Is your technology portfolio really balanced?

Spending is easy. The hard part is getting the balance right between operations, insurance and investment.

Operations support day to day business. If email breaks, "the server goes down", or the phones fail, everyone knows about it and the problem gets attention until it's fixed.

Insurance is risk mitigation. Protection against unforeseen setbacks. Sadly, this only gets attention if either 1) a disaster occurs or 2) a compliance regime mandates. If you suffer a Security breach, you could easily spend a lot more to recover than you would have spent on basic avoidance measures—and you may never fully recover customer trust. Likewise, Business continuity avoids a temporary shutdown of operations. And poor project discipline will result in overruns in budget and time—avoidable with the right preparation.

Investments, of course, return greater value over time. This is the heart of running a successful business. Spending on improved customer experience, ways of doing more with less, or building products that can return a healthy margin.

It's all too easy to spend what we need to support daily operations, keep our fingers crossed that we'll avoid (or survive) unforeseen setbacks, and get around to an investment when we have the spare cash.

But if we overlook mitigation and investment, the business will be hurt. Perhaps not today, maybe a slow, hardly unnoticeable degradation.

And that's the real challenge. Because things aren't breaking in front of our eyes, it's out of sight out of mind.

Which is why we have to pay special attention.

Check your technology portfolio

Take a look at your technology portfolio and ask:

1. What are you spending on to insure against unforeseen setbacks?
2. How does your budget address investment in future benefits?
3. Which spends could you cut without hurting your day-to-day business?

If less than 10% of your total technology spend goes on insurance, think through some disaster scenarios and consider whether your risks are really mitigated. If you're investing less than 50% of your total spend, your returns could be higher, perhaps much higher. And if you can comfortably cut any operational spends, what could happen if you moved the funds to investment or insurance?

Call me on +1 647 400 2514 during my office hours—Friday between 9 and noon EST—and we can talk about ways to balance your technology portfolio.

If you missed these related articles, go back and take another look:

Simplifying Technology Investment Revealing Value, one step at a time Production lines and the Bottleneck Effect Digging for Gold Why Platforms Matter Know your risk Outside in Design Diversity and Complexity When Better Beats Best Minimal Effort Means Avoiding Work

Risk, confidence and your dream job

I met up with a long-time coaching client last week. He had just been appointed to a great new position and was excited to talk about how we could work together again.

The secret of his success? A focus on turning the lights on, rather than keeping them on.

My client's career path is testimony to one thing. Taking control by recognizing and working on your weaknesses. When we first met a number of years ago, he had just been promoted to a leadership role for the first time. At that point, he had become an expert developer and technical architect.

His boss saw the leadership potential, had promoted him and offered coaching support from yours truly. But my client was not so sure. He took a look at the operation he was now running and was preoccupied with the challenge of even understanding how to help his new team, let alone keeping things running. Sure, he had some ideas about making things run much better, but couldn't envision having the confidence to make changes.

Over the course of the next few months, we collaborated on a simple, candid assessment of his strengths and weaknesses, of his vision, and what role he would have to play to bring this about.

Great at analysis and design—budgeting and vision would not be a problem—but not so hot at collaboration. Aligning the team, and convincing peers and leadership would require selling skills. This is where we focused.

In later phases, we've worked on improving project leadership, delegation, capacity for 10x influence, and coaching.

I asked him last week how he would assess the progress he had made in this time.

"I can only measure my career progress in terms of the value I have achieved in the eyes of my customers and colleagues. I've gone from creating great features to renovating an entire technology operation. Then when things were working well, we 10x'ed our productivity by totally revamping the way we work. I still can't believe I had the confidence to take those risks. Now I have my dream job."

I can't tell you how sweet those words sounded to the coach.

What are your career goals?

Answer these questions for yourself:

1. Where are you succeeding in your current work?
2. What would you like to change? The sky's the limit, so don't hold back.
3. How do your skills suit this ideal direction? Be honest and identify areas you need to improve on.

There are many directions you can go from here. My office hours are Friday 9-noon EST. Call me then on +1 647 400 2514 and I  can point you in the right direction. It will only take 15 minutes.

If this article was of interest, take another look at these for related ideas:

Important vs Urgent–why I wrote my new book Shake Hands with the Customer Who Owns the Conversation? The Right Kind of Help Your help to shape my roadmap

Have you simply moved the problem?

When you're solving a problem, it's all too easy to obsess on the issue at hand and ignore the overall context.

The answer's simple - keep in mind the distinction between fixing a problem and simply moving it some place else. In the long run, out of sight is rarely out of mind.

We're all familiar with the Value Chain concept, the notion that customers receive the value that results from a series of steps completed by your organization (production), their organization (on-boarding), and perhaps your suppliers' (raw materials and supporting systems).

