Pull Your Team Together — Management Practice Part II

By Marty Zigman, on July 28, 2010

Background

In Part I of my two part article, “Is your Staff Weak? Sharpen your Management Practice.”, I discussed the direct management practice.  In Part II, I discuss the Cross-Department Management practice.  When you adopt both the Direct Report and Cross-Department practices, it promises to produce more time, accountability, time, and productivity.

You may want to revisit Part I as I will continue the discussion assuming that you are current on that discussion.

The Cross-Department Practice

The Cross Department Practice is designed to ensure that your team works together so they don’t each become a bottleneck to each other.  You need this practice because business is fundamentally a set of coordinated acts toward some set of promises ultimately to your customers. Because I am speaking fundamentally, I can safely say that you need to ensure your staff works well together to deliver on your vision and customer promise.

Cross-Department Report

The Cross-Department Report is a shared document structure that typically is represented in spreadsheet form but can be more elaborate given the great web structures available today.  The document (example below) has the following major elements in a table (rows and columns) with the following headings:

  1. Key Project / Initiative (row): Organized by key project or matter you care about.  Often this is by major customer or business channel.
  2. Direct Report Name (column): Name of the person who will “own the column”.

Sample Cross Department Report

See the example of a report structure I used in 2003.  This example can be used for inspiration but it will be up to you to design what works best for your organization.  Personally, I possess the skill to do this well as I think categorically and logically.  If you find you this is not intuitive to develop, you may want to get some help getting this built.  The document should live electronically in a place that all team members can access as needed.  Typically, we see this on a shared file server but these days, it is often in some type of web portal, such as SharePoint or Google Docs.

Action during the Week

During the week, your staff will be making new requests of each other and taking care of existing requests.  As they do, they will record their request within the Cross-Department report by finding the cell that is the intersection between the table-row related to the project / major initiative the staff is working on, and the person who is being requested.  Your team member will record their initials and make their request in summary form as well as a “requested by” date.

For example, a request that I made to Tanya Blenner may look like this “MZ: Need marketing pamphlets for STK1010 by 4/3” in the “STK1010 New Product Initiative” row  under the “Tanya Blenner” column.

Your team members should not solely record their request in this tool without other clear communication to the person being requested.  This structure is to help team members remember the requests that their other team members have made so they can help each other move toward goals you care about.

Weekly Meeting

Like the weekly Direct Report meeting, you will hold another, at a minimum, weekly meeting.  I like Wednesdays because on that day, we are typically in the middle of major action for the week.  This meeting is run quite different from the Direct Report meeting because you and your entire direct report team will be together as a group.  At the meeting, you will organize around the Cross-Department document discussed above.

The meeting will have two parts.  During the first part, you will open by speaking any updates that the team needs to collectively hear.  This usually is a good place to make new announcements and to reinforce the existing business strategy.

The second part takes considerably more time and once your team understands how this works, you will be mostly quiet as they will do the talking.  You can designate a member of your team to be the organizer to step through each spreadsheet table row (project / topic) and to record key elements within the related cell.  The document should be displayed, for example on a large screen, where you and each member can see the document clearly.  If team members are remote, I suggest a desktop sharing program, such as GoToMeeting.

The conversation goes something like this:

Designated organizer: “Jim, what is your progress on the new SBT order integration for Lynette?”

Jim: “We are on track for delivery on 4/12”

Designated organizer: records in cell: “on track for delivery on 4/12”.

Or sometimes it goes like this:

Designated organizer: “Lynette, what is your progress on the getting Walmart their Point of Presence displays for Tim?”

Lynette: “I have an issue with my supplier and I will not be able to make it by 4/15.  Tim, may I set a meeting up with you to discuss what I am facing?”

Tim: “Yes, let’s talk after the meeting to find time as I am concerned that the customer will be upset.”

You: “Lynette, be sure you bring this up during our weekly as I thought I offered a way to get through that supplier issue and I would like to learn more.”

Designated organizer: records in cell: “Issue with supplier.  Meeting to discuss option.”

Like the Direct Report meeting, the purpose of this meeting is not to solve problems.  The purpose is to report status and ensure you work to free up bottlenecks.  There are times that the team will need your direction on specific issues and you will offer advice.  But if there are complexities, it is best to create a separate meeting specifically on the concern.

The goal for each of your reports is to have nothing in their column.  If the cell is empty, that would mean that they are satisfying requests and they do not represent a bottleneck to the organization.  The meeting can be fun if the mood is lightly competitive – I observe that most team members enjoy demonstrating that they have nothing in their column and are helpful and responsive; all team members recognize and appreciate good performers.

Remember the purpose of the meeting is to ensure the team is coordinated and is in communication toward your goals.  Here are some key suggestions and features for running this meeting:

  • Produce the meeting on the same day and time on a regular minimum weekly frequency
  • The discussion is led by you to demonstrate your commitment to action and resolution
  • Have the room be quiet, comfortable, and conducive for precise conversation
  • Turn off outside communications and do not allow interruptions
  • Ensure that people are on time and that they are ready to work through the entire meeting in one sitting
  • You will open the meeting but most of the time you will be listening to your direct reports
  • The meeting is typically two hours in duration but should not be longer as it may be too hard to hold attention.
  • The public forum puts pressure on your direct reports to perform in a positive fashion.
  • The forum is not to solve issues but to make announcements and new requests and get status.  Typical dialogue is to request for offline meetings to solve specific concerns.

