To Be Honest....

I do a lot of writing at work - email, memos, general communication.

The other day my boss was reviewing something I'd written before we published it.

He was stopped dead in his tracks over the phrase "to be honest".

"Aren't we always honest?" he asked.

I had used it as a throwaway phrase without thinking much about it. I was sharing the fact that a change in company policy benefited both our employees and (to be honest) our company.

Perhaps I should have said "to be clear" or perhaps I should have discarded the phrase entirely.

To be honest (wink) I wrote it without thinking.

When writing, brevity and clarity matter.

Order of Magnitude Metrics

My brother Bob runs an accounting firm back in Canada. He's a sharp business person and has a real gift for speed-of-light billing and more importantly, collecting.

Bob classifies his receivables in a 30/60/90 report.

To most accountants, that means 30 days, 60 days and 90 days outstanding receivables.

Except Bob measures his receivables in minutes.

What changes would occur at your workplace if you changed the order of magnitude of your business metrics?

Consequences

Too often as we look at our business processes, one comes across the situation where whole new activities spring up and become ingrained in "what we do" simply because someone isn't doing their job right in the first place.

I once worked for a large printing company that couldn't invoice jobs until they'd received all the invoices from their suppliers, because they didn't trust their purchasing processes. They waited two additional weeks while they checked and double checked their margins on each job. Millions of dollars of invoicing delayed every time.

How about the case where someone else is assigned the task to follow up on pre-qualified leads that the sales team should be calling?

Or the late (or non-existent trip report) after an outside sales person makes a call. Somehow the expense report gets submitted.

Let's face it. Would you always drive the speed limit if there were no traffic cops?

I didn't think so.

Consequences help get things done right the first time and can help kill off the temptation to create an additional process to fix a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Amanda's Posse

Meet Amanda (not her real name).

Daddy's little girl isn't just helping out with the chores. She's an archetype. On the surface, she's mimicking her parent's behavior helping to keep her home neat and clean.

Thirty years ago, the weight of the family vacuum cleaner would have prohibited her from doing it at all.

And sixty years ago, she'd be using a broom and dustpan (probably with unsatisfactory results).

But technology advancements are allowing her to accomplish tasks that once could only be done well) by those with far more practical experience.

Imagine how she'll change the way work gets done, once she hits the workforce. This interesting article at readwriteweb details how the generations are using the Web and related technologies.

Extrapolate some of the findings of this article to our little girl as she enters the workforce. On day 1, when most of us would be figuring out where the washrooms are, she'll arrive at work with

• 5,000 Facebook friends
• A mobile phone with 1,000 contacts, 750 Productivity apps (and one click access to call all her Facebook friends)
• A high degree of comfort with advanced web search techniques.
• A practiced ability to multitask that's beyond our current comprehension, honed by more than a decade of handling many different text conversations at once.

She'll be able to research any problem quickly, find out how others have handled it, get opinions from experts and colleagues alike and do it without really having to think about it.

You won't just be hiring Amanda, you'll be hiring her posse.

Image credit: www.theblogfathers.com

Do you have a Hovercraft?

I enjoy the recent Orbitz (the travel company, not the gum) commercial, where an average guy watering his yard is interrupted by a landing of the Orbitz Hovercraft.

The pilot emerges to hand the guy a refund check, because after he booked his flight, the prices dropped and he was entitled to a refund for the difference.

"Why didn't you just mail it?" the confused homeowner asks.

"Because we have a Hovercraft!" is the reply.

And so it got me thinking. How many work processes exist because they can?

Are you Essential?

This is a question worth asking yourself periodically.

From time to time we're all guilty of getting into a rut at work - slogging through paperwork, handling routine requests. In most companies, what we do is necessary, but are we essential?

Essential implies belonging to the very nature of a thing and therefore being incapable of removal without destroying the thing itself or its character

What are you bringing to your job that no one else could? Attitude? Efficiency? Ideas? Execution? How vital are you to your company?

Would your fellow employees vote you to the company All Star team?

Better to ask (and answer) this question for yourself, than have someone ask it for you.

Better Together

In the last couple of weeks I've had a chance to reacquaint myself with a couple of great local I.T. vendors. They're helping us craft a Disaster Recovery strategy.