Once you've identified a problem in your value chain, there are three things you can do about it — you can live with it, fix it, or move it. If you choose to fix the problem, your solution must consider the downstream consequences of the change you make for customers, and the upstream demands that change may impose on suppliers. Absent this, you could:

• Add a component that reduces manufacturability and reduces margins.
• Create a complex solution that dramatically increases customer on-boarding costs, has your support centre phones ringing off the hooks, and brings customer adoption to a standstill.
• Places unreasonable demands on your suppliers and damages your business partnership.

... and so forth.

To be clear, the overall health of your value chain can be improved by moving a problem to a less costly part of the chain. What matters is that you anticipate this move and bolster the impacted area.

Scan your Value Chain

Consider a solution that you have implemented in the last year, but which failed to meet your goals first time around. Who was unhappy with the outcome, and why were they unhappy? Who had more work, not less, as a result of the fix? What did you do about it?

How can you apply these lessons to your next problem fixing exercise?

My office hours this week are Friday between 9am-noon eastern. Call me then on (647) 400 2514 to discuss your self-assessment.

If this article was of interest, take another look at these for related ideas:

Production Lines and the Bottlenecl Effect Have you really solved the problem?

Are you investing in the right customers?

Ever fired a customer? Tough, isn't it? I've seen businesses flounder because they couldn't do this.

Sacred cow alert. How could you not love all your customers?

Except maybe when they grind you into the ground during a renewal negotiation, take you off strategy with product demands, or keep your support team working through the night on something that could have waited 48 hours.

Top accounts are usually selected by the amount of revenue they generate for your business. If these same accounts also provide a customer-level margin that exceeds your overall targets, that’s great. If not, it’s important to know so you can figure out what steps you can take to improve the picture.

Test your relationships

Pick your top five accounts and add up the costs that you incur to keep them happy. This cost should include an allocation of sales time and all COGS (a portion of product development costs, support and service, training, even G&A). It doesn't have to be perfect to figure out whether an account is good for the business.

Now line up the cost for each account against the revenue generated. Do the margins look good, bad or indifferent? If these were your only customers, would your business be better of worse off?

If you find this exercise revealing, how could you extend to the rest of your customer base? Consider grouping smaller customers into segments to make the exercise easier. If you missed these related articles, here's a chance to catch up:

Of course your systems restrict innovation Minimal Effort Means Avoiding Work When Better Beats Best Cut Down Your Options

Recent Hits

I’m overseas dealing with a family situation, but I wanted to make sure your received your weekly dose of Graham.

As a reminder, 10-Minute Reflections is now available on Amazon. You can buy it HERE.

Reflections provides a tool to help you step out of a busy routine to consider your business, where you are succeeding, and how you could do better.

Volume 1 covers a series of 30 wide ranging topics, each with a 5-minute read followed by a 5-minute exercise, designed to prompt your thinking and help you to generate ideas for action.

As a brief recap, here are the posts that have garnished the greatest amount of feedback from my audience over the past six days.

Thanks for your patience. We’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming as early as possible!

All the best,

Graham

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 dialled my provider's call centre.

HAVE YOU REALLY SOLVED THE PROBLEM?

Your customer is paying you to get something done for them. If your product is hard to use, you haven't solved their problem.

Go back and try again.

HOW AVERAGE TRUMPS EXCELLENT

A business runs well when many concurrent activities are in simpatico and interdependencies align.

In other words, you're only as good as your weakest link, however much you excel elsewhere.

THE DECISION ACTION LOOP

Two types of activity occur in the course of any initiative. Decisions are made and Actions are taken. Make the right decisions and you’ll take the right actions. Actions give rise to new questions which require decisions.

The pace of the work is dictated by the Decisions/ Action loop. But decisions take time. Too long, usually. The good news is that this is under your control.

THE RIGHT KIND OF HELP

I've been buying and delivering services for all of my career. Mostly buying, so I know a good deal when I see one. Whenever we seek outside help to solve a pressing problem, it's vital that we pick the best approach.

Need a better Sales process? Then don't leave it to the system

Can we agree that your business performs better when everyone's approach is thoughtful, somewhat consistent, and continuously improved? And that making the necessary changes is not easy?

If so, let me suggest that using business systems as the primary driver of change is a path to failure.

I remember when "CRM" was the big buzz in IT. Every business needed a new Customer Relationship Management system so Sales Management could deliver the best results. Turned out that CRM implementations exhibited a 90% failure rate. I'm glad to say that I've had considerably better success—otherwise, I wouldn't be sharing this article—but the projects are easier when you approach change first, system second.

Information systems have been used as a blunt instrument for change, and sales systems have been the most extreme example. The thinking went that you provide a tool to the sales team that required them to track every activity in their sales funnel following a rigid process. Sales management would then know exactly what was happening, and could change approach on a dime in order to bring home the deals.

