Remember BHAGs?

This weekend, I was posting on our new company blog at 5Rules about How Everything Old is New Again.

And it got me thinking. I wonder how many "old" lessons are out there that need to be re-learned?

And THAT led me to thinking about BHAGs.

Some of you may be too young to remember "Big Hairy Audacious Goals". BHAGs were introduced to us by James Collins and Jerry Porras more than ten years ago, in their article entitled "Building Your Company's Vision".

At the time, BHAGs were all the rage. They were in use at some of the country's biggest companies. IBM, Motorola, Philip Morris and Walt Disney Co. all embraced them.

In 2007, no one talks about BHAGs anymore.

Somehow the whole notion died off. Perhaps some of us tried BHAGs and were disappointed. Perhaps none of our senior management read the article. Perhaps none of us had the attention span it took (about 10 years) to keep the BHAG alive. Perhaps BHAGs were undone by the need to make the quarterly numbers for Wall St.

Maybe we should have tried LHAGs instead. (Little Hairy Audacious Goals).

I've had good experience with LHAGs.

Most recently my team need to perform a version upgrade to a major ERP system (PeopleSoft). Anyone who has done this can tell you that it is generally a 6+ month project. It involves identifying all customizations you've done to the system and "retrofitting" the changes into the newer version. Then you need to individually test each function, followed by an entire integrated system test - not to mention rewriting all the training.

It's a mini-ERP implementation. And sometimes you need to being in additional staff to complete the project.

We decided to create a LHAG. To successfully complete the upgrade in 8 weeks, without any additional outside help.

I won't bore you with all the details except to say that while we missed our 8 week target (we did it in 12 weeks), we still accomplished it in half the time it would have normally taken. We didn't use any additional resources. Occasionally, self-imposed constraints are a good thing.

It forced us to rethink the entire process. To prioritize. To sweat the big stuff. We were able to reuse original test scripts (saving us time) and to amend training documentation in a way that forced successful module tests. We focused on testing new functionality and verifying that the old processes still worked.

We might not have known it was possible, if it weren't for the decade old insights of Jim Collins and Jerry Porras - and the introduction of BHAGs.

So dust off those old business books and turn something old into something new again.