Have BEP Techs at Strategy Planning Meetings or It May Backfire
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**BEP Techs**
In a nutshell, Business Entity Performance Technologists (BEP Techs) include but are not limited to technology training leaders who have a business entity crisis prevention eagle eye. They merge their vast experience of pedagogical expertise, human behavior, change management, business maintenance behavior, and business emergency survival behavior into a figurative weapon of mass prevention to help businesses ultimately solve root cause issues during new or upgrading technology implementations.
From the agile perspective, PEOPLE come first.
Because of their pedagogical and hands-on knowledge of how operational, tactical, and strategic business teams function, they have a vast understanding of the motivation, movements, cognitive abilities, games of business politics, and needs of many different areas of an organization since it is the job of the training department to successfully teach those different areas how to utilize a new or upgraded technology.
**When “People First” is a "Myth in LARGE Organizations"**
Unfortunately, in high-level crisis management of medium to large organizations, business entities cannot always move with the “people first” mentality. To ensure the survival of the business, they must move by “business entity” first.
BEP Techs have expertise of mediating those two disparities.
During technology implementation phases, many stakeholders eventually engage in ego-driven, territorial, heated, eventually-emotionally driven debates in order to protect their unit, especially when the decision is to protect the entity over people first OR prioritize certain units' needs over others'.
The Business Entity Performance Technologists’ job is to see through the egos, emotions, miscommunications, and territorial requests to discover: (a) the fundamental needs of each segment (b) how those needs can be addressed or at least communicated properly so that people come on board with change easier.
Every need can’t be addressed as an initial priority but an effort to honor stakeholders’ needs for understanding, clarity, and respect is a BEP Tech’s goal to induce change buy-in.
**Technology Strategy: Just Say No**
BEP Techs warn decision makers when training is NOT the answer. Many times, organizations bring training professionals into a program only after all decisions have been made and the technology has been designed and even launched. While the training department interfaces with all levels of the organization and learns many of the details of the operational, management, and leadership teams that are needed for training requirements; the BEP Tech discovers that:
Training was the wrong solution OR
People were being trained on the wrong solution OR
Training is a temporary fix that is placing bandages on what the root cause fix should be OR
Training was like a broken romantic relationship:“The RIGHT thing at the WRONG time is the WRONG thing.”
**BEP Techs as Human Knowledge Management Systems**
Training experts are like human versions of knowledge management systems. They have a wealth of information. If they don’t have it, they will seek it. Why?
Because training departments are performance improvement experts. If all required users of an organization must learn a new technological aspect of their job, then training department personnel must learn the new technological aspect of those users’ jobs along with the proper in-the-field context of how it should be used. For the BEP Tech, this includes discovering the proper:
Governance
Patterns of business activity
Internal business relationship management activities
Goals, demands, resources, and capabilities of the unit being taught
Business cases to contextualize and communicate the required change and knowledge, and
User Profiles (Assessments of who the users are, how they learn, what prevents them from changing job performance behavior, etc.)
Final Thoughts on BEP Techs
Though not all training professionals can have a seat at your business decision-making tables, business entity performance technologists should. They are under-respected crisis prevention gems. Whether or not you know it, you
most likely have a BEP Tech on your training team. Their capabilities aren't seen, because they haven't been allowed to utilize them. If you don't have one, let us get one for you. Thank us later. We will thank you now.
For more information on a BEP Tech's capabilities, read this Wiley article.