But sales is not amenable to very rigid process. And good sales teams will resist being confined in this way when they see little benefit in the system. Change management cannot succeed in this environment, nor should it.

CRM has moved on over the last few years. Sales systems are now a commodity—most mature solutions will do the job you need.

Turns out that the art is in deciding what that job is, and successfully changing the habits of the organization to do the job consistently well.

While I've used Sales to illustrate my point, the principal applies to every area of your business. Figure out your change goals thoroughly by assessing benefits for all parties, and do this before looking to any specific system solution.

So how do you do that?

Think about a major change that you are trying to introduce, or would like to introduce:

1. What are you looking to change? What is the vision? What is your timeline?
2. How confident are you that you know how the details must be altered? What unknowns remain, and what might change as you role out the change?
3. Who will be impacted within and outside your organization? How will each party benefit?
4. What role could a business system play in the change? How much will you depend on the vendor to determine the details of your change?

Now assess how you can reduce your dependency on the business system vendor, at least until you've figured out the answer within your organization. Share your answers to questions 1-3 with your team and fill in any gaps before you ask a system vendor for input.

Let's discuss your results. Contact me at graham@primeFusion.ca to let me know when you'd like to talk and we'll set something up.

In the meantime, if you missed these related articles, here's a chance to catch up:

Of course your systems restrict innovation Minimal Effort Means Avoiding Work When Better Beats Best Cut Down Your Options

Important vs Urgent–why I wrote my new book

We all know that:

1. Businesses don’t build themselves – it’s important to focus on the work of improvement.
2. It’s too easy to get wrapped up in the urgent matters of the day.

My new book is written to help you focus on the important, 10 minutes at a time.

Every useful business book I’ve read has a single theme–to counter the human instinct to deal with the urgent matters staring us in the face every day. It’s great when I can get time to read.

You may have an angry customer to take care of, or a production line that is bottlenecked, or a key team member to talk back off the ledge. Maybe the Board has just added to the agenda for next week’s meeting, or you have a week full of standing meetings and an Inbox that never lets up. All of these matters are urgent, but to do them you’ll have to postpone tomorrow’s strategic planning meeting–something’s gotta give!

Can you find the time to think?

I’ve been an Executive for over 25 years and have always benefited from stepping out of my daily routine for short periods of reflection. Brief meditations about the work my business is doing, where we’re succeeding, and how we could do better. Some of the best ideas happen that way. That’s why I wrote 10-Minute Reflections–with one simple goal in mind–to provide you, the business leader, with a brief diversion from your busy day that will be enjoyable and productive.

The book provides 30 accessible exercises to help you reflect on diverse aspects of your business. Each reflection is a 5-minute read followed by a 5-minute exercise. If the questions need more time, they may merit a longer session at a later date. Your call.

If you can dedicate just 10 minutes a day you’ll be in the top 1% of the hundreds of executives I’ve worked with–and no surprise, they’re always the most successful.

By the end of the book, my hope is that you will have generated 10 ideas in one month. 10 actions to enact in your business this year. I’ve had feedback that the exercises are also great to pass around your team for a wider perspective. You can even use them to kick off a new initiative.

I hope you can take the opportunity to step back, reflect and enjoy the exercise before you return to the rest of your day.

10-Minute Reflections is now available on Amazon.

As ever, drop me a quick email at graham@primeFusion.ca with your questions and comments. Let me know what you liked about these exercises, and how they could be improved. I’ll be publishing another edition and will incorporate your feedback.

Do your customers care about you?

Have you asked all your customers lately why they care about you? Why they bought, and why they continue to pay you?

They’re likely to say one of three things…

1. We need you. We may not admit to this, but we couldn't live without your product. It's removed major pain and would present huge challenges if we lost it.
2. It's ok. We have your stuff and we're using it. In fact, we've been thinking about alternatives. We just haven't had the time to look at this yet.
3. Who are you? Oh, that's right. In fact my boss was asking whether we could cut some costs. Let me check with my team whether we really need to keep paying for your product.

When you ask this question, you’re doing a quick customer success test. Problem is, if you leave this late, don’t weave it in to the fabric of your customer relationships, you’ll be at a disadvantage. That’s why it’s so important to do customer success right.

I spent ten years buying technology as a CIO in several businesses. I always chose the vendor that helped me simplify and measure the value of the work we did together. This kept me honest with my boss, and the vendor honest with their commitments. Crucially, it told me how much the vendor understood the ways they could improve my business. So the most important point in our first meeting came when I asked how they measured customer success.

Like me, your commercial customers measure their success in the same way that you do–revenue, profit, cashflow, perhaps risk mitigation, market valuation or social contribution. Your champions within those businesses may measure themselves on engineering efficacy, leads converted, sales quota, transactions processed, ROI, employee survey results, promotion opportunities, and the like.

