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I was the dinner speaker the other night at a professional society dinner, and I gave my talk on tools for the project manager. One of the tools that I covered had to do with the problem of inclusion.

The issue of inclusion is simply this: have you included the right people in the current discussion or decision?

It is really easy to overlook people in a project. It is especially easy to overlook those who are difficult, who are nay-sayers, who are on the other side of an organizational division or controversy. But these are exactly the people who you want to include.

What can happen when you haven’t included the appropriate people?

The classic situation in IT is not including representatives of the line workers, or the field workers, or the day-to-day users. I ran into this several years ago. A medical products company retained me to implement a sterility testing system. The system was innovative, in that it used tablet computers that the technicians carried into the clean environments to do on-site testing of the sterility of machines, surfaces, and people. The system captured thousands of test points per week, uploaded them into a relational database, and supported pro-active quality management of the sterile environment. Because management drove the need for the system, they provided most of the specifications for the system.

Several years later, the system was up for a series of updates. This time around, we aggressively included the technicians in the redesign. In talking with them, I noticed awkward pauses and gaps in their discussion of the system. Finally, one of the technicians took me aside and confessed that the tablet computers never made it into the clean rooms. The technicians kept the tablets in their lockers, collected the test results on paper, the old way, and in the locker room transferred the results to the tablet computers.

The technicians weren’t included in the original project, and felt that their needs and issues hadn’t been taken into account. They found a way to bypass the intent of the system, as people on the front lines or the production lines, or in the field will often do.

We re-located the system to a set of Kiosks outside of the locker rooms, which is how it works today.