Form or Function?

How many times throughout your day or week are you asked (or told) to fill out this form? We fill out forms to receive pay, medical attention, and especially when we have to deal with anything relating to our government. I think we have become a bit desensitized to the whole bit personally.

As someone who lives in a world where I must lift out process in chaos, I have to rationalize that on some levels the ability to elicit needed input from an end-user can and will come in the form of – well – a form.

Change control is perhaps one of the more interesting applications for a form in that it combines the two things people subconsciously hate the most: 1) change and 2) documenting the impending pain of change. OK, I’m being a bit melodramatic here, but I can quickly support the decision to document changes, especially in wide-reaching environments where many people are impacted by such a change.

However, often times in my experience filling out a form quickly turns from elicitation of information and documentation of change to simply CYA. You see, we too quickly jump to a form solving our problems and becoming “the process”, and this is a very slippery slope, indeed.

Let me be clear, a form is not a process. It is most certainly can be a crucial part of your process, but we are often guilty of allowing ourselves very little opportunity to vet all objections and recourse for not using the form in the first place; we rationalize the need for the form and minimize the inconvenience placed upon the end-user – our customer.

I’m not here to bash on forms, but I am here to point out an often unchallenged tendency to throw out a form without:

1. a true needs analysis,
2. interview and elicitation of impact,
3. whether the information can be harvested elsewhere leveraging data already in play, and finally
4. a clear communication of the entire process (to include benefits) to the customers impacted.

It is really a question of form over function, in the truest sense of this saying. Next time, before you try and emulate our lovely federal and state governments unquenched desire to spew forth forms as an example of “survival of the form-est”, examine the 1-2-3’s of your new process’s requirement to enforce the use of yet another form – pretty please.

Image courtesy of sunshinecity

Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. Ken is also the founder of Seeking the Son. Ken is always interested in connecting; To discover the many ways you may connect with him, visit him at DandyID.