If I heard a response in those terms, there was a pretty good chance that we'd finish the conversation over beers and the vendor would become a partner. Unfortunately, too many vendors forgot that customer retention was their goal, not mine. Or that I didn’t measure MY success by the number of tickets THEY resolved. Customers care how long you continue to solve their problems, not how long they continue to give you their business. If you cease to provide value, your contract may not be cancelled immediately, but it will be cancelled. (Do you have any customers in this limbo?)

Sure, it's not always easy to determine the measures that matter to a customer. They may not open up immediately but this conversation lies at the heart of any useful sales process and the trust building and conceptual agreement that follows. No agreement of objectives and value, no proposal. And if the customer doesn't know exactly how to measure their value? Well what a great opportunity for you to help by applying your industry expertise. If you can't, your competitors will.

If you master the measurement of customer success, you'll have the information to know how to invest where your customers, in aggregate, need you to invest–how you sell, design and build your product, how you on-board and support your users. This, in turn, means that your investment will increase the value you deliver in ways that are clear and enlightening to your customers. That opens the door to conversations about better service for higher fees.

Your customer success program should be concerned with only two things–how to connect the value that your products deliver to each customer's relevant metrics, then doggedly pursuing success in those terms. You use the metrics to sell your solution, then to manage the relationship.

When you have a solid basis to measure the value you deliver, you can ask the "why do you care?" question with confidence.

Who Cares?

Call one Buyer each day for the next month and ask them why they care about you. As you go, bucket your customers like this:

1. Recognize the “We need you” group as your ideal customers. Capture why they need you, then find similar prospects in your sales funnel, sign them up and add more.
2. If the ok group are thinking about alternatives, they need what you do, but maybe not how you do it. If they see a better option elsewhere, they may stay to avoid switching costs–for now. If you are committed to their niche, they present your best area for innovation. Address their concerns and you'll move them up to the need–you category.
3. The “Who are you?” group have forgotten what you do for them, or their business has changed and you're no longer relevant. Understand their definition of success and decide what it would take to re-recruit them. If there's a win-win, you can re-recruit them–it’ll be easier than winning brand new customers. If there’s no win-win, assume they'll be gone by next year and build your plans around the other groups.

How did that exercise make you feel? How will your findings be reflected in your approach to customer success?

Share your conclusions with me at graham@primeFusion.ca and we can spend a few minutes discussing your next steps.

If you missed any of these related post, take a look now:

A Question of Innovation Outside-in Design The Best Collaborations Out of the Box Revealing Value, one step at a time

Which way to Lean?

Agile vs waterfall? It's one of the most common questions I get from business leaders. Building software WITH the customer seems so obvious. It's a wonder it took the industry decades to figure that out. So Agile is sexy as the way to Lean.

Yet Waterfall still has its place. Why?

Where this came from

Waterfall dates back to the days when creating software was more like constructing a building. Coding was a much slower process, so it was cheaper to design the system on paper, then have the customer approve the design document before cutting any code. As coding tools became more productive, this gap closed.

The Agile movement gathered pace at the turn of this century. The founding group created a brand around a collection of great software development practices. I had been using some of these a decade earlier, so of course I was a fan. The richness of a working prototype trumps a 50-page document to convey the design to a buyer, and when the prototype is right, the job is done.

The Agile brand allowed the software industry to have a conversation about our fundamental practices. Lots of businesses that started up after that time have known no other way. But the argument still rages. It's become a religious matter. Agilers can't fathom why anyone would take more than two weeks to deliver a usable improvement. Waterfallers don't trust the uncertainty of no plan and no documentation.

And leadership is caught between the deliver–early–and–often promise of Agile and the relative comfort of a thorough plan.

Fact is, projects are seldom pure Agile or Waterfall. Agile should never be used as an excuse for no plan and no documentation, and any complex project needs some structure. Where's the right place in this spectrum for your next assignment? It depends ...

The Waterfall/ Agile Scale

If you're wondering which way to go, here's a scale of favourable factors for 1 ( Waterfall) or 7 ( Agile):

1. You know exactly what you need and can write down every detail at the kickoff meeting.
2. You have a culture that is atuned to Waterfall.
3. You favour predictability and will pay a premium to get it.
4. You're repeating work that you have done before and have confidence that your playbook will work again this time.
5. You have a very short list of critical goals and don't care how those goals are achieved.
6. You have a team that's really good at Agile.
7. You're solving a problem for customers and the best solution isn't known yet.

The higher up this scale you are, the more you should lean to Waterfall–the further down you go, the more likely you are to win with Agile. You may notice that the degree of uncertainty increases as you go down this list. That's no coincidence.

If you can plan, do. That's Waterfall.

If the team knows the problem but little about the solution, figure out what needs to be learned next and learn it quickly. Lean towards Agile.

Which Way to Lean?

Pick a handful of projects that your business will conduct this year. For each project, circle the numbers that apply on the Waterfall/ Agile Scale and add up the scores. If your project scores 10 or less, waterfall is the better way. Over 15, lean towards agile.

Contact me at graham@primeFusion.ca to discuss your outcome for this challenge. We can spend a few minutes on some examples.

If you missed any of these related post, take a look now:

A Question of Innovation Outside-in Design Let's Be Clear

Have you really solved the problem?

Your customer is paying you to get something done for them. If your product is hard to use, you haven't solved their problem.

Go back and try again.

I once shipped a feature that relied in part on a spreadsheet for data input. It's not an uncommon shortcut when you a dev team is pressed for time. The user had to fill out several columns of data before they could start using the new code and it was plain sailing from there on. Problem is that we had run out of time so we didn't give the user any information about how to do this. The support team handled a lot of calls that week, all could have been avoided by decent usability or a little documentation.

Not quite up there with exploding smartphones for the worst user experience of all time, but I only let that happen once. Ever since, something like this has been a stop ship.

We all have our favourite usability gripes, frustrations we face when trying to use a product or service to solve a problem or get something done:

• Cash machine (why do they always ask me which account to deposit to when I only have a chequing account?)
• Any tv remote
• Any photocopier
• Most call centres

Supply your own examples - it's a parlour game.

Poor usability is a waste of your customer's goodwill, a drain on your support team, and a frustration for both. Everyone wins when we make poor product design a stop ship issue.

Grade your user experience

Think of a few times you have shipped a new product or service. Grade each time on this scale:

A - Your user can do what they need to do without training–it's intuitive. B - Training is required, it's easily accessible and as clear as possible. C - Hard to figure out, the user must call or email you before they can start. D - Impossible to figure out; the user needs to hire a consultant to set it up. E - They need help but they can't get through to you.

To make this exercise doubly effective, have an objective, independent party ask your customers to grade you.

If you consistently score As and Bs, your customers must be happy and your help line won't be spending their time dealing with bad product design. If you gave yourself Cs and Ds, better product design will increase customer satisfaction and the efficiency (profit) of your business.

Contact me at graham@primeFusion.ca and we can talk through some examples.

If you missed these related articles, go back and take a look now:

Outside-in Design Out of the Box Let's Be Clear

How average trumps excellent

A business runs well when many concurrent activities are in simpatico and interdependencies align.

In other words, you're only as good as your weakest link, however much you excel elsewhere.

Back when I was at school, I took a course in Operations Research. I don't recall whether it was an option but I doubt it - I hated the subject. Lots of those complex, multi-line formulae that we now have smartphones to solve. As I walked out of the exam, I shared my one takeaway with a friend - a business is a system that is only as good as it's weakest link. 5 average-quality steps will beat 4 excellent steps with one lousy bottleneck. Like the hare and the tortoise.

I've had many opportunities to test that idea in the years since. It still holds true.

When we implement business computer systems, we try to systematize the business. We take complex, varied problems, simplify what we can, then write code to enable people to conduct their work faster. This forces us to look at the sequence of steps a business goes through to process its transactions. Find a prospect, close a deal, build the product, deliver to the customer, then provide the service required to keep them happy.

Everything hums if those processes run seamlessly, information flows freely between the teams, and no step delays the next.

If we have one area of excellence, it's wasted if other areas are poor. If we sell a ton of product but can't deliver as expected, the customer is disappointed and we can't recognize revenue. If we could churn out product immediately but don't have enough orders on the books, part of our organization lies idle waiting for work.

Centres of excellence are a nice idea, but we'll build a much better business by raising the average until everything is good enough.

How good is your average?

Take a look at your operation:

1. List the 5-10 steps in the sequence that you follow to deliver value to a customer, starting with finding the sales lead.
2. Grade your business's performance against each step, 1 is poor, 5 is best.
3. What's your overall score? If it's over 20, you must be happy with the business - how will you get better? If it's under 10, there's work to do.
4. Which areas should you be improving first? If you have one or two 5s and the rest are under 3, can you move resources around to raise the average?

I've done this exercise with several hundred businesses. Send your results to me at graham@primeFusion.ca and I'll give you a benchmark.

If you missed these related articles, take a look now:

Production Lines and the Bottleneck Effect Let Information Flow Feel Your Pulse When Better Beats Best

Shake Hands with the Customer

It takes all kinds to make a business work, many skillsets. Diversity rules.

But customer engagement is one skill that we should all polish.

I was terrified the first time I met a customer. I let my colleague lead the meeting, kept my mouth shut most of the time for fear of saying the wrong thing. Fortunately, that was very early in my career. After a couple more meetings, it felt good. Not long after, you couldn't keep me away from the customers.