The Promise

I learned this practice from someone I highly respect.  He had a military background and he taught me what an operation is and how to be an effective leader and manager.  Here is what I can promise:

  1. Your staff will be less confused and you will get what you want in a more reliable and predictable fashion.
  2. You will produce more time to take care of things because you will always be informed and you will not feel the need to chase after information or project status.
  3. Your team will have more time to work because they will have fewer interruptions by you and they can make space to be prepared.
  4. Your staff will work more like a team and develop mutual respect for each other.
  5. You will develop more loyalty because you will understand your staff better and they will feel understood and heard.
  6. You will discover if you make too many requests and if you need more capacity.
  7. You will understand if you are in a fantasy about what you think your people can deliver and what they actually do deliver.
  8. You will learn about the strengths and weaknesses of your team and you will have opportunities to calibrate its configuration and structure.

My Offer

I am happy to have conversation about this practice to help you see if it is applicable in your situation.  This practice is one of the offers I make for my clients who are looking to develop internal excellence.  I use this practice when my firm leads major client project initiatives.

Sometimes, my clients ask me to help them get these practices started so they can learn and then take it over once they get the feel for it.  Along the way, I make assessments of my client’s leadership style so that they can learn how to improve their managerial effectiveness.

Feel free to comment for more conversation.

July 28, 2010 | Tags: | Category: General, Management, Strategy | Leave a comment

Is your Staff Weak? Sharpen your Management Practice.

By Marty Zigman, on July 8, 2010

The Complaint

Sure enough, I see the pattern repeatedly.  A very bright executive is having trouble with his management team to produce to his or her expectation.  A common complaint is “I told them three different times I wanted this… “ and the management team doesn’t deliver.  The executive speaks about how their team is weak and how he or she doesn’t understand why people seem to be “making things up” about what they said.

Orientation and Promise

One of the things I generally notice is that many business executives and managers appear to be disconnected from the energy required to produce action that delivers results in a reliable, sustainable, and effective fashion.  It was Peter Drucker, early management science pioneer, who said, “The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.”  This discussion is about helping you get more productivity from your people.

When I work with others in a leadership role, it has been my personal experience, my followers will commit to the extent they see me commit.  This means if I act accountable, then they generally will as well. If I make better assessments about what it will take to get something done, my staff will generally accept my requests with a mood of willingness and enthusiasm.  If I remember what “already existing” commitments they need to take care of, and I stay sensitive to them, they will appreciate the practical reality they face working to deliver on their promises to me.  This will produce loyalty.

Through a set of management practices, I offer that you can develop a skill that will produce better leadership and thus better results in your business endeavors.  The promise, if you commit to the practice, is to lower your management costs, increase your profits, develop more time for both you and your team, and produce long-term staff loyalty.

Applicability

The practice I am offering works best under the following conditions:

  1. Your staff will be with you over a long-time horizon.  Hence for short-lived projects, this practice will not work as people will not have enough time to learn it.
  2. You have more than one person on your staff.  The practice demonstrates its value best when there are three or more direct reports.
  3. Your staff each holds a different role from their peers and they need to coordinate with each other to produce results.
  4. You have developed sufficient autonomy to control your calendar so that you can make recurrent commitments for conversation.

This article will be delivered in two parts:

  1. The Direct Report Practice (this article)
  2. The Cross Department Practice (future article now available here)

The Practice Elements

The practice begins with a common Manager / Direct Report hierarchy.  See the image below for the model’s structure and lines of communications:

Management Communications and Hierarchy

The elements are as follows:

  1. Manager: this is you holding your role as a leader.  Your orientation is that you need others to help you get things complete.
  2. Direct Report: this is your staff where you have authority to produce consequences if they do not keep their promises.  The practice we will discuss will produce accountability.
  3. Report: this is a document structure that a direct report produces to record their promises, concerns, and requests and is delivered to you recurrently.
  4. Cross Department: this is another document structure that is used where direct reports record requests between each other.

With these basic elements and model, we can discuss the practice.

The Direct Report Practice

The practice begins with you being clear what you want to produce and the role each member plays as your staff.  This is easier said than done.  This article does not address the concern that you are not sure what you need to get done; it is perfectly reasonable that you may not be sure what is the most relevant and meaningful action to take to produce your objective; this practice does not help.  However, this practice will help you steer in any direction you decide to take.

It is important to ensure that your staff is clear what their role is in producing what you want.  At the simplest level, you are a customer and they are a producer and hence they exist to serve you.  It is quite important that your staff, acting as a producer, possess the skill to understand your requests and they have the capacity and knowledge to fulfill on promises to deliver.  A feature of strong leadership is to make sure structures are in place to work with people who can hold organizational roles that you invented.

Weekly Meeting

At a regular frequency, you will meet (face-to-face or, if remote, through a desktop share program such as GoToMeeting) with your staff to have a conversation.  At the meeting, your staff will bring their documented report (discussed more fully in the following section) to you.

The meeting should have the following characteristics to be effective:

  • Face-to-Face / One-on-One Direct Communication
  • Safe Environment with only You and the Direct Report meeting
  • Recurrently Minimum Weekly Frequency
  • One Hour Duration (typically)
  • Report Maintained by the Direct Report
  • Organized By Key Responsibility Categories
  • Organized By Key Customers / or Channel
  • Organized by Operation and / or Project or Initiative

It is important that you perform this recurrently.  The better you do this, the more effective your staff will become.  In general, it means this:

  • Meet at the same day and time and be on time.  Demonstrate you care.
  • Turn off your phone and get away from your computer
  • Be in a quiet place so you can listen
  • Emphasize precision and rigor
  • Do not use this time to solve complex problems; that happens at a different time.  If you need more time, offer to schedule a separate meeting to solve specific problems.
  • Only make new requests of your staff after you have heard their report so you can tailor them to fit their current progress and concerns

To help clarify, each report element will be described in greater detail below:

Weekly Report General Structure

The weekly report, authored and maintained by your direct report, should have at least the following informational elements:

  1. Progress on Requests: list of your requests typically categorized by theme that makes sense for the way your staff organizes their department.
  2. Issues and Concerns: list of issues or concerns that your staff feels they need help with else they won’t be able to keep their promise to you.
  3. Cross Department Requests: list of requests that your staff has made between each other.  A follow up article will discuss this practice and the Cross Department Meeting.

I supply a couple of sample reports (#1 and #2) for your inspirational review that I used in 2003 when I held the Chief Technology Officer role and I reported to the Chief Operating Officer.  You will need to work with your staff to invent what makes sense for you.  Below is a visual snapshot of the report elements:

Sample Direct Report Snapshot

Here are more details about these report categories:

Progress on Requests

You need a mechanism to make requests, for your staff to make subsequent promises, to understand if your staff heard you, and to see how they are progressing toward fulfillment.  You need to help them understand the key concerns or initiatives you are after.

Everything you request will be recorded by your staff.  Your staff will be responsible for writing down what you want so that you can observe if they understand your request.  If they don’t understand you, you will not get what you seek.  If you don’t demand they write it down, then be prepared to have cases where they won’t deliver.  Give your staff time to take notes and to ask questions – remember, it’s not what you say but what they listen.  Having them write it down holds them accountable and teaches them to understand you so your cost to work with them goes down over time.

Your staff will report on your requests typically in a prioritized fashion for which you set.  You are there to help them prioritize what you care about.  They will offer a status on their delivery progress so that you can assess if they will meet your requirements (completion time, deliverable).

It is important to remember that despite best intentions, all human beings have a hard time remembering or holding everything they promise (this includes you).  The intensity of situations may produce significant stress and throw people into forgetting what they said they would do (and what you requested).  It’s important, as a leader, to develop good judgment on how your requests actually are responsible for their breakdowns in performance.  Of course, if you assess your staff member can’t hold the role and someone else can, it may make sense to make organizational changes.  Good leadership is to know when to make these calls.

Issues and Concerns

Your staff will always have issues and concerns when they are trying to produce action.  You need to see what they are concerned about because if these issues are not addressed, it will likely get in the way of them keeping their promises to you.

This can be a place where you develop empathy for the world your staff experiences because of the role you invented. By listening to their concerns, you can offer them thinking and tools to help them break through their issues. It is also a place for you to reflect on how much capacity you need to get what you want.  If you see recurrent patterns of breakdowns and obstacles in these discussions, you have an opportunity to design for a different organizational structure or configuration.

Cross Department Requests

The Cross Department Requests is elaborated more fully in the subsequent article.  This is a place where your staff has made requests of other staff members (their peers) that directly report to you.  You will learn how your team works together and if there are bottlenecks due to the way you have configured your organization. Like the Progress on Requests above, you will want to see the status on each item in a prioritized fashion.

The Cross-Department Practice

I delivered the subsequent article that discusses a different practice that ties all this together.  Please share your thinking so I can clarify the Direct Report practice.

July 8, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: General, Management, Strategy | 1 Comment

All-Talk: Parallel Processing before Going Live!

By Marty Zigman, on April 27, 2010

Houston Neil, of Manufacturing Software Advice, just wrote a nice article about different ERP implementation approaches.  He did an informal study with 45 participants and came up with some interesting summaries.  The three primary implementation strategies are:

  1. Big Bang: cutover all-at-once from the legacy system
  2. Phased: cutover areas over of the system a portion of the time
  3. Parallel: Process in both systems at the same time until comfortable

His findings show that few, if any organizations parallel process.

I generally start with a Phased approach when the scope of the project is great and complexity is high.  If the project is small enough, I go with the Big Bang approach.

A number of years ago, I led an implementation for a major Talent Agency where we planned a Big Bang approach. We built a custom trust accounting application which plugged into Microsoft Dynamics NAV.  We were going with native Accounts Payable and General Ledger features.  The risk was in the software stability of our new application and the data migration.  Big Bang made sense because we were going to retire the “Tiny Term” legacy system before the client’s contract renewal term came due at the end of the year.  Right after we started the implementation, our key sponsor and project champion left the agency and we were forced to start working with a new CFO.

The new CFO was reasonably nervous.  He was new in the position, had not had the opportunity to develop a relationship with me and my team, and had never gone through a new financial system implementation.  He was very concerned that the new system was not going to work and that he would end up have a significant issue processing disbursements to his high-profile celebrity clients.  That would be a major failure under his leadership.  I was calm because I had done some many implementations, I understood where the risks were, and I knew how to manage through it.  The CFO wanted an “insurance option” in our contract so that he could ensure costs would not get out of control if the software did not deliver on our promise.

