Applying the Swiss Cheese Metaphor to Your People
When it comes to your current and future states of your business processes and systems, a critical component is the people involved. However, sometimes we overlook this and identify gaps later than would be ideal. Let's see how Swiss cheese can help us.
As a quick refresher, the Swiss cheese metaphor helps us see holes, then layer more slices to reduce the number and size of the holes until we're satisfied with the gaps that exist.
There are two ways the Swiss cheese metaphor helps find gaps:
Undocumented or under-documented knowledge
Roles that need to be filled
Starting with knowledge, this is especially risky if you're part of a lean organization that does not have redundancy in roles. It can also pop up as digital transformation programs are underway, as some stakeholders decide or are asked to leave the organization.
These holes can appear in different forms:
Institutional knowledge that exists only in someone's head
Context about why decisions were made
Expertise around legacy systems and processes
The simplest way to solve this is with shared documentation. Even if you're not in the middle of a project, it's still worth doing.
If you need a framework, consider writing interaction-based scripts, as these are essentially repeatable steps to execute a business process or use a system's functionality.
Moving to roles that need to be filled, this tends to be more obvious. Typically, it appears as bandwidth constraints with your existing people or a lack of skills to run an operational need (e.g. RevOps) or system (e.g. Salesforce admin).
Depending on your culture and constraints, you can solve this by:
Training your existing employees
Hiring additional employees
Working with part-time or fractional independent contractors
Finding a managed services provider
If you're planning or already executing a digital transformation program, it's worth understanding which of solutions you're planning to use as it factors into how you estimate your total cost of ownership.
TLDR: Use Swiss cheese to identify knowledge gaps and missing roles. Compile documentation where there are gaps, and decide to train, hire, or outsource.