It's been my pleasure to lead many teams since then. I've worked with great sales people, customer support experts, lots of developer and IT stars, product managers, consultants, and service technicians. Warehouse professionals, insurance brokers and bankers. Even accountants.

Since those early sales meetings, I've been committed to introducing every member of my teams to the customer.

Naturally, this is inherent in sales, service and support roles. But all too often, the "backroom" staff don't leave the back room. The stereotype suggests that 'technical people' are uncomfortable with customers. Don't believe it. I've known many colleagues who have crossed this bridge and never looked back. Besides, since when was being outside our comfort zone a bad thing?

For people who build things–like developers, QA, and IT–invaluable insights are gained from sitting with a customer, or by hearing frustrations and solving problems over the phone in the support centre. Helping to sell exposes us all to customer objections.

These folks stand to benefit the most from walking a mile in the customer's shoes. Understanding how their work is being put to use, where it's working and where it isn't.

Because when they go back to their desks, they'll be able to solve those customer problems that much better. They will build better things.

Your people on the front line

Write back and tell me about the last time you put your developers in front of a customer, or rotated new tech hires through your support centre. Give me a specific example and tell me what you learned from the practice.

If you’re having trouble coming up with an example, it’s likely you’re not shaking the customer’s hand nearly enough–and that’s hurting your business.

Send me your answer at graham@primeFusion.ca and we can compare notes.

Of course your systems restrict innovation

Of course your systems restrict innovation - that's how you built them.

Anticipation is the key to flexibility.

Businesses run on transactions. We find a customer, strike a deal, deliver the goods and get paid. Day in, day out.

Business systems are the embodiment of the rules we define. Ways that we want the business to handle these transactions. The steps required to complete specific processes. Rule books are drawn up, and technology may be used to provide tools to help everybody follow those rules. The technology is useful if it enables scale, quality, efficiency and knowledge.

That's great as long as we get the rules right.

But things change. We learn better ways, create new products that require different transactions and processes. Customers demand something different. Maybe we need to raise the bar on our competitors. We often refer to this change work as "innovation" - designing new rules, then changing the technology to support those new rules.

The fewer rules, the more flexibility. But less control, and less scalability.

For this innovation to happen at a pace and cost that is viable for our business, we have to anticipate the need for flexibility. The challenge arises when the system becomes an impediment to change. If the innovation requires expensive modifications, we're less inclined to try it.

If the "system doesn't let us do this", it's worth remembering that can only be for one of three reasons:

1. The need for "this" was never foreseen.
2. "This" was foreseen and prohibited, for whatever reason was right at the time.
3. "This" was foreseen but did not make the priority list for implementation.

How much flexibility do you need?

1. Does your business benefit more from rigid processes or the flexibility for change?
2. Are your current systems designed to constrain or enable flexibility?
3. On balance, is your system enabling your business or slowing it down?
4. What changes do you need to make?

As ever, share your answers with me at graham@primeFusion.ca and we can spend a few minutes discussing ramifications.

The Decision Action Loop

Two types of activity occur in the course of any initiative. Decisions are made and Actions are taken. Make the right decisions and you’ll take the right actions. Actions give rise to new questions which require decisions.

The pace of the work is dictated by the Decisions/ Action loop. But decisions take time. Too long, usually. The good news is that this is under your control.

The work moves best when the decision and the action are made by the same person, or by a tightly connected team that can make good decisions quickly.

When the team knows what decisions they can make, what liberties they can take, things will be humming. The challenge arises when it’s unclear who needs to make the decision. Who can  approve this spend? Do we have the latitude to move this milestone? We need to broadcast the customer but marketing is at an offsite today.

Here are some techniques that will speed up your decision/ action loops:

• Steering meetings are update and decision sessions. A bi-weekly schedule is usually sufficient for the team to update leadership and request timely decisions. Skip a meeting and you may let the team down.
• Provide the team with guardrails to clarify their scope of influence. This will allow them to proceed with confidence unless the decision falls outside the bounds of budget approval, schedule delays, customer communications, resource allocation, or strategy.
• Have a leadership sponsor attend the team’s frequent updates.  The sponsor can move the guardrails and make a decision on the spot. But the role here is primarily as coach to enhance the team’s confidence in decision-making. Whether these are weekly status meetings or daily scrums, sponsor participation should take no more than 90 minutes a week. If the work is important enough, sponsors will make the time.
• Maintaining a roster of decisions. Traceability is useful if things don’t go as planned. Your project manager will handle this best.

Empowering Decisions

With your hand on your heart, answer these questions for a recent major  initiative:

1. Was your team generally able to make timely decisions without delay?
2. Did you give them appropriate guiderails and latitude?
3. If the work was delayed by decision-making, how could this have been avoided?
4. Was leadership able to keep their finger on the pulse and make the right decisions where needed?