For larger companies this is relatively easy. Just throw gobs of money, time and resources at the problem and away you go. It's actually easier to justify DR in a larger business environment than in a smaller one - even though the predictable outcome of NOT having a recovery plan is the same. (I've had to do both.)

For privately held firms or smaller public firms, "DR on a budget" is a lofty challenge. Duplicating a server rack at another site is expensive. Having all your applications hosted at a 3rd party data center is expensive. There has to be a better alternative.

This week, a couple of local vendors are really stepping up. Our shop is thinking about virtualizing our servers - both for the daily benefit of leveraging unused processing power and because we can take a "snapshot" of the virtualized servers to shorten recovery time in the event of a disaster.

Virtualizing servers effectively separates applications from hardware, allowing the applications to be easily transported and recovered into another virtualized environment very quickly.

Think of it this way.

Circa 1950, every office Manager had their own secretary to do typing. One Manager. One secretary. Sometimes the secretary was overwhelmed with work and sometimes there was no work to do. Then someone came up with a different idea.

By introducing "typing pools", a group of secretaries were organized to handle the typing needs of a group of Managers. In this way, no single secretary got overwhelmed with work.

Server virtualization works the same way. Most servers are responsible for one main application or service. By pooling processing power across applications, we can make better use of our servers.

Well, once we get our servers virtualized, we benefit on a daily basis. But, in the event of a disaster, where can we recover? We're all set to go. We have snapshot tape backups of our virtual servers in hand.

Now what?

Well, it turns out that there are NOT a whole lot of great options for small business. If we want to recover our data at a hosted site, we need to rent the site as if we were using it every day. This option is way too expensive (or we'd already be doing it).

So the way I see it, we've just uncovered a business opportunity for our vendors. And to our vendors' credit, they see it too. So now, they're trying to figure out how they might host DR services for small business. The idea would be to setup a series of virtual servers in their data center, then contract to several companies for the same recovery space to cover their equipment costs. And voila! An affordable DR solution for smaller businesses.

Companies like SunGuard and IBM have been doing this for years for big companies. Now it's time that someone offered the same protection for smaller business - at prices that smaller businesses can afford.

The lesson here, is that some customers simply invite their vendors into the office to be beaten up on price. Smarter customers take a look for opportunities where both customer and vendor can be better together.

There are almost always win/win outcomes, if everyone is willing to look for them.

The Connection Culture

Michael Lee Stallard has written a great manifesto entitled: The Connection Culture - A New Source of Competitive Advantage. available on the ChangeThis website.

Read it this weekend.

I'm not kidding.

He talks about three core values that are essential to the human connection; Vision, Value, Voice.

I've seen teams come together in amazing ways when these values are present. Hopefully Stallard's observations will ring true for you too.

Dumbing Down S.M.A.R.T. Goals

If your company isn't getting the desired employee performance results from the use of S.M.A.R.T. goals, the guys at 5Rules tell you why.

The Power of Transparency

Need to build up department credibility within your organization? Start thinking about transparency.

One sure way to improve your standing, is to begin measuring what's important to your customers (whether they're internal or external) and publicly reporting your results.

This technique bares your performance to the world. While it may be a tough pill to swallow, when you first do it, it does accomplish a few things.

1. First it shows that performance improvement is important to you, your team and your customers.

2. It demonstrates (or sets the expectation) that you're doing something to improve.

3. It frames the challenge objectively rather than subjectively. You can begin to have fact based discussions.

4. It tracks improvement progress.

5. It begins to focus your team on corrective action rather than on explaining away the problems.

6. It helps identify whether you're measuring the right things. (i.e. if your metrics improve but your customer's aren't happy, it's time to re-examine what you're measuring!).

Some basics about transparency....

1. Setup customer feedback mechanisms for all your critical processes or services. These can be suggestion boxes, electronic surveys, blog comments...whatever works.

2. Allow comments to be anonymous. Yes, there will always be a few idiots who take advantage of this, but in the end, I think it allows for more honest feedback.

3. Communicate what you're doing to improve and why it matters. (For technical departments, R&D, or I.T.) think in terms of a WIIFM (what's in it for me?) statement, rather than relying on technical jargon. Respond to suggestions (either individually, if possible) or in summary form, on an internal website or a group email.

