Every year the organization “Operasjon Dagsverk” (eng. Operation Day’s Work) arranges for students in junior high and highschools to contribute one day’s work to a charity cause.

The students takes responsibility for finding a place to work for a day. The company that accepts the student pays NOK 300 to that year’s charity and puts the student to work. This year the money goes to an educational project in Guatemala. The day was this Thursday (31st October).

My oldest son, Niklas (14) asked if he and two friends could work at Å (a-circle.no). Obviously I took the opportunity. I got the idea of charging them with the task of creating two generic business models – one for Project Management and one for IT Service Management.

The boys got to work and in less than two hours, they delivered an intriguingly simple model for Project Management. Their “SUKK”-model pinpoints responsibilities in a project far better than the ruling model of PRINCE2.

Their model for IT Service Management was even more succinct and with excellent focus on exact responsibilities. While ITIL is perhaps the best professional model for corroding responsibility in an IT organization, their SAO model goes straight for the kill with no wishy-washy or overlapping responsibilities.

In addition to this, I got them to define the term “delivery” and had them write down exact deliveries for roles such as “a baker”, “a teacher”, “a student”, “a Prime Minister” and “an architect” as well as writing down their own personal deliveries in life. I have done this exercise many times with groups of executives and experts from businesses and government agencies. These boys were amazing and I believe they did a better and more efficient job than any other group I’ve seen.

The NOK 900 generated amazing value as I will use the results from this day in many seminars and talks to come.

Thanks to Niklas, Isak and Alf-Johan.