Value is in the Eyes of the Beholder: Effectiveness

In an earlier post, I introduced six Key Value Factors that I consider to be drivers of high value perception:

• Timeliness
• Efficiency
• Effectiveness
• Responsiveness
• Quality
• Integrity

In this post, I will expand upon the third factor:  Effectiveness.  I will do so by defining what it means and discussing what it entails.  While the focus of this post is based on my experience and approach at Remote DBA Experts, these factors are universal and thus applicable in multiple individual and business contexts.  Being timely, efficient, effective, responsive, and delivering quality output with high integrity will score big on anyone’s value scorecard.  That is why awareness of them is so important!

What does Effectiveness mean?

Effectiveness means the capability of producing an effect or result.   It means being effective!  When all is said and done, efforts should yield the intended results for which they are expended.  Ineffectual efforts are wasted efforts.  At Remote DBA Experts, we are effective in the delivery of our remote database administration services when we maintain the highest database availability and database performance for the systems under our stewardship.  That is what we are in business to do.  All our individual and collective efforts and activities must yield these results.

What does Effectiveness entail?

To be most effective, you need to start by understanding your goals and mission.  That is the genesis of effectiveness.  Once you know what the target is, then you need to understand your current situation or reality.  The difference or gap frames the effort necessary to accomplish the goal or mission most effectively.  In the service business, another important aspect of effectiveness is to have a clear understanding of your customers’ expectations.  Since, as the post title implies, “effectiveness is in the eyes of the beholder”, that would make sense.  Make sure your customers’ expectations are in-line with reality and capabilities, or otherwise you’ll set yourself up for failure.

As I mentioned above, your ultimate Effectiveness is measured by the key results associated with your goals and/or mission.  However, to achieve it, you must be effective at many sub-tasks and activities.  Thus, you must be effective at the things that yield the ultimate key results.  It takes a Sequence of Effects™ in the Chain of Effectiveness™ to accomplish most effectively.  Effectiveness is a serial process, as opposed to a parallel one.  That means weak or ineffective links make the whole chain weak!

Similar to Efficiency, Effectiveness also involves multiple aspects.  Our ability to accomplish impactful results effectively depends on how well these aspects are integrated and managed.  There are five aspects I want to delve into to give you a better sense of what Effectiveness entails in our remote database administration business:

• Human factors
• Effective Enablers
• Effective Activities
• Effective Tasks Completion
• Effective Results

Human Factors are the seven “Accomplishment Factors” I wrote about in one of my prior blog series:

• Aspiration
• Attitude
• Aptitude
• Approach
• Action
• Absorption
• Adaptiveness

These factors frame effectiveness at the human level.  To start, you must aspire to be effective.  Effectiveness also requires a certain mindset (or attitude) and a set of aptitudes (or skills).  Furthermore, it requires an approach (or strategy), action, absorption (or focus), and adaptiveness (or flexibility).  These factors are critical to both individual and collective effectiveness.  But this is just one of the links in the Chain of Effectiveness™ required. More links are necessary to make up the whole chain.

Effective Enablers are the next link in the chain.  These are the set of capabilities that enable individual and collective effectiveness.  Effectiveness at this level is the same.  Each capability must be effective given its intended purpose.

• Effective Processes
• Effective Procedures
• Effective Methods
• Effective Tools
• Effective Information

In addition, the company’s culture, expectations, reward systems, and work environment influence effectiveness significantly!  Thus, they must be carefully considered and managed in order to maximize effectiveness at both the individual and group level.

Effective Activities are another link. These activities are what I call the set of “meta-activities” people must do effectively in order to accomplish value delivering tasks and achieve the key results customer expect.  Effectively completing them is part of the sequence.

• Effective Preparation
• Effective Learning
• Effective Communication
• Effective Documentation
• Effective Search
• Effective Analysis
• Effective Collaboration
• Effective Research

To execute these activities most effectively, you need to clearly define each.  You need to know and understand what Effectiveness means for every one of them.  You need to know which of them are more vital to the end result.  Spending too much time and/or effort on less vital activities will affect their proverbial strength as a link in the chain.

Effective Tasks are the next link.  These are the tasks customers hire us to do for them.  Each of these tasks breaks down into many more “sub-tasks” for the lack of a better term.  However, these three capture the essence of the services we deliver.  Their effective completion is the ultimate contributor to us being most effective as a whole.  Database availability and performance directly depend on how well we proactively monitor and maintain the databases under our stewardship.  Furthermore, effectively preventing and resolving problems enhances our effectiveness.

• Effective Database Monitoring
• Effective Problem Management (prevention and resolution)
• Effective Database Maintenance

Effective Results are the bottom line of our service engagements: When all is said and done, everything we do at Remote DBA Experts must result in one or both of these results depending on customer expectations and contractual agreements.  These are the bottom line of our effectiveness efforts.  All the links in the chain lead to them:

1. Database Availability
2. Database Performance

Similar to the Efficiency factor, Effectiveness is not as simple as it may seem.  As you have seen, there are many links in the chain and because of its linear nature; any weak link makes the chain weaker.  That means attention must be paid to all of them in order to maximize individual and organizational efficiency. They need to be measured and monitored on an ongoing basis with goals and benchmarks to drive effectiveness.  The process starts by hiring and retaining people with a set of performance factors attuned to Effectiveness.  Then you need to provide them with capabilities that enable them to complete effective activities and tasks, and thus, accomplish effective results.

And never forget that “Value is in the Eyes of the Beholder.”  That means that you must ask your customer what “Effectiveness” means to them, because no matter what, that is the only definition that really counts when it comes to delivering them high value.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO