Diversity and Complexity

I just enjoyed coffee with a friend who has recently been appointed CEO of a business with diverse sources of revenue. He was excited by the new challenge, but was puzzled as to why the business systems were so much more complex than in his prior business.

The reason, it turned out, was quite simple.

My friend's prior business had similar revenue, but all from a single source. This meant that the whole business could run on one core system. Any investments in that system would benefit the entire business and achieve greater economies of scale.

In his new position, he was collecting revenue from a three diverse sources. While these businesses were able to share services for Accounting, HR and IT, the technology investment was spread thin since each business required a separate system. And the need to integrate these systems to exploit synergies added further complexity.

My advice was that, from a technology investment perspective, he consider each revenue source to be it's own, smaller business. A simple way to measure this diversity is to apply industry standard classifications to your own business ( they are typically applied your customers to measure diversity of markets served). In my friend's case, these were Services, Medical Wholesaler and Software Publisher.

I had my friend complete the exercise below before we finished our coffee. Next up, we're going to use the results as a basis for his technology strategy.

Understand your Complexity

Try this for your own business:

  1. Distinguish your separate lines of business and assign a classification to each line using one of the industry classification standards, such as NAICS or NACE*.
  2. Based on the revenue generated by each line, consider what your systems budget should be for each business.
  3. Put a value on the synergies between each business line to identify valuable integrations.

If you would like to discuss how this exercise can further inform your technology strategy, please reach out to me at graham@primeFusion.ca and we can spend a few minutes on your specific circumstances.

*You can find details of NAICS at www.naics.com/search/ and NACE at ec.europa.eu/eurostat/.

Feel Your Pulse

I like to measure my pulse at the end of every workout to see how long it takes to return to resting. It's a great measure of overall well-being. Equally, our businesses have a few key pulses - critical activities that determine the speed at which we meet customer demands and measure our progress.

Recognizing those key health indicators and understanding how your business performs on each provides vital insights for well-being, innovation, and opportunities for getting better.

Consider three examples:

1) Days from "Quote to Cash" on your top revenue products 2) Hours from customer complaint to happy camper 3) Days to complete your month-end close

We all know the importance of an efficient quote to cash process. Whether this takes minutes or years, innovation around production, distribution, installation and onboarding is the mark of a great company. Most businesses could do this better.

Once your product is in your customer's hands, issues may arise as they consume it. Your business's reputation is dependant on the speed with which you can receive complaints, determine root cause, and return the customer to a happy place. Most businesses could do this a lot better!

If you conduct more than a handful of transactions each month, your Accounting team will have to work through the numbers to deliver month-end reports. It may not matter to you whether this happens on day 2 or day 22 of the month, but the time taken is a leading indicator of how well your systems serve your business. The more finagling required by Accounting, the less pristine your business information is. And that doesn't bode well for your ability to make well informed decisions on a more strategic level. Most businesses ... well, you know.

There are many other pulses that could apply. The best innovations arise from focusing on the big picture and not, for example, on the nitty gritty of the order admin process. Other big picture examples:

  • How long does it take to a new product from concept to first sale?
  • How long is your sales cycle?
  • How long does it take for a new hire to become fully effective?

You get the point.

The key is to have a short list of pulses that are critical for your business over the next 18 months, and to make the right moves to get each pulse to where your customers, employees and shareholders need each to be.

Your Three Pulses

Try this week's 5 minute exercise to see whether you can uncover opportunities to make a better business:

  1. List the three pulses that are most important to your company's prosperity.
  2. For each pulse, write down the number of hours or days it takes to complete, start to finish. If that varies, take an average.
  3. Next to each actual, write down the number of days your customer would like it to take.
  4. Now consider what you are doing to close each gap. Are you happy with these actions? If not, what will you change?

Send your results to me at graham@primeFusion.ca and I'll set up a short call to discuss ideas to exploit the opportunities you have outlined.

Outside-In Design

I made one of those calls this weekend. You know, the kind that you put off because you know how painful it's going to be. But there are lessons to be learned everywhere. With that in mind, and with a list of service issues in hand, I set aside an hour and dialed my provider's call centre.

No one ever calls support to say thank you. To pass the time while "the systems are looking up my account information", I like to engage the agent in pleasant conversation about the challenges THEY face. It makes the time worthwhile for me and seems to bring a smile to their day.

I hear lots of great ideas from the people on the front line - avoiding handoffs between silos, faster systems verification, and better answers to tricky questions.

It's amazing how often the agents feel they have to apologize. Fact is, the buck stops with leadership. Whether it's a conscious decision to spend budget elsewhere ( more agents vs better process?), or the experience is not measured ( at the expense of customer sat).

It's hard to take one's custom elsewhere, but it's dangerous to run a business on the assumption that customers will tolerate inconvenience when better alternatives exist. True - some industries simply don't do a good enough job for the grass to be greener, but that just makes them all the easier to disrupt.

This is why we should all design our businesses from the outside-in. Understand what the customer needs and decide what reputation you want to uphold. And know that your business is part of their process every day. What level of investment is that worth?

Your Outside-In Review

Next time you're in the position of speaking with a call centre, I suggest you take advantage of the conversation. Then call your own business and see how well you're doing with the tools you give to your staff. In fact, don’t wait - call now.

Then spend 10 minutes in your customer's shoes:

  1. What makes your consumer experience stand out when you interact with a call centre agent? What don't you like?
  2. Call your own business in the role of a customer and mark your experience out of 5. What score would you like to achieve?
  3. What can you do to provide your team with better process and tools so you can get to your target?

Send your results to me at graham@primeFusion.ca and I’ll suggest some quick wins to move your business up the scale.

The Best Collaborations

One of the great pleasures of my career has been to contribute to thousands of collaborations - efforts where we've pulled together teams of experts to solve problems large and small. I've experimented with many practices. Some worked and some didn't, but that's how you learn, right?

Here are five things I've learned that make the difference between great and not-so-great collaborations.

Have a coach. There's a buzz in team sports that you don't get in solo sports ( even golfers and skiers have their coaches). Working on a great collaboration is no different, but many business teams skip the coach role, the individual that trains the team in HOW to play. I’ve seen teams double their previous productivity and impact with good coaching.

Distinguish Collaborations from Committees. Collaborations are teams with complementary skills, formed to design a solution to address a specific challenge. Committees are review groups made up of complementary perspectives, and formed to make decisions and compromises. Don't confuse the two.

Pick the right problem. Spend time at the outset for the team to identify the real problem to be solved. Don't assume this will be the challenge that is originally presented - that's often (usually!) just a symptom. And be ready for the problem to morph as the work progresses.

Expect Expertise to Shift. A team can start with just two members and add expertise as the work evolves ( but be cautious about teams with more than seven members). Pay particular attention to ensuring the right skills are applied. If you don't have all the skills in-house, be open to using outside expertise, even if it's only for short time or a second opinion. Done right, this always pays off.

Pick the best Domain. Most business-changing opportunities will span organizations. If you don't involve Suppliers, Customers or both, in addition to all impacted parts of your business, you'll likely just move the problem around. For instance, cutting corners on product quality to hit a deadline or meet a revenue target will place an extra burden on support and service.

Rate Your Collaborations

Consider 2-3 teams that are collaborating in your business today. Pick a mix of completed and ongoing initiatives so you can look back on outcomes:

  1. Did these teams produce the results you had hoped for in the time expected? Did they have a coach to help them with their practices?
  2. How many of these groups were formed with complementary expertise ( as opposed to opinions)?
  3. Did each group change members in the course of the work? Were new members added ( or at least consulted)  as new expertise needs arose? Did members step back when issues are closed?
  4. Did all members have an opportunity to provide feedback on results and approach? What do they say?
  5. Were the original problems always resolved or did they ever re-surface? Did issues pop up elsewhere in the organization as a result of the team's solution?

Is collaboration a big deal for you? If so, I look forward to seeing your results. Send your thoughts to graham@primeFusion.ca and we can spend 15 minutes on the phone to discuss.

No Need to Outrun the Bear

I was skiing in the woods last weekend and noticed some interesting paw prints in the snow. This always brings to mind the wisecrack about not having to outrun the bear. You just need to outrun your slowest companion.

There's a topical analogy in business technology.

My last newsletter provided a 5 minute litmus test for you to determine whether your information security strategy needs more attention. Whether or not you concluded that you need to dig deeper, I have a few quick wins for you.

No security strategy completely guarantees against intrusion, but there are ways to reduce risk significantly, quickly and at low cost.

Over recent years, the hacker industry has focused more and more on the easy pickings, small, medium or large businesses whose security is lax and easily penetrated, and who can be monetized by techniques like ransomware.

The unfortunate fact is that many businesses pay less attention to security than they should, and security standards are low. This is your opportunity. With a few basic measures, you can reduce your risk by 10x. No kidding. Depending on your response to my litmus test, you may need to go further, but 10x is enough for you to be much better than the average. To outrun the majority of your peers.

So try my second 5 minute test to get started on your path to escaping the bear.

Six Quick Steps

Answer these questions YES or NO:

  1. Could your staff be responding to suspicious emails inviting them to visit sites, download software or transfer funds? (80% of breaches start like this, the vast majority through innocent error.)
  2. Do any of your non-IT staff have the ability to install software on their own ( or colleagues') computers?
  3. Does it take more than a week to install newly releaseed security patches on all your staff's computers?
  4. Do any of your suppliers' or business partners' systems interface with your systems?
  5. Last time you had a breach, did it take more than a day before you knew about it?
  6. If you had a breach next week, would your team need to spend time determining a response? Could this include having to notify customers and third parties?

If you answered YES to any of these questions, contact me at graham@primeFusion.ca to discuss some quick fixes.

And in case you missed it, here is my litmus test for the significance of security to your business.

Know Your Risk

There's one question that I am asked above all others. "My Board is asking me to provide an assessment of our security risk. We don't know how much we should be investing in information security, but there's a feeling we're not putting enough focus on this today. Where do I start?".

Aligning security needs with business strategy is a mind-blowing exercise for many leaders. No wonder, given the amount of press, technobabble and confusion that surrounds the topic. The good news is, there's an easy way to get started.

I've taken friends and clients through a few simple questions and, in about the time take it takes to meet over coffee, we always come up with the right next steps. Literally on a napkin. But first things first ...

Security is not a technology matter. It's a business decision.

To be perfectly clear, security is not simply a project, a skill set you need on your IT team, or a set of technologies to protect you against viruses and other intrusions. It's a series of investment decisions within your business strategy that drive ongoing activities. As you've heard me say in all other cases, technology choices follow business strategy, not the other way around.

CEO surveys consistently cite cybersecurity amongst the top 5 business challenges. But if your team masters the topic, your risk will be dramatically reduced, you can present maturity to your customers ( some of whom may not buy without appropriate assurances), and it will become normal course of business.

If you overlook the topic, assume IT "has it covered", and just cross fingers and toes, you are likely to expose your business to undue risk.

