Ask the Right Question!

A business associate of mine is in talks with a local client about a potential consulting engagement.

Due to a number of factors, the client believes they need to reorganize their I.T. resources, and they're looking for help. Certainly the options are obvious; align by customer segment, align by function, align by technology, even align by application.

The problem with the whole exercise is this.

They're asking the wrong question.

First, the client needs to answer the question - "What problem are you trying to solve?". Once you get the question right, the answer becomes almost self evident.

Without a clear understanding of the problem, any internal alignment will do - because you don't know what the outcome should be! The client would be better served hiring my friend to help them identify pain points within their service delivery and support model (which he'd be excellent at doing) - to help them understand the nature of their problem; to help them pose the correct question.

They might even discover that I.T. alignment isn't the issue at all. It could be an I.T. governance issue or possibly an underperfoming department.

The lesson here is that sometimes consulting dollars are better spent helping you ask the right questions, than in providing the answers.

Grow and Die

Two of my favorite blogs both had interesting views about company growth and competition. First Seth Godin blogged about a colleague's despair about how a smaller more nimble competitor was about to eat his company's lunch - and how his company's past success was preventing them from reacting to the threat.

The guys at 37signals, (my new favorite business model), answered the question; How do you handle the pressure to grow (your business)?

What is it about human nature that morphs our motivation and our expectations, once we garner some success? Why is it, that CEO's are so attracted to the phrase "Grow or Die?"

I think it is a self destructive mantra. Self destructive, because it can lead you away from the very core capabilities that achieved some measure of success. Once you adopt a "Grow or Die" mentality, you set your corporate sights on adjacent business opportunities, or you focus only on the highest margin products or customers, or you set your sights on buying the competition.

You enter uncharted territory.

Just because your bagel shop is extremely popular locally, doesn't mean you should grow into a full line bakery. Nor does it mean that you should franchise your bagel shop. Nor does it mean you should open up a restaurant. Nor should you automatically consider buying up all the other bagel shops in town.

Because none of these strategies made you successful in the first place.

If you're like most successful entrepreneurs, you started you business to fill a need or to feed a passion.

Not to rule the world.

I think the guys at 37signals have it about right. Growth is in the eye of the beholder. They can remain true to their ideals, close to their passion, without adding hundreds of staff or moving into a large corporate office. They can add new products, attract new customers without all the traditional bulky infrastructure.

Because staying close to their passion and filling a customer need is their sweet spot. If you do something you love, you never work a day in your life.

If you're determined to grow your business at the cost of staying close to your passion you just may turn the phrase Grow or Die into Grow AND Die.

Your mission changes from serving customers to serving shareholders.

And a corporate mission of Get BIG or Stay BIG, is pretty hollow. Work becomes work.

The Circular Firing Squad

A recent "up close" experience in developing web applications has left me with the following conclusion.

I.T. has met the enemy and it is us.

Attempting to render web based applications in every major browser is a huge task. Basic images don't render the same way in IE7 as in IE6 or Firefox or Safari or whatever. Applications act slightly differently, depending upon which you're using.

This is very OLD news to internet developers. If their business counterparts really understood the challenges, companies like Microsoft, would be under seige, because all these costs are built into the web based software they use and the web based software they're developing.

They just don't know it.

I can't imagine the amount of work this has caused (and is causing) developers around the world. Can you imagine the outcry if Television producers had to adapt their shows depending upon whether you were watching them on a Sony or a Magnavox or a Sharp television?

Give me a break.

This situation makes as much sense as a circular firing squad.

Realizing the Obvious

The guys at 5Rules explain the reason why good, formalized, Performance Management processes matter.

Check it out.

You Can't Handle the Success!

What do Wal-Mart and Home Depot, two of the world's largest retailers have in common?

Everyday low pricing.

Early on, Sam Walton figured out that it cost him a LOT of money to put on sales. Aside from the price changing (and changing back, after the sale), there were sales rung up at incorrect prices, causing customer complaints, etc.

He felt that a much better business model was to adopt everyday low pricing. He didn't make a secret of it. He just did it. Everyday low pricing became Wal-Mart's manta. All the employees know it. All their customers know it. It works.

