Excellent organizations are continually adding and improving on their systems, processes, and best practices across their organization.
The cliché that to add or improve systems and processes to practice “R and D” or “rip off and duplicate;’ however, when it comes to adding new best practices or new processes the challenge with practicing “R and D” is every organization is different. Even if they're in the same city, maybe they're even next door to each other, there are nuances inside each organization like communication style, technology, comfort with change and many others that make “R and D” a great theory but not very workable in practice.
Instead of simply “R and D” we can more effectively mix in new processes systems, best practices and Technologies by using “RDEI.” Rip off, duplicate, evaluate and iterate.
The first two steps of RDEI are very simple. We take what someone else has done to rip it off, in the politest way possible, and duplicate it internally.
Before we implement, we want to evaluate it against our vision for our organization, our departmental goals, the individuals on our team and how this might or might not fit in with them exactly as we've brought it over from wherever we got it.
Once we've done an evaluation we want to iterate because our evaluation, if it's done at more than a cursory level, is going to give us insights around where this best practice, process, or system needs to be adjusted in order to fit into our organization.
To maintain our excellence as an organization we will have to stretch our comfort zone, and possibly bust our comfort zones, to get up to the level that we have set out for us and our entire organization. When we iterate, we want to we want to do an intentional evaluation of the process that we have ripped off then once we've evaluated intentionally, iterate where we can make this process slide easy into our easily into our organization.
Human beings fear death taxes in change. When we are bringing in a new system it's tempting to only do “R and D,” which sounds like “plug and play.” As we've discovered, especially as our tech stacks have gotten bigger and bigger, “plug and play” typically turns into “plug and our headache continues.”
Addition and subtraction of processes, systems, and best practices is crucial to the long-term sustainability and success of our organizations; however, if we only follow the “R and D” model we are likely going to cause a whole bunch of unintentional pain on us and our team members. Adding an “evaluate” and “iterate” step ensures we’re enhancing our organization instead of unintentionally causing more pain.
Until next time… go lead.
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