Pims digital maze | Behind every successful standard lies a graveyard of failed initiatives

It's death or gladiolas for Pim van Meer, if you want to introduce standards into your organization. Somebody has to be willing to take the hit.

People sometimes congratulate me on "my" standards. Sounds festive. In reality, it smelled more often like gunpowder than confetti. Standard working methods are not written, she be fought.

Make better

I can still see that picture from my first year at VORM: our CEO bent over a three-dimensional model in which a modest, minimal data set showed the feasibility. Later we called it MiniBIM. My commitment then: to make one of the best developers even better. That's asking for trouble. Try telling very good people they can do better. My own route: stay until it either fails or lands. Death or gladiolas.

Fortunately, there were flag-bearers to-"young pimlets" (who are not necessarily young or male) who saw it and carried it on. Sometimes painful when they pass you content. Sometimes irritating when opposition blows into the building. But I stayed, and slowly doors swung open: internally, at partners and at industry clubs (Aedes, NEPROM and BouwendNederland). Adoption turned out not to be a finish line, but a starting ribbon. Once something works, the real work begins.

Fix the incentive

What I learned doesn't fit on posters, it does fit on helmet scratches. Success is not a ribbon; Behind every visible result lies a graveyard of fallen initiatives. Make that graveyard visible-not out of drama, but to save useful parts. Resistance is not a bug but a signal: every no Points to a missing incentive, role or definition. Fix the incentive, not the person. And above all: a standard is not a document, but a social contract. (And that's why "standardization is not dead," Jan Willem van de Groep)

Stop before it starts to fester

An Information Delivery Specification/ information requirement without linkage to decisions, incentives and acceptance criteria is just theater-pretty much made up theater, though. The momentum never came from adding more, but from pruning. Planning kill moments. Stop before something starts to fester. Gladioli grow on tightly pruned beds. Small set, divisible, open. Parametric where it has value. Rhythm in decision making. Record decisions concisely. It looks modest, it works maturely.

Small nod in between: who calls "We all have the same goal, don't we?" May hold the starting ribbon while everyone else runs. Even a standard needs a hook to hang on to.

For the young pimlets: link what works, build coalitions, keep the set small enough to carry and SHARE. And don't blame anyone if change seems abrupt in hindsight. If you do it right, people will say later, "gosh, that came naturally" or "disruptive". You know better: evolution with momentum.

The filleting moment

Standards arise naturally when everyone wants them.
No. Standards arise when someone budget, mandate, rhythm, passion, a testable agenda and exit rules brings together-and is willing to take the hits. Without that, any Information Delivery Specification remains a wish list with fancy fonts.

About Pim's digital maze
In this column, Pim takes you through the sometimes wondrous, tangled but rapidly changing world of digitization. He draws on his experiences as director of digitalization at VORM. Pim is outspoken, critical, but above all wants to help you. Are you stuck in the digital maze? Pim helps you find the way out.... Do you have a question for Pim or are you looking to get in touch with him? Follow Pim on LinkedIN.