Home Depot was born and initially grew through "loss leaders". They'd make HUGE bulk purchases and stack the product high in the aisles. Customers couldn't help but trip over the sales. But early on, Home Depot executives made a visit to Bentonville, Arkansas and were convinced to change course. Adopting everyday low pricing helped create the largest Home Improvement chain in the world.

So here's a question to my phone company and my cable company.

Why wouldn't it work for you too?

Communications companies have created a tremendous amount of "busy work" for themselves, churning customers like crazy. There's a whole customer sub-culture out there, who threaten to leave every six months or so, and are granted the latest promotional price. Last week my neighbor threatened to leave Time Warner for Direct TV and instantly received a $40/month discount off his bill. Almost a $500 annual savings! These companies assume that this activity is simply a cost of doing business. A cost they build into their pricing. A cost we, as consumers, pay for.

Perhaps it's time to stop the insanity! Imagine a world where all of Time Warner's customers were paying the same (lower) rate.... A world where AT&T had two or three standard service plans that didn't change from week to week.

Imagine the impact on customer goodwill if these companies actually moved you to the plan which benefited YOU the most, depending upon your mix of services - instead of penalizing customers who happen to "go over" their text message or primetime minutes? Imagine a world where your phone bill was 1 page long.

I don't think AT&T or Time Warner could handle the change. Or the success.

Stop Writing Manuals and Start Creating Videos!

Today I discovered a really neat software tool that allows you to create videos of whatever appears on your PC screen. The tool records both audio and video, so it is extremely simple to create on the fly software demos or even narrate Powerpoint presentations.

Why would anyone ever create another training document, when you could record a presentation?

Here's an example of a video I made in literally a few minutes.



The video was created using a FREE product called CamStudio. And trust me. If I can use it, you can too.

I think you'll find that your employees or customers would much rather spend a minute or two watching your video, than reading a brochure. And as you can see, I uploaded my video onto YouTube, then embedded it into my blog.

The Apathy War

Seth Godin has a great blog this morning about the Two kinds of "Don't Know". While Seth points out these observations as a warning to Marketers, his blog should serve as a beacon to I.T. Project Leaders as well.

My team faced the two kinds of "Don't Know" first hand, when trying to educate and train employees on a new business system.

I had been through the process before, during a Global SAP system implementation for a prior company. For my new company, to help get the message out and to help our employees get trained, (to address "Don't Know") our team did a LOT of stuff.

1. Our team provided monthly project updates via email.
2. We posted project information on a blog.
3. We created a spot on the corporate intranet for project updates.
4. We provided detailed process transaction documentation.
5. We provided "cheat sheets" featuring transaction shortcuts.
6. We provided online web based (self-paced) training, available 24x7.
7. We provided online integrated help within the application.
8. We provided a tool free phone number for any questions.
9. We pre-trained our Helpdesk to answer questions and to support our employees.
10. We built and provided access to a duplicate, test environment, where employees could actually logon and practice their transactions (available months before our "go live").
11. We held classroom system transaction training.
12. We held Process overview training.
13. We built a train the trainer model, to develop local experts, who could be relied upon as a "first line of defense".
14. We created process user groups so our employees could rely on their community for support (and we led the monthly meetings).

None of it mattered, because many of the employees, fell into the second "Don't Know" group.

They didn't care.

And no amount of communications, training materials or practice opportunities can overcome apathy.

In retrospect, our time would have been much better spent "engaging employees", measuring their committment, motivation and project understanding, rather than focusing on training/communications tools and expecting employees to listen and learn.

To defeat "Don't Care", you need strong corporate committment. You need leadership. You need to win "hearts and minds".

We didn't need another training brochure. We were fighting an Apathy War.

Really Clever

Ever watch TV and think to yourself, I could have written a better commercial? Or seen a crappy magazine ad or billboard and thought, I could have make a lot of money in advertising?

One Man's Blog features several clever billboards, which may convince you otherwise.

Brand Betrayal

Why is it that companies intentionally do things to undermine their brands? To piss off their customers?