The CFO wanted to go Parallel.  Naturally, I did not challenge him on this but I did advise about the extra costs and demands on his organization.  Most people who are risk averse conceptually like the parallel option as it eases their mind that they can abandon the strategy should it not workout.  I offered that before we start the parallel processing phase of the project, we should perform good data conversion tests, ensure the team is well-trained and perform an Acceptance Test.  We proceeded with that plan and had approximately 4 weeks of parallel processing in the mix.

What is great about working with a CFO is their concern for ROI.  As we were in the implementation and performing our Acceptance Test, he began get comfortable that the system functioned as promised.  Instead of using the 4 weeks for parallel processing, he used that time to perform more training and planning for the cut-over.  He basically picked Big-Bang but he never knew nor admitted it.  He elected to not exercise his insurance option.  This was a good decision on his part.

In almost all cases, the cost of parallel processing is simply too great to get a return.  It’s logistically difficult to pull it off — and invariably you run into exceptions that must be reconciled driving up costs.  In my mind, the question gets down to weighing the cost to uncover issues before cutting over versus the costs of discovering and dealing with them in the heat of the cut-over.  I think concerns about breaking customer-trust if we experience system failures should be factored into the decision making.  Many times, customers are shielded from the back-office operation so this is usually is not a heavy factor.  After 20 plus years doing this kind of work, I have witnessed and admired clients that “go-for-it” by going live with basic testing and training and who are committed to handle issues as-they-come-up.  This approach generally keeps costs down and it forces the real concerns to come forth the need attention.  Recently, I heard another client discuss the desire to go Parallel.  I kept quiet, staying sensitive to his concerns, but speculating that it was “all-talk”.

What lessons have you learned migrating from old systems to new business platforms? 

April 27, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: Accounting, CRM, General, Strategy | Leave a comment

Trust, Responsibility, Competitive Advantages and NetSuite

By Marty Zigman, on April 14, 2010

In organizations, responsibility appears to be something that is dealt with only when irresponsible behavior is witnessed.  I claim that because responsibility is not regularly talked about, and hence is not well understood, most organizations are effectively blinded by ignorance — They don’t “get it”.

Responsibility, Trust and Sought After Business Attributes

I offer that responsibility is a context for the production of trust.  Behind all acts that produce trust, responsibility is the attitude and environment that must be there for trust to be developed, reinforced, and subsequently leveraged.  Why care about trust?  Because trust dramatically lowers the cost to have offers accepted, promises to be fulfilled, and satisfaction to be produced. 

Can we agree that a good business is one that produces sustainable growth? Is not a good business one that has more offers accepted, more promises fulfilled, and more satisfaction produced?  All my clients want a business with these qualities.  Does it not follow to ask what we can do to become really good at producing these outcomes?  Let’s look closer at trust as a competitive practice.

 Trust is always in the background working for us but we don’t see it until it breaks.  Consider Toyota and the issues it faces with product safety.  Toyota’s break in trust is a loud display of its role in producing competiveness and now it is spending millions of dollars to regain their customers’ trust.  Just as a break in trust takes away capacity and produces cost, its reinforcement lowers costs and enables growth.  But how many executives, while talking about growth, speak about building trust?  Very few.

 To understand trust better, we can develop a deeper understanding of responsibility.  I find that it is easier to understand when we see trust in relationship to responsibility and time.  See the table below: 

Responsibility Time Perspective

Time Horizons and Responsibility

The illustration models three time horizons to determine a individual’s perspective and associative behaviors. 

  1. Past / Accountable: to be accountable is to maintain a perspective that you are the owner for an already produced outcome.  The most accountable person will accept consequences, in any form, for the results of past behavior.  Managers are powerfully accountable when they explain the past which point to their action (or the action of others through them) as the cause of any effect.
  2. Now / At Cause: to be “at cause” is to hold a perspective that you will do what ever is needed to produce action toward the intended goal.  The most “at cause” person does not simply expect others to fulfill but will always know that their requests, promises, assertions and declarations move the action forward toward a specific goal.  Hence managers remain at cause when they see and know their staff understands their requests and promises.  Managers do this by grounding their own interpretations by regularly checking the performance of their staff’s current and past action.
  3. Future / Committed: to be committed is to declare specifically what the future will be like even if there is weak supporting evidence that it will go that way.  A committed person designs, makes and fulfills on strategies and tactics that change the current situation to a new and improved situation.  Managers that are committed relentlessly and continually act to bring the future into the present. 

Responsibility sits in the background for these three attitudes and time perspectives.  To be powerfully responsible is to hold these three perspectives at all times. Trust is built when you act responsibly.  Finally, trust is an assessment made about a person’s sincerity and competence to fulfill and produce conditions of satisfaction in a specific domain of concern.  This is a more sophisticated way of saying that that trust is earned and given to you by another. 

From your customer’s perspective, earning trust might look like a future invented by you (as in an offer) that indeed produces exactly as you said it would (as in fulfillment).  The better you are at producing what you offered, the more willingness your customers will move into a future you invent; and hence you will become more competitive.

Responsibility and Business Functions

To connect these concepts better to organizations and behavior, the illustration below brings forth common business functions that nearly all companies will be fundamentally be concerned about.  For the purposes of this writing, I won’t go into what each function is but may in a future post.  What may be new for you is to think about these functions in relationship to time and uncertainty and ultimately their relationship to trust.

Business Function Responsibility Time PerspectiveThe illustration is designed to show that past actions (lower left corner) leave relatively little to uncertainty.  This is the business domain of “Accounting” and it is called that because the responsible perspective is to be “accountable”. 

In the space of now (center area) is the action we are in to fulfill promises.  There is more outcome uncertainty (albeit high or low depending on the difficult to produce the promise) as we may encounter breakdowns as we attempt to produce what we promised to our customers. 

In the future (upper right corner) is where we act with commitment.  Typically in business, this future is about forecasting, management planning, and product development.  In those domains, there is much more uncertainty that it is going to turn out. 

Competitive organizations make declarations and commitments and are able to more reliably turn it out.  They earn trust and are granted more authority to make new commitments.  They enjoy lower capital acquisitions costs, have an easier time recruiting talent, and possess customers more willingly open to listen to new offers to try new products and services.  A good example is Apple Computer announcement of the new iPad with 300,000 units sold the first weekend.  Apple is downright competitive! Is it not fundamentally due to their capacity to build and hold trust (meaning of the brand in the customer’s mind)? 

Less competitive organizations ultimately make commitments that ruin their future.  They cannot be trusted to turn it out and they ultimate have higher costs of capital, more difficult time getting quality people, and their customers are less willing to accept their offers.  Fundamentally, they can not be trusted.  For their listeners, they produce uncertainty.  They are not competitive.

Connecting Responsibility and Business Systems

My hope is that the connection between trust and responsibility has been made and you can see how these concepts have relationship to core business functions.  In modern businesses, software technology is used to enable coordination between all parties (customers, suppliers, employees, employers, regulators, investors, etc…).  Business systems shape the space for which all these roles act.  What does this mean in relationship to trust? 

Have you ever had the experience of cooking a sizeable meal in constrained (small size and poorly designed) kitchen versus a larger, well designed one? In the constrained kitchen, is it not harder to prep the food and get it all out hot at the same time to produce the good meal?  Even when you are acting responsibly, can you see how the space thwarts your intentions? 

Business systems help you work along the entire business cycle as suggested in the above illustration.  The best business systems enable responsible, trustworthy action at all times.  Business systems simply represent capacity in the hands of responsible business actors.  How that capacity is used is completely driven by the skills, strategies and tactics of its users.  Underneath this is a deep and rich story for greater degrees of responsibility to drive competitive action. 

A well designed business system expands the capacity of its users just as the well-designed kitchen empowers the responsible chef.  A poorly designed business system will reduce the capacity of its users.  In my career, I have seen so many systems thrown into organizations to solve specific problems and these very same systems actually work to reduce capacity.  I talk about this in my article “Best of Breed Systems: Traps and Lies”.

A New Orientation and Solution

In my assessment, once an understanding that responsibility and the production of trust can produce competitive advantages, the need for high quality, well designed business systems take on new meaning. 

When I listen to the marketplace, I see organizations that understand the business system promise and they make the investments to realize the sought after competitive advantages.  Usually, these are larger organizations with more resources dedicated to get their systems integrated so that it works to open capacity, not constrain it.  They “get it”.  See the February 27, 2010 Economist article: “Clicking for Gold”  for a report on how companies like eBay and Amazon do this.  

I serve smaller organizations which seek to leverage tools to expand their capacity to produce marketplace trust.  Software integration is costly and is avoided primarily because their organizations often don’t have the scale to realize the return from the investment.  So they need a solution.  

Up until a couple of years ago, all my ambitious customers faced software integration questions.  Grow revenue sufficiently to make the investments toward better integrated business systems.  However, I am pleased that there is now one provider that has the vision to support smaller companies who “get it”.  And that provider is NetSuite.  They offer business management software that is designed to support the continuity of business functions as illustrated in the above diagram.  In the hands of responsible actors, they will become more competitive.  

We seek to work with clients with substantial ambitions to select, customize, and implement well designed systems so they can responsibly gain competitive advantages.  To this end, we anticipated marketplace demand and became a NetSuite Solutions Partner because their offering fits our philosophy and is a “secret weapon” to smaller organizations that adopt responsibly.  With our knowledge of business practices, information technology, and NetSuite coupled with our customers’ responsible practices, we substantially increase our customers’ competitive advantages.  Get it?  

Please share your thoughts so we can continue the conversation.   For a PDF of this article, click here.

April 14, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Accounting, CRM, General, Marketing, NetSuite, Strategy | Leave a comment

Finally a BlackBerry Unread Messages View

By Marty Zigman, on April 6, 2010

After being a hard core BlackBerry user for easily over five years, I finally today found what I have been wanting since day one: a BlackBerry Unread Message view that would closely mimic Outlook’s Unread Mail Search Folder.

Because of BlackBerry Enterprise integration with Microsoft Exchange, I enjoy the power of jumping between Outlook and BlackBerry to work my communications in my professional and personal life.  Long ago, I gave up on filing Outlook Email Messages and instead used the Read/Unread mail toggle as my mechanism to manage mail.  I only mark a message as read if I am done with it.   I keep messages as unread when I need to follow up.  I toggle the flag as necessary to keep under control.

I do the same thing on my BlackBerry.  However, until today, I thought I had to hit “b” to go to the bottom and then hit “u” to scroll up to the next unread message.

I found this post, Saved Searches – Find Unread Messages, and it unlocked the mystery of this missing feature.   You can read the post but bottom-line, use Message Search to create a Saved Search that is assigned to an Alt-Key combination.  While the article suggests using Alt-U, I disagree because Alt-U is my toggle/untoggle flag while reading a message.  I chose Alt-T but anything will work if it doesn’t conflict with an existing short-cut key combination.