Ask these questions in all your project retrospectives to get the team's candid  feedback. Share your results with me at graham@primeFusion.ca and I'll give you mine.

Minimal Effort Means Avoiding Work

"How do we know we're doing enough?" is a question I often get from business leaders. My response is to start by making sure you're not doing too much.

When you define a successful outcome and think through the work required to reach that goal, it's natural for the planning process to proceed from start to finish. If you're repeating work that someone on the team has done before, they can attest to the steps taken last time. If that worked well, go for it.

But if you haven't perfected this kind of work (or your team hasn't experienced it at all), there'll be guesswork in the plan. And with guesswork, comes extraneous effort. I've seen many plans that specified work which turned out to be detached from the critical outcomes of the project.

The exercise below provides a simple review for your team to make sure your projects are not wasteful. The test works best when applied to nearly finished plans before the work commences. It also works well as a retrospective for a completed project, often highlighting ways that work can be saved in future.

Being Minimalist

Apply this test to the last project you completed. Then apply it to the next one you're planning

1. List the ten project activities that took the most effort to complete.
2. Rank these activities by their importance to the project outcome - highest contribution to lowest.
3. Starting with the lowest ranked activity, ask whether the project would have been a success if this activity had been skipped.

If the answer is "Yes!", congratulations. You've found an activity that is not required on the plan. Take it out and save everyone time and energy. Then repeat the exercise with the next activity up the list.

As ever, share your results with me at graham@primeFusion.ca  and I'll suggest other ways you can avoid wasteful work.

Who Owns the Conversation?

If you're pitching something, asking for a decision, you'd better own the conversation. If you're being pitched, that's the last thing you want.

Meetings are great when they work. They're a waste of time when they flounder.

Every meeting needs an owner. A leader or facilitator to guide everyone through the topic. As the owner, your pre-work will make the meeting successful. If you invest the prep time well, you'll save time for each attendee. They'll all appreciate that.

Owning the pitch means sending the agenda and inviting the right people. It means being ready to answer their questions going in, or committing to a fast follow up if you can't.

To make your pitch, you'll need to establish expertise in the topic, tell the story, present options, and make a recommendation. Lead by example and ensure accountability. As the owner, you also control the loudest voices, avoid the herd and engender participation from everyone you invited. Otherwise, why did you invite them?

Conversely, if you're the one being pitched to, you are being asked to make a decision. You want to be advised, perhaps convinced, right? If you own the conversation, that's a red flag. It means that you may just end up with a bunch of unanswered questions, diminished confidence, and another meeting next week.

If you're pitching, put in the prep time. If you're being pitched to, share your expectations before the meeting.

Ownership Challenge

Here's a checklist for you to assess meetings where you're asking for a decision. Maybe you're proposing a plan, a strategy, asking for more budget or closing a sale.

1. Did you call the meeting?
2. Did you lead the meeting? If not, was your heart really in it?
3. What outcome did you hope for? Did that happen?
4. Were you asked questions that you hadn't anticipated? Could you have foreseen these?
5. Did the group wander from your topic? Did you get them back on track?
6. What will you do differently the next time?

You can easily turn this in to a preparation checklist and track your progress. Send your results to me at graham@primeFusion.ca and we can take a look together to make your next meeting even better.

When Better Beats Best

I have a pet hate for "best practices". Not the concept, but the term. There are areas in every business where being the best is valuable. But most often, better is good enough.

Like many tech marketing terms, "best practices" is a well-intentioned cliche. Who says these practices are the best? That's pretty definitive. Best for who? Is best the same for every business? I'll let you know whether they're best for me.

Guard against being sucked in by the promise of doing something the best possible way - it's often unnecessary and distracting. I look at four options:

1. Stop! : wind this down - it's no longer relevant to your business.
2. Good : you're already good enough - just maintain what you have.
3. Improve : should do better - steady improvement is useful.
4. Perfect : become the best you can - it'll make or break your business.

You probably know what distinguishes your organization from your competition. Better still, what your customers need in their provider. Getting to best for these things is worth the effort. That means not trying to be best at everything. Knowing where to focus makes all the difference.

Where do you need to be the best? Test your focus by answering these questions:

1. If your business could improve in three ways this year, which three would your customers appreciate the most?
2. Who in your industry is best at each of these three things?
3. How good do you need to be in each area?
4. How good are you now, and what steps should you take to get there?

Send me your results at graham@primeFusion.ca and we can discuss an action plan.

Master Small Data Before Big

I was in New York City last weekend. Reminded of the time when I was helping the Wall Street firms with their first forays into big data. Fast forward 10 years, and the larger financial institutions have figured out the value. But this does not mean that big data is ready for widespread success. There's still much more to be gained by mastering your small data.

