Re: Mission Statements

[John Posada <JOHN -dot- POSADA -at- EY -dot- COM>]

>>Besides, they all end up sounding the same. It's always obvious stuff. What
company or group *doesn't* want to provide complete customer satisfaction or
increase company profits?<<

I wanted to respond to this thread since it's something that I just went
through for my department.

I agree on one hand that most mission statements sound alike and tend to state
the obvious.  However, speaking from one who just handled the process that
spanned almost two months, I can identify some benefits that would have come
out of it even if the statement had never seen the light of day.

A mission statement is not for the primary benefit of a customer.  The mission
statement is for the benefit of the organization.  It is created to have
everyone in the company or department "reading from the same page".  If you
orient the statement toward the customer, it will loose it's internal
benefits.  (For those that are interested in the resulting statement, I've
included it at the end of the message.)

During the process of the development of our statement, everyone in the
department participated.  The process went as follows:

I created two versions of "a statement"; a short one-paragraph piece and a
piece that went into greater detail and about three to four paragraphs. They
were distributed to about 40 members of the department.  What then happened was
the development of a dialog.  The managers started discussion "why are we here"
stuff.  They started to realize that there were many differing opinions and
that when they looked back, they realized that a number of project failures
(and fortunately, we don't have many) occurred because of the differing of
opinion of how to do their day-to-day business, yet it wasn't apparent at the
time.

For instance.  I had the word "support" in the statement.  Do you have any idea
of the number of ways that support can be interpreted?

I'm a fan of the process of creating a statement.  I'm not a fan of "obvious"
statements.

----------------

The Tactical Applications Group of Ernst & Young LLP will be responsible for
the analysis, design, development, deployment, implementation, and support of a
wide spectrum of  information management applications for our customers at
Ernst & Young.

The needs and desires of our customers will drive us to develop best-of-class
applications.  We will  respect each of our customers as equal partners. As
partners, we will strive to produce the most cost-effective,
technology-appropriate application using current development tools, processes,
and disciplines.

---------------

John Posada
Ernst & Young
Tactical Applications Group
Lyndhurst, NJ
john -dot- posada -at- ey -dot- com (work)
john -at- tdandw -dot- com (personal)
http://www.ey.com (work)
http://www.tdandw.com (personal)
(201) 842-2699

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