My hope is that this just helped you become that much more productive.  If you have any obsure BlackBerry tips, please share.

April 6, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: CRM, Technical | Leave a comment

Innovation, Testing, and Fully-Integrated Systems

By Marty Zigman, on March 18, 2010

CFO.com magazine just released an article called “Testing, Testing: The New Innovation Game“, “Harrah’s Entertainment exemplifies the burgeoning use of broad, IT-enabled experimentation to improve businesses.”.  The main point in the article is that information captured in IT systems enables innovators to test their speculations better than ever before.

This is the promise of Business Intelligence (BI) and its predecessor, Data Warehousing.   In my mind, what’s most important is the skill to make assessments about the data captured.   I have clients that call this “Marketing Analytics” while others call it “Data Mining” and their vision is to capture greater revenue and build deeper customer loyalty.   Fundamentally, the data needs to be organized in a manner that allows the analyst to do their analysis.   I find that we are often in conversations about ways to lower the investment to pull data together because it is generally too slow and costly to get data prepped before doing the analysis.

A big concern I see in the talk around Best of Breed Systems is lack of conversation about the need to build a Business Intelligence system.  Although there can be pre-built integration between those systems, the data elements generally will be decentralized.  This leads to significant investment in the development of a data warehouse to link and centralize information to support analytical reporting.  Can this be avoided?

For small to mid-sized businesses, I am interested in bringing analytical tools to ambitious organizations at low cost to help them produce competitive advantages.  As such, the argument for selecting and implementing fully-integrated systems, such as NetSuite, significantly drop the cost of getting at data to make meaningful and actionable assessments.  See the “Best-of-Breed Business Systems: Traps & Lies ” post for more thinking. 

Most growing organizations have decentralized systems, and hence they have problems getting at data.   We have provided a good interim solution before they migrate to fully-integrated systems.  See our “Remote Reporting Services” offering.

What opportunities and challenges do you see with getting at information to become competitive?

March 18, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Category: NetSuite, Reporting | 2 Comments

Best-of-Breed Business Systems: Traps & Lies

By Marty Zigman, on January 26, 2010

Background

In my 20+ year career helping middle market companies select and implement business software systems, I often come to client situations where an executive makes the declaration: “We are going Best-of-Breed with our software solution!”.  I understand the appeal and logic.  It seems smart and will provide for a range of options.  In the background, my client believes the following arguments: 

  1. I will get the best software in that class so I will end up with the best practices in my business.
  2. I won’t get vendor lock-in because I am mixing and matching systems.  If one vendor gives me a problem, I will take that portion of the system out and replace it with another.

We all like to look smart and no one likes to be pinned down in a situation.  But I urge you to develop different criteria for making decisions around your business system investments.   I offer that Best-of-Breed thinking is really a marketing lie designed to sell more software.  Under the allure of making you feel clever as you believe you are minimizing risk you are led into a trap that becomes later expensive to untangle.  I suggest that there is a more powerful orientation for selecting business software:  Select your software based on 

  1. Its capacity to organize work.
  2. Its ability to help you synthesize information for decision making.
  3. Its mechanisms to allow you to act quickly and consistently with customers and partners.

Let me debunk the background arguments for the Best-of-Breed approach:

  1. Business Practices: Software opens and closes your capacity to produce a practice.  But it does not make the practice.  You will have to design, craft, and learn your desired practice and that is a human endeavor, not a software undertaking.  It’s more demanding to envision a practice first and then select the software that most closely meets your future process.  Simply assuming the software is used by many others (i.e., “so it has to be good”) is a recipe for unpleasant surprises and sub-optimal workarounds.
  2. Vendor Lock-in: Once you adopt business software, you are locked-in primarily because of the investment effort to get off it.  All software migrations are demanding especially if you want to adopt them in the least disruptive manner.  I generally don’t believe that a software company is “out-to-get-you”.  In my assessment, most software vendors are behaving ethically.  Part of the software selection process should be about the vendor’s reputation and their commitment to serve its customers’ marketplace.

What about Total Cost of Ownership?

Of course, your future software should meet your requirements for producing a return on investment.  I choose not to labor this point because many have traveled the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) discussion and I think it does not reveal other important concerns.  I have seen many cost of ownership analysis and I assess they mainly miss the soft, qualitative aspects of the investment; or they don’t see all the other functions that won’t be solved in the point solution – to look beyond immediate or qualitative concerns is more demanding and it may be difficult to measure and it often is ignored.  I argue that there are larger opportunities to adopting a business system than solving the most immediate pain point.

Best of Breed Example

Salesforce.com is the premier best-of-breed marketer in the systems marketplace.  It is a “point solution” in that it tries to solve a type of problem in the business.  Today, Salesforce.com is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) leader.  As of December 2009, Salesforce.com touts well over 67,500 implementations and over 2,000,000 subscribers.   If the software doesn’t do what you need it to do, you are urged to visit their Force.com community to find applications that are pre-integrated to Salesforce.com.  Salesforce.com is the hub in this spoke and wheel environment.  Wow, what an array of applications you can choose from!  You can also develop software on the platform to make it fit your requirements as well.  On the surface, you feel positively overwhelmed with options; just like what it feels like to go to a Super Retailer and have a large variety of products to choose from.