In just one week we've had two examples in the Tech world.

First, Apple drastically lowered the prices of their products, notably the iPhone by $200, causing their early adopters a LOT of heartburn. Steve Jobs quickly relented and offered up a $100 store credit towards Apple products.

But at what cost to the next product launch?

Today, several irate bloggers are writing about how Microsoft bypassed their automatic security update feature on Windows XP and Vista, to "force patch" that very application - even if their customers had disabled the feature on their PC!

This corporate "home invasion" is completely unacceptable to most of Microsoft's customers.

Yet someone in the bowels of the organization thought they could "slip something by the consumer". Has there ever been an example where this type of behavior has worked to the long term advantage of a company or their brand?

Was the Ford brand enhanced long term by the internal decision NOT to fix engineering problems with the Ford Pinto, because customer litigation costs were anticipated to be a fraction of the cost to remedy the problem?

Did the Firestone brand benefit by manufacturing substandard tires?

There's an old leadership adage that says; "Run your company as if your name were on the door."

For some public companies, that lesson seems lost.

There's Nothing Like an Open Mind

As a Canuck, I like to think Canadians are a little more willing to "think outside the box".

Slashdot proves me wrong, with this story about Montreal bureaucrats who seem to be battling common sense.

And winning.

Thinking Outside the Stall

If you want an example of how difficult it is to jump the curve with product innovation, look no further than Uriah Smith's 1899 concept car called the Horsey Horseless.

I think this was an early example of "thinking outside the stall".

Basically this contraption is a horseless carriage, complete with horse's head. The world's first hood ornament was designed so that the car wouldn't upset traditional horse powered carriage traffic and was also made hollow, to enable fuel storage.

There is no truth to the rumour that Uriah Smith's descendants were behind the design of the Ford Pinto.

I think this is a great example of how difficult it has always been to develop game changing technology. Regardless of the century, the problem with inventing the future is that we're grounded in the present.

School's Never Out

Want to build a learning organization? It starts by asking one question repeatedly.

"What did you learn this week?"

And listening to the answer.

Try asking the question in a group setting. Invite your team to lunch or set aside some time late on Friday for a meeting. Go round the table and have each person relate what they learned this week.

The first couple of meetings may not elicit much discussion or lessons learned, but persevere and you'll begin to set the expectation that your team should come prepared with lessons to share.

Well facilitated, these meetings can become lively sessions, with team members sharing similar learning experiences or suggesting additional ways to address a situation, move forward on a difficult problem, or effectively work with a difficult employee. Perhaps an employee didn't have a lesson to share...how about recommending a favorite business book to the team?

Done well, your team will begin to open themselves up to teachable moments and to continuously self-question - how could I/we have done this better? They'll begin asking co-workers for advice rather than trying to solve situations all on their own.

You'll build a trust within your team. A feeling that you "have each other's back" - that you want everyone to succeed. At a minimum, it's an opportunity to "blow off steam" - to vet issues causing stress.

You may discover some team members who are oblivious. Each week (or month) they'll attend the meeting with nothing to share. They clock in each day and do their jobs but don't have their "radar up", watching for teachable moments. They're caught in a daily grind, locked into a rut. Worst case, they may be the kind of employee who "checks their brain at the door".

There's a place for these employees too.

Working for the competition.

Here are four steps to beginning the process.

Step 1: Start asking the question in a group setting.
Step 2: Encourage (demand?) participation.
Step 3: Keep asking the question. (Make continuous learning a habit.)
Step 4: Move the "dunces" out.

Turn learning into a habit and watch what happens to team productivity, employee engagement and morale.

School of "Hard Knocks"

I've discovered a new show on HBO called "Hard Knocks". It's a documentary on the Kansas City Chiefs training camp. Every show is filled with teachable moments for business. Training camp is all about personnel evaluation, personal motivation, training, job measurement and job performance.

In business, if we exhibited even a fraction of the organizational development effort depicted by this series, most of our companies would be performing at a much higher level.

In football, from a player's perspective, it's easy to tell whether you're winning or losing - how you stack up against the competition.