A few successes have come out of costly R&D exercises. We are told that more data has been captured in the last two years than had been captured to that point. Tech industry marketing is naturally looking to seed a revolution around big data - think of all the storage and processing power that this would need.

But as you've heard me ask ad nauseum, what value does this have for you?

Sure, it's an enticing concept - capture everything and seek hidden gems in the patterns, trends and associations that lie within. Big data is massive, unstructured, and random. Insights are needles in the haystack, and extracting them is a science project. If you don't at least have a theory as to what you could gain from this, it's not a business initiative.

A much better focus - master the data you already have! Once you're comfortable that your business's data is captured accurately, reported efficiently, and analysed as thoroughly as you need to support your tactical and strategic decision making, you're ready to look at other data opportunities.

75% of businesses are not there yet. Are you?

My guidance? Keep an eye on big data technology by all means - it will become affordable for smaller businesses 10 years from now. But continue to focus on developing insights from the data you already have.

Have you Mastered Small Data?

Send me your answers to these questions so we can discuss the best way for your business to becomes a master of your data:

1.     What data do you have?
2.     Where is it?
3.     How long does it take to close your monthly accounts?
4.     How often do you see your non-financial data?
5.     How many of your actions are guided by good data?
6.     What additional data would help you take better actions?

You know where to send your answers to get my specific guidance - graham@primeFusion.ca.

Cut Down Your Options

A couple of years ago, I was asked to comment on the implementation approach of a large client. They wanted to know why "everything took so long" and, more importantly, what to do about it.

The problem - too many decisions. The answer? Constraints.

After a few conversations with leadership, specialists, project managers and business experts, it was clear that no one really agreed on the root cause. IT thought that the business didn't spend enough time on the projects, the business thought that IT didn't make changes quickly enough, and leadership just knew that stuff needed to happen faster.

So when I brought the players together for a day to work through the feedback, I led the group through an exercise to whiteboard solutions to two problems. As pre-work, I asked the business leaders to bring two real-world problems to the session.

We picked the first problem and the teams worked together to figure out a solution. We did this quickly, but it took three hours.

For the second go around I added one step. After picking the challenge, I asked the group to spend 15 minutes identifying constraints that they could impose on the solution. Simplifying assumptions, budget and timeline limitations, and team size. Remarkably, the second solution was designed in one hour.

When we debriefed, the team reflected on the past couple of years. Their conclusion was that decision-making accounted for over 50% of the time taken to complete projects. These were delays when work was on hold waiting for the right folks to find time in their busy schedules to make the decisions. Too many choices, it turns out, slowed things down dramatically.

Over the next six months, every project included a constraints discussion. Always a workshop, with all the right players in the room for as long as it took.

The result? Limiting their choices improved project delivery by 25%. IT was happy that the business spent enough time ( although it was less time than before), and the business was happy that IT turned around their feedback more quickly ( because they could get on with the job with fewer interludes).

Leveraging Constraints

Think of the last major decision your organization made, did it take too long? If so, ask yourself if considering the constraints would have expedited the process.

Think about a decision you’re working on right now. How could you make this easier by applying some simple constraints?

Let me know at graham@primeFusion.ca and I’ll be happy to show you how. After all, time is money.

The Right Kind of Help

I've been buying and delivering services for all of my career. Mostly buying, so I know a good deal when I see one. Whenever we seek outside help to solve a pressing problem, it's vital that we pick the best approach.

There are 4 tiers of help we can bring in to solve a complex challenge:

1. Do this task for me
2. Tell me how to do this task
3. Help me do this task
4. Help me figure out how to address this challenge

Notice that in the first three cases I, the client, have decided on the tasks that are required to solve my problem. I may be asking for different types of help, but I'm assuming I know the answer. That's great if I'm right, but if I'm wrong, or incomplete, I'm just hiring an expert to help me do the wrong thing right.

For tier 4, on the other hand, I know what challenge I need to resolve but I am open as to how this is done. I'm asking for a different type of expertise, someone who has solved similar complex problems before, and who could help me figure out a much more innovative solution. Simpler, lower risk, higher benefit. A better way.

Understanding this helps me to recruit the right kind of expertise - 1) trained bodies to complete a task, 2) trainers, 3) technical advisors, or 4) strategic problem solvers.

The value I am seeking increases as I move from tier 1 to tier 4. At the same time, the supply of suitable expertise decreases.

4 tiers for you

To apply the 4 tiers model to your business, consider a previous initiative where you may have been too prescriptive on the solution and hired task-based expertise from the get go. Could the outcome have been better if you had recruited the help of a strategic problem solver first?

You can reach me at graham@primeFusion.ca to discuss how the 4 tiers can apply to your specific circumstances.