Security Risk Assessment on a Napkin

To cut through the fog of technology, standards, certifications and compliance regimes that you encounter when you research security strategy, these five simple questions will give you an idea of whether or not security should be a focus for your business:

  1. How many customer records do you store in your systems? Do these records include customer addresses, SINs and other details subject to privacy? If this number is in the tens of thousands or more, dig deeper.
  2. Have competitors and peers in your industry disclosed breaches over the last two years? Is your industry a target for hackers?
  3. What commercial IP does your business own? If this showed up on Wikileaks tomorrow, would your business survive with ease, crash and burn, or be somewhere in between?
  4. How many credit card transactions will your business handle this year? If the number is in the tens of thousands or higher, you are likely PCI compliant. If you are not, spend some time understanding PCI. ( Beware though - PCI compliance does not mean that your security is covered. It's a necessary step, but not sufficient.)
  5. Have breaches, viruses, or ransomware impacted your business over the last year?

If your answers cause concern, you will be well served by developing a better understanding of security needs. Contact me on graham@primeFusion.ca and we can talk through your options.

Why Platforms Matter

When you design your business systems architecture, the balance of buy vs build is important. Are you in the business of creating systems, or the business of leveraging systems built by others? Will you achieve agility by "owning the code" or by choosing the best platform partners?

One of my favourite clients successfully completed a long and arduous journey last year. Like many such journeys, this one was packed with lessons. I’m sharing with you to help you avoid the same challenges.

Several years ago, my client was coming close to outgrowing their core business system. They conducted a search for vendor solutions but couldn't find the perfect system. So the decision was made to build their own system from scratch. Owning the code, the thinking went, would give them complete flexibility on what the system could do for the business.

Here's what actually happened. Without realizing the consequences, they decided they were in the business of creating systems, but did not retool the business to add this core competency.

Three years later, this new system had not been completed.

When a new management focus was applied, I was asked to take a look and provide an opinion on how to complete the implementation. My conclusion was that the need to build the system from the ground up required the team to create too many low value components before they could implement anything resembling the system that the business required. And the search for a perfect system had driven scope creep to run amok.

My advice was to stop development, take another look at the available alternative vendor solutions, and consider moving from build to buy.

We quickly completed a thorough search and found a suitable alternative from a good vendor with solid references ( some unsolicited). The system would provide 90% of my clients “perfect” solution. Three years on, that was good enough for them. Six months later, the new system was up and running.

Don't get me wrong - buy was the right decision for this business, but there are plenty of circumstances where build would be appropriate for other businesses. My point here is not to enter into the system development field lightly. It's complex, risky, and will draw resources from your core business. That's why a build justification requires considerable upside. Not a decision to be made lightly.

Beware the Technology Stack

Business Technology is multi-layered, from the network and hardware, up through the operating systems, database engines, and the applications that sit at the top of the stack. The deeper you delve in to this stack, the more your business's core competencies must lean towards technology. This is a strategic choice.

If you build your own business systems, you take on ownership of modification and maintenance for the life of each system. Sometimes, this is short lived - a lot of web applications fall into this category. But consider that a good business systems investment will carry you through the next five years or more. The total cost of building a system must include the business technology skills and resources required to operate and maintain the system for that time. This is likely to be 3-5x your original build cost.

If you buy and implement systems built by specialist vendors, you're tapping in to a platform strategy. Choose well, and you'll reap the benefits of a mature solution, proven in your domain to provide agility to the other businesses that are customers of your vendor. Of course, a robust implementation will take time, and you'll incur license and support costs. But the risk of implementing the best solution for your business from a proven vendor is much lower than building your own systems from scratch.

Platform Decisions

Platform decisions are fundamental to your success with Business Technology. Answer these questions for yourself to get started:

  1. What kind of agility matters most to your business over the long haul? Can you achieve this with a platform that has proved itself across many other businesses with similar needs to yours?
  2. Does your business operate in industries that are well served by existing platform solutions? Or are you in a small niche, where proven specialist vendors are hare to find?
  3. Does your business operate in multiple industries? Might this necessitate multiple vendor solutions?
  4. What is your competitive secret sauce? What will it take to maintain this recipe if you implement an industry-standard platform that may be used by your competition? If you must build your own solution to capture this value, is there any reason that this could not be an add-on to a core vendor system?
  5. What do the candidate system vendors' references say about the vendors credentials? How has the solution advanced their businesses? Was the implementation experience a good one? Has the vendor provided great support since then? Do they act like partners?

These decisions are complex, but if you send your answers to me at graham@primeFusion.ca, we can get on the phone to discuss your next steps to finding the best answer.

Your help to shape my roadmap

Throughout our careers, we develop skills in order to get better at what we do, and to provide better value for the colleagues we work with. Learning on the job is the best way to hone our craft, but trial and error can be expensive and slow. That's why I've always tried to accelerate my learning by complementing "on the job" with guidance in the form of mentorship, coaching and training.

But many is the time I have been unable to find the right support - skills development that was targeted at the challenges I had in front of me right there and then. Timely, practical tools, instruction and guidance that could have saved me and my teams many costly hours of trial and error. That's high value, worth a fortune to the businesses we served.

I'm not talking about classrooms where we follow a rote syllabus, or reading the latest business books, educational as that occasionally was. I'm talking about step by step guidance through specific best practices to develop skills that we could apply to our immediate challenges and solve real problems. A way to address topical assignments unlike anything we had experienced before.

My Contribution

So I have set out to contribute to the solution.

For the last 20 years, I've used the term Business Technologist to capture the blend of business, people and tech skills required to maximize the potential for technology to fuel business growth. I'm extremely proud to announce that 2017 will be the year I launch my Technology Leadership Roadmap, an online Coaching program to help develop hundreds, maybe thousands, of better Business Technologists. The program will:

  • Be self paced
  • Combine online training with feedback and coaching
  • Use your specific business challenges as case studies
  • Be immediately applicable to the challenges you are facing

I'm very excited because I'm certain this will address a long standing need and offer great value to businesses and individuals alike. It will provide the kind of support that I wish I had throughout the course of my career.

And helping people further their careers in the pursuit of business technology success is what I'm all about. 

Here's How You Can Help

A number of courses are under development and I'll be making further announcements in the coming weeks. I have defined the topics to be addressed but I need your help to make this as good as it can be. Please click here graham@primeFusion.ca and email me the top three tech challenges you are facing today. Even better, forward this email to anyone that you think might be interested in providing a list of their tech challenges.

I’ll follow up to discuss how my program could help overcome these challenges within a few short weeks.

And I'll be sure to provide you with direct updates on how your feedback is contributing to the design of my program.

Thanks for your help!

Resolutions

Last week, I asked you to conduct a quick review of your business’s year in tech. This week, let’s examine how you can build on this exercise to improve your results for the coming year.

Retrospectives are cathartic - they provide an opportunity for constructive improvement. But the real value comes when you apply lessons learned to the next body of work. I call these Retrospective Resolutions. In that vein, try building on the outcome of last week’s exercise by answering the questions below.

Always Improving

  1. What surprises from the last year suggest areas in which you could profitably innovate?
  2. If your Tech let you down last year, what needs to be fixed? How does fixing rank alongside innovation?
  3. How does your approach to projects need to change to avoid a repeat of last year’s disappointments?
  4. Do you have a list of projects for the coming year? Has your team assessed the value of each, and are you focusing on the high value projects? Are any of these simply not that important?
  5. Is your plan achievable? What factors present a risk to the targets you have set?

Let’s discuss the results of your Retrospective Resolution exercise. Send me your results at graham@primeFusion.ca and we can get on the phone this week to discuss the best way to strengthen your plans for the coming year.

That’s the best way I know to make it a happy new year!

Retrospectives

I’m a big fan of regular retrospectives to summarize lessons learned at the conclusion of any project, and to institute measures to improve future outcomes as a result. If you’re not already in the habit of conducting these, there’s no better time than the end of the year to get started.

It’s fashionable to use this time of the year to look back and look forward. Let’s start the process by reviewing your year in Tech. Try this exercise to rate your organization’s performance over the last 12 months.

Was Your Tech Year a Success?

Try this simple review of your :

  1. What business outcomes delighted you this year? Which of these were enabled by your technology investments?
  2. Did your Tech perform flawlessly, or were any business goals missed as a result of issues?
  3. List your top five project disappointments. These could include unexpected delays, major discoveries made during the course of a project that could ( should?) have been uncovered at the outset, or outcomes simply not matching up to your original expectations.
  4. How many projects hit the targets set at the outset?
  5. How many missed the target date and/ or exceeded the original budget? Why did they miss?

The answers to these questions will provide you with a pretty good snapshot of the health of your technology investments over the past year. If you’re unhappy with anything you’ve learned from this exercise, then we should definitely talk.

Either way, send me the outcomes and I’ll be happy to set up a call to suggest measures to build on in the coming year. As ever, I’m available at graham@primeFusion.ca .

Keep Steering Simple

Every successful project needs a well thought out plan. But a regular steering meeting is even more important. This is where you will take the pulse of the project and make any adjustments required through the course of the work. There are only three items on the agenda.

  1. Project health
  2. What to expect next
  3. What could go wrong

That’s it. With appropriate preparation, these meetings will run like clockwork and focus the valuable time of the leadership group on a short list of matters of the day.

Let’s talk about each of the three key areas.

Project Health

Project health is a measure of progress against plan. The plan may change in response to lessons learned, but once the steering group has approved the change, be sure to track against the latest plan. The original has become redundant.

Here’s a simple color-coded scheme my best clients use to measure project health:

  • Green : on schedule for approved plan
  • Amber : behind schedule with a plan to catch up
  • Red : behind schedule with no plan to catch up

Track the health of more complex projects at the level of each major constituent part, but anything more than a dozen line items is too much detail for steering.

If you follow this approach, you’ll spend time where it’s needed - turning amber items to green and avoiding ambers turning red.

What to expect next

Next up is a focus on the slice of the plan that covers activities to be completed between this steering meeting and the one after next, typically the next 4 weeks of the project. It's the opportunity for the team to highlight any challenges they are facing and push for timely decisions required in order to proceed. This topic is all about the steering group removing roadblocks to progress so the team can maintain their commitment to completing the next phase of the work.

What could go wrong

Last on the agenda is risk and mitigation. We all know that circumstances can cause changes to the best laid plans. No plan is complete without an assessment of the foreseeable risks, and an idea of how the team will respond if each challenge arises. As the project progresses, risks will diminish and, eventually, disappear. New risks may emerge, and they’ll require a mitigation plan. Each steering meeting must stay on top of this changing landscape. Remember, this topic is about things that have not happened yet, but that you’ll need to be ready for.

How Informed are you?

Consider major macurrent or upcoming initiative. How deep in the weeds do you need to go in order to be comfortable that you’re on top of the project? What is the simplest summary that you can expect your team to prepare each week?

How many of these criteria are achieved by your project updates?

  1. The meetings are efficient - well prepared, stay on topic, end early or on time, 60 minutes per week.
  2. All parties feel well-informed.
  3. Communication is clear across the team.
  4. Surprises are being dealt with quickly.
  5. Decision-making is not holding up the project.

If you scored yourself a five, you’re team is doing a good job. Any lower and you may be risking your project timeline and budget.

Contact me at graham@primeFusion.ca to let me know how your approach lines up against these three agenda items.

