The Improving Organizations Effect

I’ve been writing about Improving Organizations over the last few years. If you look through those, you can infer that I had the opportunity to work with a company that was working to improve how they approach their work. I learned a lot from those experiences. My articles usually sprout from the daily work I’m apart of. I lead a conversation about this topic at Omnitech and it became a reference

I’m writing this for an Omnitech post, but I believe you can bring these ideas to your team or as an individual developer to create your own positive “effect”.

At Omnitech , we strive to help our clients by providing high-level quality technical solutions. We also have a goal to increase the technical levels in the South Dakota region with integrity by:

• serving others
• fulfilling business technical needs
• growing relationships
• continually learning and improving together

We believe that bringing our experiences with clients back to Omnitech and then back to more clients we create a cyclical feedback loop. This will lead to more interesting challenges/opportunities to serve our clients and give us more to learn.

Values

We value people and support our employee family time and work/life balance.

Please see our CEO’s article Letting our History Lead for more insight into our company values.

We also identified that by learning together we can:

*  Reduce learning time
*  Bring the total of our experience to our clients
*  Bring the total of our individual client experience back to Omnitech
*  Then back to more clients creating a cyclical feedback loop. 
* This will lead to more interesting challenges/opportunities to serve our clients and more to learn.

Dr. Ron Westrum describes organizations in 3 categories: Pathological (power-oriented) VS Bureaucratic (rule-oriented) VS Generative (performance-oriented). Learn more in Episode 18: Dr. Ron Westrum (Part 2) . We have a generative culture and need to continue to improve in that regard.

How do we build connections, improve working together and increase learning?

• Lunch and learns

  • Focus on client solutions
  • Learning together

• On demand getting together to discuss client solutions

• Conversations

  • Walks, in the hallways, asking for help

• Company meetings

• Book clubs (we have several suggestions for you on our Omnitech blog )

• Company events

• Mentoring

  “Iron sharpens iron, and one man (person) sharpens another. Iron sharpens iron, and one man (person) sharpens another.” ~ Proverbs 27:17

Tools and Approaches

Please see my Approaches as a Developer to help Improve Organizations for a list of examples.

“The Omnitech Effect”

We coined the combination of our values and the success we’ve had helping others as “The Omnitech Effect”. We want to help the organizations we work with improve technically, create Better Value, Sooner, Safer and Happier and improve the lives of everyone involved.

Continuous Improvement

I believe we all have an effect on the organizations we work with. If you’re not learning and improving then entropy will catch up with you. Are you having a positive effect or negative? What can you do today to improve yourself and those you work with?