4. Start somewhere. Becoming transparent can be a daunting task. Pick one process, measure and post the results. Communicate your improvement efforts. Survey occasionally.

Transparency is part of an ongoing process. It's a management philosophy. It's an ongoing dialog. If you're not doing it now, it's worth trying.

The Great One

I've resisted any hockey analogies in this blog......until now.

I was thinking about how we recognize achievements in business - record sales, record profits, sometimes team recognition for a job well done. I may be stating the obvious, but in business, seldom are great accomplishments achieved alone.

I came across Wayne Gretzky's scoring records recently. For those of you who don't know hockey, Gretzky was the best ever to play the game. He retired many years ago and still holds 61 different scoring titles. His nickname was "The Great One". How cool is that?

Of interest to me, were the number of records he held for assists. He wasn't simply great because he scored goals (and he scored LOTS of goals). He was great because he made the rest of his team great as well. He made plays to allow his teammates to score. And needless to say, he played on a lot of winning teams.

We keep assist stats in hockey, baseball and basketball. On every hockey goal, credit is goven to the scorer and the one or two players that helped make it happen. In baseball, every out is recorded by position and the scoring identifies everyone who touched the ball in the process.

In business we tend not to keep track of "assists" - but who wouldn't want to work in a place where everyone was looking out for each other's success? - a place where co-workers were recognized for helping others? Shouldn't we find a way to recognize business "assists"?

"The Great One" scored 894 goals in his career. He also had 1962 assists. For every goal he scored, he helped two teammates score as well.

So the question is: "How could you recognize "assists" at your company?

Realizing the Obvious

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

Check it out.

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.

Windshield Wipers and Data Integrity

Tell me. When do you notice a problem with your car's windshield wipers?

Answer: When you need to use them. (And then, it's too late.)

On dry, sunny days, cruising along the highway, we never give a thought to our windshield wipers. We enjoy the ride. We get to our destination.

The same is true for data integrity. We don't spend much time thinking about our company's data or it's accuracy. We process transactions in our system. We serve customers. We generate reports, we close the books. 'Nuff said.

Then comes the day when we decide to upgrade our system, or do a deep dive into the data to solve a problem. And we discover that our data is terrible.

Just when we need to use it.

It's a lesson learned by EVERY company at least once in it's lifetime. Systems don't ensure data integrity, PEOPLE do. Sure, your system has edit checks, makes you complete all the fields and may even do some duplicate entry checking. But it doesn't do everything!

Anyone who has gone through a major systems implementation can tell you that data cleansing and data integrity of the legacy system chews up a significant amount of a project budget (as much as 10%-15% of the total cost).

And it's this crappy information you're basing business decisions on every day.

I've worked for a number of profitable companies who have learned this lesson. My last ERP project uncovered that within our legacy system, we were using more than 20,000 chart of accounts across the organization. More than 20,000!

Our Purchasing function had created more than 45,000 vendors in our legacy system. That's more than Wal-Mart! Even though the legacy system cost many millions of dollars, our Purchasing department couldn't prepare a report of how much we purchased from individual vendors. They asked the vendors to supply that information to us each year!

When we completed our project, our team had reduced the chart of accounts to less than 2,000 and our vendor list had been culled to less than a quarter of it's previous size. In the course of the exercise, we uncovered many duplicates, inaccuracies and data omissions.

Why? Because no one "owned" the data. Everyone relied on "the system". It's easy to blame something that can't argue back. Stupid software.

Usually, ERP implementations create new business roles. (note I didn't say I.T. roles). The folks who enter the data, who use the data, who rely upon the data, need to own the data.

In my case, our company created two new positions. Only one Financial person had the authority to create a new account within the system. This insured that no duplicate use accounts were entered because the data owner acted as the gatekeeper. You don't need THAT account, use this account instead (like everyone else). So few new accounts were created, and the size (and more importantly the integrity) of our accounting system remained intact.

On the Purchasing side, we dramatically reduced the number of people who were authorized to create new vendor records. This forced our purchasing users to spend a little more time searching for an existing vendor, rather than simply adding them again (with a slightly different spelling). Reports were created to monitor the growth of the account to warn us if new vendors were being created faster than expected.

Once the business took ownership for the data, the quality of the data improved dramatically.

The moral of the story?

Even though the sun is shining, take a look at your windshield wipers.