Let Information Flow

Information is only useful when it flows. Making sure that the right information reaches the right people at the right time is, typically, a hit and miss process. And that feels like a great opportunity to me.

As consumers, we are all familiar with the best of breed services of companies like Amazon. Information simply flows through their systems and we, the customer, get the benefit. Could the shopping experience be any easier?

Unfortunately, most businesses incur way more cost than they need to in exchanging information with their customers, and most would benefit by sharing more information.

Think about how often your business shares information with your customers. There's marketing ( communicating what you do and how you do it, the value that you provide), sales ( closing deals, transacting orders, taking payment), and delivery ( shipment, support, returns). Thousands of times a day? More?

Now imagine that you improve the efficiency of this communication by, say, just 10%. What would that do for your customer satisfaction on the "easy to do business" scale? How much time would that free up for your staff to spend on helping more customers?

Happier customers and more of them.

The faster the flow of relevant information between you and your customers, the more efficiently you can service their needs. If you email shipping updates, customers won’t be left waiting, won’t need to call your service team. If you provide an online customer account access, they can tailor your service to their needs, update account and payment details at their convenience, and won't need to call your service team. And the more you avoid the need for paper forms, the less faxes you’ll receive and the less data entry for, well, your customer service team.

Information is the rocket fuel at the root of every great business design. Mix in the right technology and you can make something great.

Better Flows

Assess the fluidity of your business information with this simple exercise:

  1. List the ways that you exchange information with your customers. Your list will most likely include sales, order processing, product delivery, support, and (hopefully) repeat sales.
  2. Now consider how easy it is, or isn’t, for your customers to communicate with your business. Do you still require them to print out, complete, sign and fax in paperwork? How many calls do customers make each day with questions that you could answer online? How much of your team's time is spent moving information from one medium to another, keying faxed information into your systems, handling a sequence of emails to clear up a miscommunication?
  3. What are your top 3 opportunities to improve your information sharing with customers?

Contact me at graham@primeFusion.ca and we can talk about the fastest way to execute on these opportunities.

Out of the Box

Your Business has an out of box experience. Great insights await if you can make a subtle shift in perspective. And we’re all better user experience designers than we think, for one simple reason.

We are all Consumers

We all know when we've had a good customer experience. Or a bad one. It’s a small step from there to designing the out of box experience for our businesses. We simply have to step in to our customers shoes and walk a mile or two. What first impression do you present to your customers? How do you cultivate that impression over time? And how do you feel in their shoes?

Thing is, it’s easy to park your consumer experiences when you arrive at the office every day. You start looking from the inside out and forget that you’re dealing with people just like us, customers who could tell us how to make their day better. So ask them. Or role play, if that helps to get you into your customer’s mindspace. Best of all, have your team go sit with customers as they call your helpline, your accounts receivable department, your call centre, or any part of your organization that interacts with the customer.

Consider your Customer’s Routine

I often hear business leaders ponder how to fit customers into their business’s processes. This is precisely the wrong question. The world looks very different when you turn this perspective on its head:

Your business is part of your customer’s process

Any time your customers interact with your business, they spend time handling the interaction - answering a sales call, phoning for help, reading and composing emails, printing, signing and faxing documents, or clicking around your website.

How can you accommodate them better? Can your business systems extend to your customers and provide them with the easiest possible ways to get their job done?

Don’t forget Internal Customers

Same goes for users within your organization. Your business systems have an out of box experience for staff and partners. How steep is the learning curve for new hires, or for the whole team when you move from an old system to a new one? How many steps does it take to place an order, log a call, calculate a quote, or do any of the other things your staff do hundreds or thousands of times a day. Too often, little time and thought is applied to usability. Good user experience design will save a lot of time, increase efficiency, and staff morale.

And happy colleagues make for happier customers.

Looking from the Outside In

I've run this exercise with many clients.

  1. What questions come to mind if you step in to your customers shoes?
  2. What does it take for the team to deliver this service. Where do you need to make their lives easier?

You can find sample answers here.

Start the conversation with your team by asking these simple questions:

  1. Write down the 5 best interactions you had this year in your role as a consumer, or dealing with a business supplier. Then write down the 5 worst.
  2. Which of the above scenarios could apply to your customers? How many good? How many bad? What can you do to make them all line up with your best experiences?
  3. Now figure out how to repeat this exercise with your most passionate and demanding customers.

Take a look at the ideas that come out of this conversation. Odds are there’ll be some easy changes, such as streamlining your call centre script. Other changes will require investment in a system, a platform on which to build a better business.

But you’ve started on the path to innovating towards improvements that will differentiate your business, strengthen your brand.

And that’s gold dust.

As ever, contact me at graham@primeFusion.ca to discuss your outcomes.

Mixed Emotions

Change initiatives usually span months, sometimes years. Team sentiment follows predictable patterns through the inevitable ups and downs. Understanding the psychology helps us all manage.

Nothing worth doing is every easy, right? Changing the way a business works is a challenge; implementing new systems, changing the details of day-to-day activities, shipping a new product, onboarding a major new customer.

If we graph a typical project team's level of stress, we see a bell curve with the peak somewhere around the three-quarter point, only dropping off after the project is done. With forethought, it’s possible to render this closer to a straight line, or at least a shallow bell curve with a lower peak. In short, a happier team, and happy teams do better work.

Uncertainty is one of the biggest causes of work-related stress. Comfort with the status quo is a natural sentiment. At the outset of a major initiative, it’s vital to manage uncertainty by communicatiing a vision for making things better, emphasizing the positives of improvement, and engaging the team in how best to achieve the goals.

