I got a lot of grief as a kid for daydreaming. Teachers would be trying to change the direction of my misguided youth and I’d be totally zoned out in the back of the classroom wondering if Major Tom or Ziggy Stardust were real people. If adults back then were being nice, they might have said I had an overactive imagination. In fact, I think that’s the only positive thing they might have said about that – there sure were a lot of not-so-nice labels affixed to the front of my shirt and difficult conversations during the parent-teacher meetings. (At least I think there were, we all know I wasn’t paying attention.)
Perhaps my current career path is an accommodation to that dreamy tendency. Of course, now that I’m a consultant, I call it much more impressive stuff such as big-picture thinking, goal-setting and my favorite: vision-casting! After all, we can just call what I do: dreaming up cool stuff. That just doesn’t sound billable.
As you know our team helps employers with their HR Technology goals. A big piece of that is being able to dream with them about what life could be like on the other side of their pain and problems. Of course, we help executives dream up ways to control the rising costs of running their enterprises and control their vendor or system costs. But often, we get to use our vision to just help someone who has been overworked, stressed and incredibly frustrated see how their life could be different. All of a sudden, that overactive imagination can be shared with our clients to see how their lives could be different with a little automation or technology judiciously applied to the right situation.
Paula is one of our Project Manager teammates who sits in our San Diego office. (Yes, I am totally jealous and pester her about the weather whenever we talk!) She was recently working with a client to create a vision of what Benefits Administration could be like with an automated solution replacing paper enrollment forms. What they came up with is a fantastic process overview I wanted to share with you in case you’re wanting to dream about what Benefits Administration could look like for your organization. Perhaps you already have a system and need a way to illustrate it to your teammates to talk about points of failure or areas of change. However you choose to uses this, we hope it is helpful to you. We always want to make things as simple as possible, but still have the best level of detail for a full understanding of scope. If you see something we might have overlooked, please comment below to let us know.
With the long weekend coming up, we wanted to offer you something to ease your labors and give you some rest. We hope Paula’s picture is a perfect fit for your needs! Happy Labor Day!