When a lessons-learned review produces a suggestion that takes time to enact, the project group leader assigns a team member or two to the implementation. That happened at the benchmarking-reports team's planning meeting for fourth quarter 2000, when the team considered lessons from the previous quarter. The big one? To boost sales, competitor META Group had timed E-mail marketing pitches to go out near the end of each quarter, putting a date in the subject line and offering a discount for reports purchased before the date. All during the fourth quarter, two teammates worked on how BP could ape that strategy. It paid off. "We saw a 200% increase over final-week sales from the previous quarter," recounts Jason Richardson, who manages the benchmarking-reports team.
There was another reason for the jump, though. It came from BP's second method for gathering ideas: an internal review process. Instead of producing their first projects for clients, new workers at Best Practices do their first projects inside the company. Instead of researching sales-force productivity at, say, GlaxoSmithKline, the rookies explore the topic at BP by interviewing and surveying their coworkers.
Last July a batch of rookies investigated how well the company's press releases drove traffic to BestPractices.com and whether the releases contributed to subsequent sales. The rookies talked to experts both inside and outside the company and combed Best Practices' archives for information about big companies' press-release strategies. They found that -- contrary to common public-relations wisdom -- the E-mail releases should not contain the company name in the release headline or the E-mail subject line. Potential readers cared about the insights in the press releases, not the company behind them. Best Practices changed its headlines and subject lines and reduced to two sentences the company description at the end of each release. "Working so long on something, you don't ask certain questions," notes manager David Wang. "New people help you examine all your assumptions again."
The third way Best Practices gathers ideas is through Bogan's own efforts to lasso them -- both from his company's projects and from the business world at large. The company is small enough that Bogan, like an editor-in-chief, reads final versions of all research and consulting reports. So if a lessons-learned review overlooks a valuable idea, he wastes no time pointing it out to the staff. Bogan also keeps an eye out for ideas that teams can tap during projects. Which is why, as the database team struggled not long ago, he was able to direct it to some ideas he'd encountered one summer day just outside Chicago.
Step Two: Implementation
Obviously, finding ideas is useless if you can't put them into effect. BP's secret to implementing ideas is to swallow them in digestible chunks. The process of determining what those chunks are -- and which ones to swallow first -- begins with the lessons-learned reviews.
The reports team, for example, came up with a list of 17 ideas at its last second-quarter planning meeting. Only the top 3 will be acted on, says team leader Jason Richardson. How does the team determine which are the top 3? It charts all ideas on a graph with "ease of implementation" on one axis and "impact" on another. The top 3 ideas are the ones that score high on both scales. "It's a way to target the low-hanging fruit first," Richardson says.
Based on the lessons-learned reviews, some sifting takes place before implementation. But the brunt of sifting takes place during implementation.
Early in the spring of 2000, for example, Bogan asked Webmaster Larry Weaver to create Web pages for BP's customer-account management. Bogan wanted the pages to be just like ones he had seen on Dell.com. Each major BP customer would have its very own Web page, listing all the products and services the customer had bought and promoting other BP offerings targeted to that customer's interests. That way, a customer that ordered only human-resources-related products would not have to canvass the entire Best Practices site to find new material on the topic. Instead, an announcement of the new material (and an electronic link to it) would automatically appear on the customer's individual page.
Weaver did as he was told, and the cross-promotion brought an immediate increase in sales. That caused a problem: every new purchase meant that BP had to update a customer's personal Web page. Pronto. And Weaver didn't have the time to do the updates all by himself.
Had Weaver's Web pages been exact replicas of Dell's, there would not have been an issue. Most large companies have pricey systems that automatically update customer pages. BP didn't have such a system. But after some tinkering, Weaver found an intuitive, low-tech way to update the pages regularly, one that any staffer handling an account could use -- even while on a sales call. To the customer, the update seemed instantaneous. In reality, Weaver had winnowed down a high-tech idea from Dell so that Best Practices -- with its IT staff of two -- could implement it.
Best Practices founder Chris Bogan says his company's mission is to combat the perception that every idea has to come from within an organization.
Because the staff saw an immediate, positive reaction to the Web pages from customers, getting the BP employees in the habit of constantly updating the data wasn't difficult. There are times, though, when a new idea is not the easiest thing for the staff to swallow. Take, for example, what the rookie employees learned about the wisdom of dropping company names from the headlines of press releases that pitch BP's review of best corporate practices. How can a company enforce a lesson like that when people who write press releases are used to employing a specific format?