Time seems plentiful at the start of a new project. But there’s a danger here. It takes effort to build inertia, and I've seen many a project get off to a slow start due to a lack of urgency. The danger is, of course, that you reach the half-way point and only a quarter of the work has been done. As the challenges become clear, the stress can grow. Then the time pressure kicks in.

Get ready

Prepare for the worst and expect the best. This is Change Management in the raw. Time for calm heads, for leaders to step up, deal with the issues, and make sober assessments of the best way to win.

Here are some key turning points to prepare for:

  • Initial anxiety : Communicate and engage.
  • Launch : Focus on building inertia to overcome complacency.
  • Planning : Spend the time to identify foreseeable issues and allow time to deal with the likely setbacks.. This doesn’t guarantee against pleasant surprises, but it does mean you’ll have the capacity to deal with a much smaller list of adjustments.
  • Tension : You can leverage a little stress as a motivator. But don’t burn your team out.
  • Resourcing : Focus on small teams handling an even workload throughout the project. Adding people at the back end is not cost effective and rarely brings completion forward.
  • Milestones : Design frequent milestones into your plan. Deliver useful work early and often. Ticking stuff off a long list is a great meter for progress.
  • Wins : Do not let wins pass unnoticed. Celebrations and recognition are a great way to refuel the team’s energy levels.
  • Bad News Days : There will be days when it seems there's nothing BUT bad news. Keep your chin up and break on through.
  • Testing : The rubber hits the road when testing begins. Issues will surface and may not be checked off fast enough to hit the go live date. Start component testing as early as possible.
  • Tipping Point : Keep an eye out for the tipping point when things suddenly fall in to place. It usually happens (trust me) but you can’t plan on it.
  • Go Live : Do not take shortcuts, overtax the team, or declare success too early. You need to make this last step as easy as possible
  • Stabilization : You’re not done with Go Live. Plan for a period of uncertainty. The work isn’t done until youve realized the benefits.

And breathe …

You will complete the project with a mix of relief and satisfaction in a job well done. And don’t forget those Bad News Days. They teach us resourcefulness, and make the completion celebrations all the sweeter.

Sound Familiar?

  1. Think back to an initiative earlier in your career. What were the turning points?
  2. Thinking ahead to your next major initiative, how do you plan to handle the emotions of your team?

As ever, let me know what you come up with. If this rings any bells, contact me at graham@primeFusion.ca and we can discuss.

Digging for Gold

There are times when we need to dig deeper to find nuggets of gold. Estimating cost and return helps determine whether or not to invest in a new initiative. Searching for value beyond obvious revenue and expense opportunities can solidify your investment and dramatically enrich the outcome.

Most initiatives arise from the need to solve a specific problem or create a specific capability. A Value Review can quickly establish a better outcome. I recently completed an executive session which provides a great example of how quickly this can be achieved.

My client's team was seeking to meet (or beat) a 3-year payback goal set by the CFO. We had compiled a textbook ROI that compared estimated project costs with multi-year expense savings. The return was positive but borderline. While there was a case to invest, the outcome would hinge on a few unknowns. If any of these did not pan out, the initiative would take more than 3 years to pay back. The team did not feel comfortable presenting a business case that might be judged as a failure. They believed in the work, but wanted more evidence of the benefits.

We decided to assess different types of value. Here’s the list that we came up with:

  1. Brand Reputation : Always tough to measure, but the work was in an area that the market cared about, and the Marketing team was excited about the PR opportunities.
  2. Customer Satisfaction : We knew that six of the top ten customers had expressed a desire for the work we were planning. Sales felt that this could generate a handful of strong referrals.
  3. Employee Engagement : The initiative would address issues with a process so onerous that HR felt it was was contributing to high burnout and staff turnover. If a much easier workflow could reduce the turnover by a few percentage points, we could target another measurable benefit.
  4. Infrastructure : IT felt the solution could be designed in a way that would streamline future changes. This, in turn, would reduce the cost of a number of ongoing activities. Another long term gain for operational efficiency.
  5. Change Management : the team had been looking for a chance to apply some new change management techniques. This initiative provided a great opportunity to invest in some outside coaching to improve the organization’s agility. Although this was a softer benefit, we added it to the list.
  6. Compliance : we thought long and hard on this one. While we couldn’t see any advances for compliance, we convinced ourselves that the work would be completely onside. That’s just as important.

Finally, the team extended the plan to address these benefits at minimal cost by adding a PR plan, customer referral follow up, and change management coaching.

As we closed out, the debrief highlighted the value of this exercise:

  1. A borderline ROI was enriched by digging deeper for benefits.
  2. Benefits Realization would be monitored after Go Live to ensure that all goals were realized.

The team felt better about moving ahead and the initiative was approved.

What Are Your Values?

  1. Consider how any of these categories of value could apply to your business
  2. What additional categories could you add to the list? Can they yield measurable benefits?

Please - let me know what you come up with. If there are additional types of value that you would like to measure, contact me at graham@primeFusion.ca and we can share ideas.

Let's be clear

Clarity is the best investment you will make. Miscommunication is a killer. Fortunately, that's a match made in heaven. True story. A friend of mine was asked to book a flight to Oakland for an urgent meeting. He dutifully called the travel agent, bought his ticket and made the flight. To Auckland. That's an extra 14 hours in the air. You see, my friend had a heavy accent and when he said "Oakland" the agent heard "Auckland". He missed the meeting.

I recall one time a vendor was giving my client first view on a major deliverable. The vendor was anxious but proud of the work they had put it. As we walked through the demo, I could see my client's face contort from excited anticipation to confusion, and then a frown. "You look pained" I whispered. She leaned in, "this is not what I asked for".

