The Human First Handbook

It’s a collection of practical business checks designed to help you look more closely at what you already have and how it actually works.

Each one starts with a question.

• Do We Know What We’ve Actually Got?

• Are We Paying For The Same Thing Twice?

• Do Our Systems Actually Work Together?

• Who Owns What?

• Where Are We Relying On Workarounds?

• What Happens If Someone Leaves Tomorrow?

They sound like simple questions. Quite often, they aren’t.

we Start With The Question, Not The Solution

Digital transformation has a habit of starting with solutions.

A new website. A new CRM. Some automation. An AI tool. A new supplier. Another platform.

Human First Digital starts earlier. Before deciding what to change, we want to understand what you have, why you have it, how it is being used, what connects to it, who understands it and what evidence there is that something is actually wrong.

Human First Principle: Understand the problem before choosing the solution

How The Handbook Works

Choose the question that sounds most like your current situation. We’ll take you through the kinds of questions we’d ask if we were sitting alongside you looking at the business ourselves. You’ll start with what you know, look a little closer, follow the connections, establish who understands and owns what, examine the evidence and consider what your findings might actually mean.

You don’t need to know every answer in fact, discovering that nobody knows the answer to an important question can be one of the most useful things the exercise uncovers. “Leave it alone” is a perfectly good business decision.

The Business Is The System

One of the reasons these questions matter is that businesses don’t operate in neat categories. Your website affects marketing, marketing generates information, information enters systems, systems affect processes, processes affect people, people create workarounds. Suppliers control accounts. Finance pays subscriptions. Directors need information from all of it to make decisions.

Change one thing and something apparently unrelated can move with it.

That’s why the Handbook asks you to follow the connections, rather than looking at each piece of technology in isolation.

The aim isn’t simply to understand your technology, it’s to understand the business around it.

Use It When You’re In A Pickle

You don’t need to work through the Handbook in order. Come here when something doesn’t quite make sense.

• When you’re considering replacing something

• When costs seem to be creeping up

• When nobody quite knows who owns something

• When a process has become ridiculous

• When you’re about to invest

• When you’ve already invested and aren’t sure it was the right decision

• Or simply when you have the nagging feeling that there must be a better way of doing this

Find the question that sounds closest to your problem and start there.

You Don’t Have To Fix Everything

The Handbook isn’t designed to generate a giant to-do list. It’s designed to help you decide what deserves your attention.

Some things will need action. Some will need further investigation. Some can wait. Some may simply need documenting and some should be left exactly where they are.

Not everything you uncover needs fixing. Prioritisation is deciding what deserves your attention now, what can wait and what should be left alone.