You get beaten on a play. The coach yells at you (or not). You make a block. You catch a pass. You check the scoreboard at the end of the game. You check your record at the end of the season. You win the playoffs or you don't. Success or failure is pretty black and white.

In business we deal in shades of grey. Few of us are pushed to excellence because there are several other people waiting to take our "roster position". Sometimes it's difficult to know whether you're clearly winning or losing. In fact, everyone on "your team" may even have a different definition of what "winning" is!

I've worked in several companies where one division earns a big bonus (wins), while another earns nothing (loses). Yet both divisions traded under the same NYSE ticker symbol!

It seems to me that we have an opportunity to learn something here. If we can somehow develop a common definition of winning, and craft incentives to win or lose as one team, perhaps we'd all spend more time finding ways to work well together, to challenge each other - to improve all our performances.

And organizational development would move out of HR and into the daily lives of every department.

Business Led or You're Dead

Somewhere in the midwest, storm clouds are brewing over yet another ERP implementation project. In about six weeks, when the project is expected to go live, the ABC company (name changed to protect the guilty) will learn that many of the process decisions they've made are wrong. The new automated processes will actually be slower and more cumbersome than current processes. Their staff will be completely unprepared. Things will grind to a halt.

It will be an unmitigated disaster.

How do I know this? Unlike the company, I spent an hour or so listening to the Project Manager.
His client company is a leader in its industry. Their past success is making them "hard of hearing". "Just make the system do what we've always done." they say.

Which should beg the question; "Why not stick with the legacy system?"

What they don't understand is that to achieve meaninful improvements, you actually need to change something.

ABC's expectation is that by simply installing a world class ERP system, their processes and operational performance will improve as a result. Nothing could be further from the truth.

That same reasoning would have you purchase a pair of Air Jordan basketball shoes with the expectation that you'll be playing guard for the Chicago Bulls.

Not gonna happen.

Operational excellence is achieved with three ingredents; great people, great processes and the right tools. A new ERP system is just a tool. Just one componant.

Installing a new system is an opportunity to re-examine the way your company does things. A chance to simplify, to optimize, to take a fresh look at the way things are done. It's a chance to re-educate yourself in how your company processes work. If you don't do this on a regular basis, you'll be surprised at the difference in the way you think processes work and they way they're actually done.

Reviewing processes takes a big investment in time and resources - business resources. Unless the project is business led, you simply can't pry loose the key people who can make a big positive difference in the outcome. Everyone is too busy "doing their regular jobs" to devote any time on the project.

It's the Number 1 reason ERP projects fail.

(Shameless plug) If your company is contemplating a major I.T. project in the near future, may I suggest you check out my e-Book entitled; "Lessons Learned from the ERP Frontline".

It's available by either clicking on the Lulu link on this website or by going to http://www.lulu.com/ and searching on my name or the title.

And best of all, it's free.

More Business Organics

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog entitled Business Organics. Now, along comes a blog from Jason Freid at 37signals that compares software development cycles to the growth of plants.

Introducing 5Rules

Highly astute readers of this blog will notice that I've just added a new site link to a soon to be launched venture I'm involved in, called 5Rules.

5Rules is a software company that creates web applications to make everyday business processes simpler. We're targeting small to mid-sized companies with 10-100 employees, who don't have the internal I.T. resources, the money or the time to automate many of the processes they currently manage using paper forms and interoffice mail. (We aren't discriminating... big companies can use it too!)

Our model is to provide easy to use, web based applications. That means all you need is a PC and an internet connection to get started. (If you’re reading this, you’re already there!)

Our goal is to build great applications which adhere to 5Rules. (Hence the name.)

Rule 1. Quick start. You should be able to begin using our software in 5 minutes. No extensive training is required. All you need to get started is a PC connected to the internet!

Rule 2. Intuitive application design and functionality. Information, help and functions are laid out as you’d expect them. We will provide screen shots and demos to show you how easy it is! Information about each feature is embedded throughout the application (although we don't think you'll need it!)

Rule 3. Just what you need and nothing more. We are designing our apps to serve a single purpose and don’t overload them with features you’ll never use.