The Importance of Mindset

Several days ago, I wrote a blog called David vs. Goliath I.T. Tactics, where I discussed some strategies for a small company to compete against much larger I.T. resources of their competitors.

Fresh from a link on the Signal vs Noise blog, comes an interview with Jason Freid, President of 37signals. 37signals is a small (8 person) software company that builds easy to use applications for project management, to do lists, chat and the like. They have over 1,000,000 customers.

They see small as being a big advantage.

Jason makes several great points that guide their busness philosophy. While watching this video, it struck me that perhaps his greatest tool against being small, is his mindset. He sees small as an advantage and doesn't measure success by the number of employees (exactly the opposite!)

Some of the takeaways from the video.

1. Keep business structure loose.
2. No long term planning (no one ever gets it right anyway - stay in the 30-90 day zone).
3. Increase influence not headcount. Making a big influence is better than making a big payroll (my words).
4. Proximity kills productivity. Large teams, co-located tend to interrupt more than help each other, in Jason's experience. Half of their staff (4 people) are entirely remote.
5. Compete against FREE by providing products with value (that people are willing to pay for).
6. Don't limit your talent pool by geography.

And perhaps the best advice.

7. You don't have to be a big company to do big things. (The internet levels the playing field and allows you to be discovered - allows you the customer reach that once required huge investment by big companies.)

Perhaps 37signals' biggest competitive weapon is their mindset.

Hiring Athletes

A colleague once noted that I tended to hire "athletes" rather than "position players" - that I chose personal performance attributes over specific experience within a position.

In retrospect, I think he was right.

After all, in my experience, I've seldom hired someone into a job that they were expected to have for a very long time. Even technical positions (at least in my experience) get rotated to provide growth opportunities for staff or to increase depth at a specific position. So to me, it always seemed appropriate to hire "athletes".

Athletes are people who possess that "spark". They're people you want to work with. They smile a lot. They're bright and energetic. They look you in the eye. The very best "athletes" have one additional trait.

They're curious.

They ask a lot of questions. They wonder how things work. They need to know why we do things the way we do. They have a built-in desire to improve things and an energy level to make it happen. They'll come up with three ways to do address a problem, not just one.

To carry the athlete analogy further, baseball manager's love "utility players" - players who can perform well at many positions - not just the one they were hired to play. It allows managers the flexibility to "tune" their lineups - moving players into positions to allow for more right (or left) handed batters depending upon the opposing pitcher. If a position player goes into a batting slump, a utility player can easily be substituted to improve offensive power against an opponent.

Hiring athletes, at least in my experience, provides the employee with a potentially wider range of experiences and improves your team's strength and flexibility to adapt to challenges.

Next time you need to fill a vacancy, ask yourself, "Is this person an "athlete?" If the answer is yes, hire them.

Great Grandma's Roast

Stories are wonderful things - especially in business. They're usually told to make a point or to educate the listener or perhaps to evoke an emotion. The good ones are entertaining, easily remembered and easily retold. They're a very effective teaching tool.

And we don't tell enough of them.

They're important to the lifeblood of any organization. Some stories capture a sense of company history. Remember the innovation spirit evoked by early HP commercials with Carly Fiorina standing in front of the shed where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invented together at the beginning of their partnership? Nowadays you have to search the HP site to find these stories. Like too many stories, they're buried deep in the bowels of the organization.

And untold stories are assets, wasted.

Sometimes the stories are based in historical fact. Sometimes they may even be made up. It doesn't matter. As long as the stories are entertaining, teachable moments, easily remembered and easily retold, they serve their purpose.

One of my favorites is told by my I.T. teams when implementing new processes. Too often, when you ask employees why they perform a function they way they do, the answer is either;

1. We've always done it that way.
2. That's the way I was shown how to do it.

The real answer of course, is "I don't know."

And then we tell this story.

One evening, while helping with preparations for a dinner with his in-laws, a husband noticed his wife slicing the ends off the roast, before placing it in the pan to be cooked.

"Honey, why do you do that?" he asked.

"That's the way my mother taught me to do it." came the reply.

Later that evening at the dinner table, still curious, the husband asked his mother-in-law about the practice.

"That's the way MY mother taught me to do it." she responded.

A couple of weeks later, while visiting Great Grandma, the husband couldn't resist asking again.