It feels good to know that so many others have traveled this path.  You can’t go wrong because somebody out there must have an answer to your business problem in the Salesforce.com / Force.com community.  But here is the rub — it only gets you a partial (point) solution and you lock-in Salesforce.com in the middle of your overall systems strategy. Does that serve you well?  Maybe.  But it definitely serves Salesforce.com well.  Your business systems solution will now be organized around an elaborate contact manager and Salesforce.com knows that the more applications you adopt along the spoke, the more you will remain loyal to the hub.

But that’s okay, you say, because you don’t have time to solve all the other problems in the business and you can just get started now.  This syle of “need to act quickly” thinking is commonplace in the small-to-mid-tier.  This line of thinking definitely helps sell point-solution software – And I can’t say it will make a big difference in your business because for the problems it solves, an array of new issues emerges.

Best-of-Breed Case Example

I have a recent Distribution industry client that is making a significant investment in information technology to help it reach its next level of growth.  We were asked to help in a special area of their business related to operations and information technology; but not to help with the overall strategy which was set some time ago.   We have been brought in to work with the client on a strategy to bring these components together:

  1. Microsoft Dynamics NAV for ERP (Inventory, Accounting)
  2. Magento (Open Source eCommerce Platform)
  3. Salesforce.com (Sales forecasting, Customer Support and Marketing Automation)
  4. Vertical Response (Outbound eMail Marketing)
  5. Drupal (Content Management)
  6. SurveyGizmo (Survey Tools)
  7. Lucene (Search Engine)

There are other components to the solution mix but you should get the picture.  This punch list of applications is not at all unusual.  There is a mixture of Cloud Computing, Open Source, and Traditional Mid-Tier software systems within the mix.  I applaud them for having a roadmap for the major components that will be needed to produce the overall functionality.  In my career, I have done a number of systems strategies that outline components like the ones above.  I can draw pictures to help people see how it comes all together.  The client is too far down the investment road to turn back so it is best to help them navigate this future well.

Guess what I can reasonably predict?

  1. They will have to invest in software integration.
  2. They will have to develop expertise in each of these packages.
  3. They will have to develop relationships, at some level, with each of these vendors.
  4. They will have to eventually develop their own data warehouse to get good reporting.
  5. They will have to get custom software development help where requirements do not quite fit the native software.

Are they prepared for this?  At some level they are. But in many ways they aren’t.  They really don’t want to develop IT competency.  They want to focus on getting their products to market.  Someone will need to own this configuration as it will need care.

How Does The Best-of-Breed Solution Score?

Let’s see how well this Case Example solution noted above will do in our criteria evaluation?

  1. Its capacity to organize work:  Each department will have to learn the special nuances of the software at hand.  Until the integration is working really well, there will be latency and errors in the information as we copy and paste (if at all) between environments.  In my assessment, this approach does not really organize work well although for specific departments, it will be an improvement.
  2. Its ability to help you synthesize information for decision making: Very little.  Information will be scattered in various systems and it will be difficult to aggregate until the data warehouse is built and operational.  There will be analysts that will resort to spreadsheets to massage data into actionable information.  Costly, slow and error-prone.
  3. Its mechanisms to allow you to act quickly and consistently with customers and partners:  This depends on how much customers and partners interact with the organization.  The more the customer interacts with various company functions, the higher the likelihood they will have an inconsistent experience.  There will be more propensities to handoff customers to others in the organization and time will be required to “research” information that is managed by others in different applications.

I suspect these points will be valuable to the CEO and COO who are trying to build more trust, develop greater customer loyalty, steer the company toward better offers, all while trying to build an overall leaner organization.

Are There Best-of-Breed Alternatives?

Is there an alternative?  Well, up until a few years ago, for the small to mid-tier market, this was pretty much the situation.  You were forced to “roll your own” solution because the marketplace did not have many alternative offers.  Back then, I helped companies develop these types of strategies. Those companies that made the integration investments and built the skills were competitive — and consequently IT grew and became increasingly heavier and slow to act.

SAP and Oracle Applications are two well-known platforms that had a compelling vision:  a single instance (database) solution for the entire organization.  While not perfect, they could deliver a rich set of applications to take care of large organizations’ complex needs.  Consequently, they own the business software marketplace for the large-tier (e.g., Fortune 500).

The more visionary mid-tier organizations saw the power of this large-tier offer.  However, they struggled in their implementations of Oracle and SAP as they were heavy:  Most were not ready for the expensive software licensing, significant supporting infrastructure investment, complex configuration options, demanding implementation and operational skill requirements, and significant training for user adoption. Consequently, most organizations failed in their attempts to capture the single-database promise.

One Fully-Integrated Solution

I am pleased that there is finally an offer that comes close to delivering the vision of a full-integrated application for the small and mid-tier.  That solution is NetSuite.  In the above simple case example, NetSuite can deliver most of the functionality today in a Cloud Based service offering.

Of course, it depends on the industry segment for this statement to be true.  But what is exciting about NetSuite is that we finally have arrived.  In my mind, the marketplace standard has now been set higher.  I would not be surprised that over time, there will be a handful of cloud-based fully-integrated applications that will be known in specific industry segments.  Point-solutions will have trouble making compelling offers to savvy business managers who seek to transform the organization by making it leaner, smarter, and adaptable.

