As knowledge becomes commercialized remember experience is the best teacher, but wisdom welcomes a gift horse. USM is field-tested and supported by a non-profit foundation.
My initial curiosity about USM was when I heard that it included a non-redundant process model with 5 processes and a simple set of 8 workflows that serve as templates for all daily routines in any service providers’ practice. The process model and standardized workflows are used by any organizational topology, leveraging any combination of practice frameworks for all service providers.
But I was skeptical as well, and have ranted about the continuous improvement beast before.
“What’s different with the ‘nature of the beast[i]’ today is the speed and ease of which improvements to proven techniques can be duplicated — and monetized — by the community. Food for thought as you race along the digital turning point and its related disruption.“
Rolling Uphill
As outlined in the article Why Knowledge Is Becoming The Ultimate Currency, at the same time we have 1.4 billion people living in poverty and a billionaire created every two days — we also have pioneers who are showing that ‘the role of business must be extended beyond profit maximization, to also improve the lives of people they touch through their products and services.’
I like the fact that you can buy the USM book for less than $50 and get certified for less that $1,000 —- that’s next to nothing compared to other sources of service management knowledge.
You can also enroll in a FREE Workshop which I schedule every month, and since the USM method is recursive you can deploy it incrementally and in an agile manner.
So, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
[i] even Deming spent a great deal of time copying Shewhart’s ideas and devising ways to present them in his own way. Students of continuous improvement are therefore students of history to some degree.
There have been multiple instances where one ‘expert’ or another took something, ‘improved it’, and re-published it as new thinking. This sometimes creates friction between authors and confusion around who exactly is an ‘authoritative source’.
This is the nature of the beast.