"Great Grandma, I have to know. Why do you always cut the ends off the roast before putting it in the pan to be cooked?"

"That's easy dear. My roasting pan is too small to fit a big roast." she replied.

I don't remember who first told me this story, but I've never forgotten it.

David vs. Goliath I.T. Tactics

I was talking to a company yesterday (let's call them ACME) about their I.T. function. They are a successful company who have been around a long time. In their industry, they're the runt of the litter. All their key competitors are many times their size.

While they produce competitive products and are growing rapidly, they're struggling to "keep up" with technological advances of their competitors. After all, they share customers with competitors who provide glossy, full featured business portals, plug'n'play system integration capabilities and who knows what else.

The competition has I.T. resources that dwarf the size of ACME's.

In some cases, small can be a competitive advantage. When your resources are constrained it's important that you make smart decisions about projects. Here's some suggestions that came to mind.

1. Make a list of things your I.T. department should STOP doing. Clear the decks of any development activity that isn't specifically addressing your competitive situation.

2. Edit the To Do list to two or three critical enhancements. In my experience, teams can get paralyzed by the sheer length of the To Do list. (I know it happens to me, whenever I glance at my "to do" list around the house!). Once you get a few tasks knocked off the list, your team can begin to build momentum.

3. Throw the rest of the To Do list away. Your priorities will be extremely dynamic and will likely change several times before you ever revisit the list. Once you've completed the first three, then have the business decide on the next three.

4. Steal ideas shamelessly and make them your own. When you're playing catch-up, you can't afford the time to reinvent the wheel. (Can you EVER afford the time?) Use Pareto's rule and look for the 20% of the competitor's services that deliver 80% of the value and implement those. Large companies have a tendency to tie up their tremendous I.T. resources on features and functionality that their customers will rarely (if ever) use. In some cases large I.T. organizations suffer from the "we'll do it because we can" mentality. Take advantage of that.

5. Try for quick wins by implementing quickly. Look for packaged applications that can be quickly integrated and deliver quick results. Use your peer network (in non competing industries) - how do you handle EDI, what Portal software do you use and why?

6. Make the hard decisions about your talent pool. One excellent I.T. resource can be as effective as three or four average-to-poor resources. Judge fairly, but judge quickly. And don't be afraid to open your wallet to get the expertise you need. Make the case with HR that you're expanding the scope and responsibilities of the positions, not just replacing the junior level Business Analyst. Underperformers have a bigger negative impact on smaller teams than on larger teams (where they can more readily disappear into the woodwork).

7. Keep an eye on the horizon, but stay in the present. It's easy to be distracted by minutia (while we're doing this, we could also fix that). Stay focused on the present and achieve. You'll get to those other opportunities later.

Do you have any additional thoughts that might help ACME out?

Who's Your Bubba?

A friend recommended a terrific book, called Designing the Obvious, by Robert Hoekman Jr. This book is all about designing web applications for ease of use.

One of the concepts Hoekman espouses, is to create a persona for each type of user - a brief description of a "typical" user of the application. You give your persona a name, a career and a business challenge he (or she) is struggling with (that you're trying to solve). You might even download a random photo from the web and give your persona a "face".

The exercise is indended to help you get inside the head of your customer. To change your perspective. To see things from your customer's point of view.

It reminded me of a road trip that our Marketing department took, several years ago, to a well known Direct Marketing company that specializes in outdoor recreation (hunting, fishing, camping and the like).

They told us the story of "Bubba".

"Bubba" was the name of their typical customer. They could describe what Bubba looked like, what Bubba liked to eat and what clothes he typically wore. They knew what truck (not car) he drove. They knew how much money he made and what he liked to do on his time off. No matter who we talked to, Bubba's description remained remarkably consistent.

And everything they did required Bubba's approval. If they wanted to add a new line of fishing lures, they needed Bubba's permission. If they wanted to expand their line of fishing boats, Bubba's truck needed to be able to tow them. Before deciding to expand their line of firearms, Bubba had to be able to afford them.

When their Marketing department held meetings, they typically reserved a chair for Bubba.

The concept might sound a little corny, but it worked. They never lost sight of the customer. And they were very successful with this technique.

How do you sustain customer focus? Does your company have a Bubba?