In our case example above, if our client selected NetSuite as its business platform, I can reasonably predict the following:

  1. Work will become coordinated.  Every employee will see the same information because there is only one version of the truth.  One department’s work will impact another department’s so it will require tighter coordination between employees.  Hence, culture will become more collaborative as the systems encourage that behavior.
  2. Information will be aggregated and real-time.  Decision making will be augmented because reporting, data warehousing, and business intelligence are a by-product of a single database.  Our client will get this automatically as a consequence of choosing this application approach.   Management will have a superior capacity to make meaningful business performance assessments because information will be reliable and available on demand or pushed via email as it happens.
  3. Assuming good training and design practices, customers will have a seamless experience when interacting with all areas of the business because the same records, display methods, and information access will be used.  Employees will possess greater ability for department skill cross-over because the same software system is used in all departments (screen layout, lookup, input, validation, etc).  For example, if a customer changes his billing address on an online web form, employees, without even knowing it, will automatically be working with the latest address information from that point on.

NetSuite is by no-means perfect.  There will be investment to realize the power of this application.  But I can confidently say that the investments will be lower and you will get there quicker than the Best-of-Breed approach.  Due to single database architecture, your investment is going to be about working out the issues with people in different departments now needing to work more closely because each one will be impacting the work of others.   The conversation is going to be about how you can keep adopting more functionality to better serve customers and partners.  There will likely be opportunities where you will want to enhance the application to meet your more unique (and hopefully competitive) requirements: fortunately, the platform is extensible using standard development approaches and open architectures.

Pricing

The NetSuite system is modular.  It is priced to be competitive in the mid-tier marketplace.  It is deliberately priced to not appeal to very small organizations.  The platform is not toy.  It really starts to make sense when you have 20 or more employees on the platform.

NetSuite modules can be turned on-and-off.  For example, many customers may elect to go with NetSuite to solve their immediate CRM requirements (versus Salesforce.com) with intention to migrate their legacy ERP systems later.  The pricing model, for the most part, allows for this.  As a Technology Strategist, I look for ways to sequence new capacities with existing and future business strategies; every company has its own special concerns and it takes some conversation to see a good implementation approach.

Invitation

I invite more conversation.  If you are considering a new business system, let’s talk so we can assess if NetSuite is a candidate platform.  I suspect that you will find NetSuite compelling once we look at your strategic concerns for scalable and low cost growth.

January 26, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: General, NetSuite, Strategy | 1 Comment

NetSuite Trial Balance Setup for Accountants

By Marty Zigman, on January 19, 2010

The trial balance is a fundamental information sharing structure when working with tax accountants.  NetSuite’s default trial balance is not well organized for tax work.  It groups and sorts accounts in a peculiar fashion.

Fortunately, the NetSuite Report Writer is quite up to the task.  Below are screen shots that can help you quickly get a clean trial balance that only your tax accountant will appreciate — and let’s hope it keeps your tax bill down so they do more important analysis work versus wasting time massaging data.

NetSuite Trial Balance Field Output

NetSuite Trial Balance Field Output

NetSuite Trial Balance Sort Sequence

NetSuite Trial Balance Sort Sequence

.

January 19, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: Accounting, NetSuite, Reporting | Leave a comment

Categorizing Outlook Contacts for Email Marketing

By Marty Zigman, on January 7, 2010

In my discussion, Developing Brand Awareness through Outlook and NetSuite, I discussed the need to categorize Outlook contacts so they would be used to target in email campaign work once they sync with NetSuite.

A free tool that I found to be indispensable for producing the practice is called Categorize Plus.  Outlook’s native Category Master list is buried in a pop-up window when you click the Categories buttion on an Outlook Form. While this works on a one-by-one basis, it is simply too cumbersome when you need to categorize a list of contacts (batch update contacts).

Categorize Plus docks a window of your master categories into Outlook. Anything selected within Outlook that can reference categories can now be tagged by quickly clicking relevant checkboxes. It works on multiple records at once and supports keyboard shortcut keys.

This tool makes it easy to assign or re-categorize a large number of items at one time. 

Outlook Categorize Plus Function

Outlook Categorize Plus Function

January 7, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Category: CRM, Marketing, Technical | Leave a comment

Solution for Syncing and Bounced Emails between NetSuite and Outlook

By Marty Zigman, on January 1, 2010
outlook-to-netsuite-sync-contacts-function

outlook-to-netsuite-sync-contacts-function

In our post, Developing Brand Awareness through Outlook and NetSuite, we needed a way to synchronize our Outlook Contacts to NetSuite using Outlook Categories while also managing the challenges of bounced emails from our email campaigning work within NetSuite. We are pleased to announce our Outlook to NetSuite Sync program (beta) to take care of these concerns to dramatically lower marketing automation costs.

The utility performs two primary functions:

    1. Synchronize Outlook Contacts to NetSuite preserving category information
    2. Update Contacts in Outlook of NetSuite Bounced Campaign Email Addresses

These two functions perform an important function missing from most CRM systems (such as salesforce.com) — handling the issues that come up with campaign communications all the way to Outlook (and BlackBerry given our usage model). With this new software solution, we solve these concerns:

    a. Use BlackBerry and Outlook with Categories to seamlessly manage your contact prospecting list.
    b. Keep your contacts synchronized with NetSuite to enable timely targeted communications.
    c. Manage email addresses that bounce, thus lowering your communication costs and targeting efforts.

Our beta program is free of charge to those NetSuite users who need immediate value. We encourage participation so we can listen to suggestions to enhance the offering. If you are interested in the software, let us know by contacting us here.

outlook-to-netsuite-category-sync-functions

outlook-to-netsuite-category-sync-functions


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January 1, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: CRM, Marketing, NetSuite | Leave a comment