I see the consequences of miscommunication way too often - lots of wasted time and work. It's painful to observe and costly to fix.

Life's potential for ambiguity seems unlimited. You speak - I hear. But did you convey your intent clearly enough? Did I comprehend fully and have an opportunity to challenge the approach and enrich the outcome?

The best way I know to close the communication gap is to make a simple request:

Play that back to me.

In business, we are often asked to solve complex challenges. Unfortunately, teams can dive in to details too early. And any time before the goals have been clearly shared and played back is too early. Sometimes the goals are lost in the detail, sometimes they are never fully developed and communicated ( meaning sent and received).

At the same time, we have to be clear on what's intractable ( goals that the outcome must achieve, the "why"), and what's malleable ( the "how"). I advocate:

  1. A one sentence description of what we are trying to achieve; a simple, measurable outcome that anyone on the team can recite. (This is a not a list of features.)
  2. A list of steps that we think will achieve the goals, a plan to test the approach as we go, and a readiness to adjust as we learn.

In Tech, "play that back to me" translates to a clear specification that all parties can agree on. That may mean a contract, or a detailed specification, or ( often best) an evolving prototype that can be touched, felt, and sculpted in to the best outcome. The more complex the specification, the less likely that the team will absorb it, recite it, and based every decision they may on whether they are moving towards the goal. Anything else is a waste of time.

Spending a time on clarity of objective will save 10x downstream.

Clear Enough?

Consider two major initiatives in your career - one successful, the other less so.

  1. How simple were the goals at the outset of each initiative and how clearly were they defined from the get go?
  2. Did the respective teams fully embrace the goals? Were they referred to at every juncture throughout the initiative, or did they get lost in the fog of war as the work progressed?

If you would like to discuss ways that clarity can be achieved quickly, contact me at graham@primeFusion.ca.

PS Speaking of miscommunication, "waterproof" phones can disappoint, so be sure to read the fine print.

PPS There are various methods for simply capturing outcomes. If you're not familiar with the Agile Vision, check it out.

Celebrate Milestones

A client recently completed a major initiative. Two years in the planning, six months in execution. I am honoured to have been part of another great team, proud to have contributed to the success, and appreciative of the reminder.

Change initiatives are challenging, often all-consuming. This is a reminder that celebrating success provides an important injection of confidence, and each important milestone is an opportunity for the team to step back and recognize their achievements.

It’s also a moment to pause and consider what has been learned and how the experience can be factored in to the plans ahead.

Building on Success :

  1. How often does your team celebrate achievements? Do you wait for the end of a major project, or spread a few smaller milestone celebrations throughout?
  2. Does your team feel recognized and appreciated?
  3. How do you ensure that lessons learned are captured, communicated across the team, and never forgotten?

If you send your results to graham@primeFusion.ca, I'll give you feedback on your approach to building success on success.

A Question of Innovation

Isn't Design great? Who doesn't enjoy an opportunity to test ideas to overcome daily challenges and create a better way. But how do we get a chance to innovate like this?

Let me save you the trouble of reading Google's 27 million results for 'how to innovate'.

We all know that change requires a commitment to action. Without this, we're just dreaming. In the business context, that means developing a habit of questioning the status quo, filtering the best ideas and committing appropriate investment to make them happen. And the best way to start is to view value through our customer's eyes. Unless our innovations attract positive reviews, there's no differentiation, and without that we should question the value of any change.

Here's a conversation I had with a coaching client. At the time, Nigel was VP, IT in a $300m business.

Nigel; "My CEO has asked me to champion innovation across the business. I've spoken with my peers on the Management Team, and ofcourse, everyone thinks it's a great idea. But we've never really done anything like this before and no one has any suggestions. Where should we start?"

My gut feel was that this was more about kick starting an innovation mindset than any specific innovation. "Let's look at the initiatives you're already planning over the coming year to find the best context to build on. You have budget approval to install a new Customer Support system, right?"

Nigel described how the Call Centre team was challenged by the length of time it took to process a customer call.

"All well and good" I said, "but what do we know about the customer's view on their support experience?”"

Not much. We get about 5% response rate on our call close surveys, and most of the feedback is negative. I suspect that the customers are not happy. Let me pull that up.” We looked at some of the feedback. A lot of customers were asking for alternatives to phone and email support.

Nigel span around from his laptop, "So it takes too long for our staff to key in all the data that the system requires over the phone. And our customers don't want to use the phone. Can't we kill two birds here by setting up a 'Quick Issue’ form on our web portal?"

I asked Nigel how long this would take.

"Well I'd have to run the idea past our call centre leaders, and we could start with an experiment. I reckon we could push the Quick Issue form out within a week, two max, and leave the phone process untouched. Redirect callers to web support on our call hold message, and see how it goes for a couple of months. Kind of an A/B test."

"You know what you just did, don't you?"

"Innovated?"

I should add that this conversation took place seven years ago, so we have the benefit of hindsight. The Quick Issue button took three weeks to launch, and after some tweaks, was attracting 40% of customer support requests within six months. Call centre staff were able to focus more time on resolutions, and same-day ticket closes went up by 35%. This was more than enough to remove the call centre's concerns on ticket processing time. The system replacement was held off for two years, and the time freed up allowed a series of short sharp "innovations" to flower across the organization. Nigel hasn't looked back since.

What we did was straightforward yet incredibly impactful - we asked a few simple questions:

  1. How do we fit in to our customers' daily routines?
  2. How can we achieve better results with lower work intensity for all parties?
  3. Which problems can we simply bypass, rather than fix?
  4. How will the outcome result in a better experience for our Customers?
  5. How will the investment improve the results for our business?

