Basics of VeriSM
At the foundational level, VeriSM focuses on several constants:
- The organization and its governance, values and capabilities
- The consumer
- The outcomes to be achieved with the services provided to the consumer
Governance and Values
The focus on organization and governance lays the groundwork. Understanding everyone’s role in an organization leads towards its success, and how their unique abilities can be leveraged is one of the basics of the model.
The Consumer
Instead of focusing on the activities to be performed, the focus is on providing business value for both internal and external consumers, developing solutions they need to be successful.
Abilities
People with distinct competencies and abilities are grouped according to the functions they perform: human resources, accounting, information technology, customer service and others. By thinking of these not as departments, but rather abilities, it’s easy to address situations where an organization has several groups with customer service or technology roles and then gathers them when all are involved in a particular initiative. It also makes it easy to engage and organize the needed resources to achieve the intended outcome.
Focus on Outcomes
Understanding the difference between outcomes and outputs is another basis of the model. While an output is a tactical result of an activity, such as printing invoices, outcomes are more strategic, the result of the use of a product. Rather than printing invoices, an outcome may be the ability to produce invoices quicker as a result of better technology, making it possible to support additional customers without needing more staff to achieve this outcome. Of more importance, VeriSM helps to determine which capabilities must be integrated to produce that outcome: IT, accounting, customer service and legal capabilities might need to review all aspects of invoice production to determine the product features needed to produce more invoices within a set period of time. These providers can review both the entire process of creating, approving and printing an invoice and with the technology, using techniques, such as value-stream mapping, to find and resolve bottlenecks or opportunities to improve technology.
Individual growth and the value of a culture that encourages a lifetime of learning is important to sustaining success. Focusing on developing abilities enables people to expand their expertise continually, thus strengthening an organization’s capability to find the abilities it needs for specific initiatives. This shifts the focus from earning certifications towards increasing one’s understanding of management frameworks and standards, and with their industry’s specific technical/operational knowledge to continue to increase expertise and competence.
People who have both depth in their specialty as well as broad knowledge across a number of capabilities or technologies, known as T-Shaped individuals, are highly sought as a result of their competencies. This results in placing a high value on lifetime learning, which benefits both the individual and his or her organization in return and many organizations favor this learning direction.