a comparison can be made in terms of the goals set at one side, versus the results accomplished at the other side.

Tower V: Knowledge

This Tower V is about the learning organization". Knowledge describes how you deal with the lesssons you've learned during the Realization of tasks, projects and/or programmes. Any mistake is preferably only made once: the first time it occurs. Such a mistake should not be granted a second life. In order to prevent mistakes from happening again, you should maintain an accurate base of all the mistakes your organization has ever made. This sometimes requires a change in mindset, since People are reluctant talking about mistakes, they prefer to show off their success. Mistakes, however, are equally important learning factors. In order to trigger smart solutions (→explained) and effective approaches to reoccur as often as you can manage – these being the opposite of mistakes – you should maintain an accurate base of all the smart ideas that your organization has ever come up with. This sometimes requires a change in midset as well, because people may not alwas realize sufficiently that smart ideas can be beneficial on more than one singular occasion. It's not always clear to the eye that such a discovery may, perhaps after some minor adaptation, facilitate yet another success. Dealing with mistakes and solutions in essence is the basis of Knowledge. In many organizations, Knowledge is ignored completely and that is a serious mistake. In a few organizations, Knowledge is confused with just keeping track of a list of mistakes and solutions. This is a less serious error, but it still is an underestimation of the potential. Very few organizations take Knowledge sufficiently serious. These organizations are the winners. Obviously you will not successfully exploit Knowledge by just keeping track of the above described information. You will also have to undertake action in order to make that information work for you. That second part is an equally important facet of Knowledge: Using the fuel of the mistakes/solutions-overview in order to feed the engine for innovation in your organization.

Tower VI: Supporting Services

Figure 13 – Supporting Services positioning

Tower VI, Supporting Services, is about the way the organization is supporting its day-to-day-management in coherence with the programmes, projects, project portfolios and other explicit actions. This is to be done via Supporting Services, where these all come together. The Supporting Services interconnects, facilitates, interacts all of these topics as is illustrated in adjecent Figure. As is shown in this figure, the Supporting Services do not just facilitate the tactical level. They are about the support provided with the agreement of the organization's management at the level of the projects, programmes, portfolio's and that of the "regular" organization's management. Supporting Services are provided by the group of employees dealing witn project office, programme office and secretarial office tasks.

This Tower is placed at the bottom of the list, because it is not the first "hot spot", even though it provides for an effective means to interconnect the daily operation in the organization to the incidental: the organizational change and the daily organizational issues will interact and in that respect be supportive to the organization developing its organizational maturity. The staff in any organization will not spontaneously start to move in a particular direction. Not all by themselves. The management team is the most important factor when implementing change. Improving the maturity level of an organization is an important and specific kind of change, that should be "triggered from above". Where improvements to the working environment can equally well be stimulated from "below", this is different for MINCE. The only ones able to preset the ambition level (being: the maturity level that is to be accomplished) reside in the management team. They should be unified about the:

• fact that they want to improve the organizational maturity;
• level to be set as the goal (i.e. the ambition level);
• quality constraints that influence the MINCE process;
• budgettary boundaries that can be freed in order to obtain business benefits;
• realistic timeframe to maintain in relation to the environment and competitors.

The management team should be aware of the fact that starting the MINCE maturity improvement process will require their continuous involvement. They ought to be prepared to provide the stimuli required in the organization, remove obstructions and change these into opportunities. This may be as easy as the theory appears, but in practice it may prove difficult as it will require decision taking, in terms of abandoning certain working methods, methods that people have become accustomed to over time.