And we challenged current practices by asking "How would we do this if we were starting anew?"

I'm so glad we had that conversation. 30 minutes well spent.

 

Innovate Now

What questions can your organization ask to uncover simple, impactful innovations?

Please - let me know. If you send your questions to me at graham@primeFusion.ca and I'll give you my feedback.

Great Expectations

Setting the right expectations is important. In fact, it's essential if we are to choose the best investments, plan accurate timelines and deliver the intended outcome. And since estimation is the bedrock of planning and expectation setting, it's a strength worth investing in.

I recall a week last summer when I helped different clients through a couple of project sessions; one a project launch that I lead, the other a retrospective which I had been asked to attend as an observer. The projects were remarkably similar. I made a mental note at the time to compare the outcomes. Now that the second has concluded, here are my observations.

The retrospective had been scheduled because the completed project had exceeded timeline estimates by 50%. Compromises had been made to wrap up at that point, and the shortcuts were continuing to drag on the business. There was a mood of disappointment. After listening to the roundtable discussion of outcomes, I asked the team to describe their project launch process. Turns out that the sponsors had spent 4 hours preparing the business case and timeline estimates, and reckoned on a 6-month timeline. That became 9-months, and the pressure had mounted during the overrun.

The new project launch brought 8 stakeholders and contributors together over 2-days. During this time, we crystalized the project goals and made 27 key decisions. We tested use cases, shortlisted essential outcomes, mitigated risks, and developed a plan for benefits realization. The group had confidence in the plan they had built. A year on, we conducted a retrosprective. The team delivered on the timeline, despite a couple of curve balls in their marketplace, and the benefits now being realized are 15% better than expected.

Here’s the thing ...

The successful project took 10-months
The disappointing project took 9.

My clients’ take-aways were:

  1. Good estimation drives great expectation setting, which gives the team room to succeed.
  2. Successful planning requires an environment that promotes candor and preparation.
  3. Experience counts most at the outset of any project; posing the right questions, examining the work to be done, challenging assumptions and mitigating risk.
  4. Breaking the work into smaller chunks is the best way to chip away at uncertainty.
  5. Be clear where the risks lie and develop mitigation strategies to counter them.
  6. Enumerate assumptions and adjust during the project if things change.
  7. Things change.
  8. If we are repeating work which is similar to projects we've done before, we have a benchmark to build on and can apply lessons learned. We can then focus on what's different this time around and adjust our previous plans to accommodate the new.
  9. It's harder to estimate work that is different from anything the organization has done before. We need to talk to someone who's been there and done that. If they have the ability to quickly adapt their experience to our context, get them on the team, even if only in an advisory capacity.
  10. A “good" estimate pegs cost, effort and timeline within +/- 15%. We should plan for the upper bound and deliver within that budget.
  11. Always conduct a retrospective, whether the outcome is good or bad.

In short, businesses run better without unpleasant surprises, great expectations are laudable, and we all like happy endings.

An Estimation Challenge

Consider a major initiative where the outcome wasn't everything you had hoped for:

  1. How happy were you with the estimates going in? Did you conduct a Discovery exercise?
  2. Was the team forced to take shortcuts when time was running out?
  3. Was quality compromised? How much repair or rework was required?
  4. When did the project really complete? Was the original intent fully achieved?

If you would like to discuss the outcome of this challenge, contact me at graham@primeFusion.ca.

The odds are good that I have been there, done that - or know someone who has!

Production Lines and the Bottleneck Effect

One of the great things about studying a wide range of industries is that it affords the ability to take insights gained in one field and apply them in quite different domains.

Production lines, for example, are everywhere. And business technology helps us streamline production.

If your business completes more than a handful of transactions a day, you have a production line. When the creation and delivery of that value has multiple steps, you have a process. And if steps are handed off to others, you have an opportunity to streamline.

The production line came about in manufacturing, but consider how the analogy applies to other industries:

  • Office equipment : help a customer determine their needs; quote and order; receive the hardware; install, monitor and maintain each unit.
  • Software development : determine a customer job to be done; define the features required to complete the user's tasks; create code, test for defects, fix bugs; ship code; and support your customer in their adoption of the solution.
  • Insurance : quote and sell a policy; await claims; receive and assess claims, process claims payments; renew the policy.
  • Retail : order and received inventory; sell units, process payments; and handle returns.

Viewing a business from the production line perspective can clarify our approach to diagnosing or avoiding operational challenges.

Have you ever invested in streamlining a part of your business workflow, say order processing or software requirements gathering, only to find that the final output ( revenue recognition) is not impacted? This may be because fixing one bottleneck unleashes extra volume of work downstream in your production line, only to reveal a new bottleneck:

  • Faster sales mean that more daily orders arrive on the installation manager's desk (great) than she has the resources to handle ( not so great).
  • More system requirements are defined ( productive, assuming these can all be monetized) than the development team can build and test ( customers end up disappointed).

To avoid this bottleneck whac-a-mole, we are best served by taking a business-wide view of the production of value. I advocate some systems thinking, beginning with the simplest 3-step Production Line:

  1. You define, communicate and sell your product.
  2. You create your product.
  3. You deliver and service your product.

Production Line Exercise

If your business handles more than 10 transactions a week:

  1. Apply the 3-step Production Line and jot down the steps involved in delivering value to your customer, from raw materials to repeat business.
  2. Now estimate the investment you make at each step, and rank the production line challenges you face on a daily basis. Are investments and challenges aligned?
  3. What efficiency improvements are you planning to undertake in the next year? Assuming these measures succeed, where do you expect the next bottleneck to lie?

As always, contact me at graham@primeFusion.ca to discuss the outcome of this exercise.