Rule 4. A Risk free experience. Try our applications for free. If you do subscribe to our more fully featured versions and decide to leave, you may do so at any time. And you can take your data with you. (We don’t take hostages!).

Rule 5. Provide Value for money. Our aim is to satisfy the needs of small to mid sized companies who can’t afford big software prices, so we price our applications to provide great value for what you get.

Our inspiration comes from the guys at 37signals, who are pioneers in the art of building terrific, well designed, easy to use web apps. And inspiration also comes from a lifetime in business, where many processes are still much more complicated and cumbersome than they need to be.

Our company site will be up in a couple of weeks, when we'll introduce our first application and start soliciting volunteers to help Beta test applications as soon as they're ready!

Maybe the Apple was Just Bruised

After reading Steve Jobs' open letter addressing the legions of upset iPhone customers, he may have turned a bad situation into a positive one.

After reading Digg comments to his open letter, he seems to have placated most of the mob.

Rotten Apple?

If you were one of the early iPhone adopters, you probably feel like these people after hearing the announcement of the $200 price cut.

What was Apple thinking?

Hundreds of thousands of people gladly shelled out $600 for the iPhones when they first arrived. They camped in line in front of Apple stores! The product was met with rave reviews. Customers absolutely believed they were getting value for their money.

Until Apple convinced them otherwise, with yesterday's announcement.

I could understand a SMALL price drop - or perhaps even some sort of pre-Christmas sale. But to chop the price by $200 within 66 days of launch? That thing is depreciating faster than my Ford Focus!

Makes one wonder how long the lines will be for the next new Apple product?

Step right up..... please?

The Power of Surveys

I'm a fan of surveys.

I've used surveys throughout my career to help me gauge helpdesk customer satisfaction, effectiveness of communications/training and sometimes to determine how well an I.T. project is going (from my customers' perspective). There are dozens of survey tools available, but typically I use Survey Monkey for its ease of use..

I only have a few rules about surveying.

1. Surveys should be made of not more than 8, clear, concise, unambiguous, well thought out questions.
2. Each survey should take less than 2 minutes to complete.
3. The survey results are always shared with my team and my customers, usually posted on a portal for everyone to see - whether good news or bad.
4. Most times, the last survey question is an open ended one. How can we improve? (the experience, process, training or communications).
5. I usually allow anonymous responses (I send out the invitations to specific invitees, but don't track the responses by individual). I really believe it allows for more open, honest feedback.

As long as you limit your surveys to important issues and don't spam your employees or customers, my experience is that most people will fill them out.

Sometimes you find out more than you bargained for.

We were conducting a post system implementation review and wanted to find out how our customers' "go live" experiences were. While I knew that many sites were struggling with the new system, I suspected that part of the reason was the (low) level of priority that local management had given to preparing for the project.

And so I did something a little sneaky.

I prepared one survey, but sent it to two distinct groups; Managers and End Users. The survey results for the two groups were pretty consistent until we reached a question about site readiness for the "go live".

While the majority of management thought their sites were well prepared, 85% of their employees felt they weren't! We identified a clear disconnect between site management perceptions and those of their staff.

Based upon the open ended question at the end of the survey, it was clear that the site management were not nearly engaged as they said they were. According to employee comments, managers rarely spoke about the importance of the project, never updated employees on progress and didn't allow adequate (or in some cases ANY) training practice time for the employees to get comfortable with the new system.

While we conducted site readiness assessments before we went live, we made the mistake of asking the managers only.

Lesson learned.

Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?

I just rediscovered this seven year old HBR article on Leadership, entitled "Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?" It's written by Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones who have authored a book by the same title.

The question is as relevant today as it was in 2000.

Have You Mashed Yet?

Back in April, I wrote a blog entitled 3 Experiments to Try Right Now. One of the suggestions was to experiment with mashups - the linking of multiple databases to create new integrated experiences.

As outlined in a New York Times article, experimenting with mashups is easier than ever.

If you haven't begun experimenting with mashups yet, look for an opportunity within your business and use it as a personal growth opportunity for one of your developers.

I'm betting that once you've mashed, you'll keep on mashing.