Marinate

Marinate - Not a very business savvy term. However, this is something that is very essential for any process / resource to operate irrespective of the geography and the industry.

Take a look at almost every project delivered across the world. Is there a perfect deployment without even 0.0001% stability time? The answer is NO ! However, I find leaders across the world that conveniently choose to ignore that they have to give sometime for the new project to stabilize or the new process to be be ingrained into the organization. I see this happening time and again, a new product development / new project / new Endeavour is planned and the ROI is always calculated from the date of go-live and does not usually take into account the overhead associated with the stabilization period that I like to call the time to Marinate.

How do you go about getting a successful marination (if there is ever such a term) done? Always remember as leaders, that change is the most difficult thing and therefore allocate a period of time for the users to marinate and soak in the new processes. Of course, as if you were cooking something, you would want to have period checks to see how the marination process is progressing. Lastly, in order to ensure success, have a line item in the project / product plans for the marination-cost and begin your ROI calculation at the end of this period.

So, the next time around, when you are bringing in new technology, will you remember to marinate before you deploy? Think about it !