tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4944792430547317122024-02-20T09:57:58.634+00:00Emmens.Biz - Comments on business issuesIf you are passionate about what you do, you are bound to have something to say about it!
These are some views on aspects of business where we feel we have the experience and knowledge to make informed comment - on information technology for the telecomms industry, on marketing, and on communications.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-85740290717061560452015-08-28T14:35:00.001+01:002015-08-28T16:04:56.520+01:00Windows 10 - how does it seem so far?<div class="MsoNormal">
Having been an IT consultant before I retired, it will not
be a surprise that I was one of the first in the queue to get Windows 10
installed on my laptop. As no doubt other less technically enthusiastic souls
will be considering it in the weeks and months to come I thought I’d share my
experiences and views after a month of using the new version.</div>
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Firstly, the upgrade. I was impressed at how easy and clean
Microsoft had made the process. You could say it is in three parts. </div>
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Part One happens once you ask Microsoft to give you the
upgrade. To do this, look for the Windows 10 icon in your system tray – that’s
the bit at the bottom right hand end of your screen. The W10 icon looks like a
perspective monochrome picture of the English St George’s flag. If you don’t
see it there, you are not up to date on updates to your current Windows
version, and you really should be, as mostly these are about fixing security
flaws. For more info, follow the instructions on this Microsoft page: <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/windows-10-upgrade">http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/windows-10-upgrade</a>.
Anyway, once you have requested the upgrade, you will need to wait a few days
as Windows 10 software will download to your computer in the background. It’s
about the size of a third of an HD movie, so won’t happen quickly.</div>
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Part Two is preparing for the upgrade. You should take a
backup of your computer as there is always a small risk of things going wrong
enough that you need to recover your previous version. If you are already
backing up your files to the cloud (e.g. Google Drive, BT Cloud or similar) –
and if you are not then you should be! – then all you need to do is create a
‘Restore point’. See Microsoft’s instructions here: <a href="http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows7/create-a-restore-point">http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows7/create-a-restore-point</a>.
Otherwise, Google ‘create a Windows system image’ and follow guidance. Note
that a system image (essentially, a complete copy of your hard drive) will
require an external storage device with as much capacity as your current hard
drive usage.</div>
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Part Three, at last, you kick off the upgrade – Microsoft
will let you know when it is ready and provide a nice automated process. Mind
you it will take a long time: in my case a couple of hours, and you need to be
around to answer the occasional prompt.</div>
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But having done all this, is it worth it? </div>
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Well, Microsoft claims to have much improved the boot-up
time, but although it might be a bit quicker, there’s no significant gain. The
home screen comes up quicker, but there are still things going on in the
background and response times initially are a bit slow. Just hum “You’d be
surprised what I can do, When I’m starting Windows” to George Formby’s well
known ditty whilst you wait.</div>
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Overall the look and feel is a bit more modern and clean,
albeit a bit too small at times (the slider bars at the right and lower edge of
a window are quite hard to find and require more precision to click and drag
accurately).</div>
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As with Windows 8, you have to work much harder on setting
up the launch screen than in earlier versions, which were based on the Start
menu or on desktop shortcuts. However, the desktop shortcuts work just as well
as ever and remain in place after upgrading. You lose the ‘recently opened
programs’ list – oh and don’t forget that programs are now called Apps. I find
it hard to think of Word or Excel as an app, but that’s modern thinking. I
would like a notifications panel for things like latest emails and upcoming
appointments, either in the Start menu or on the desktop, but I haven’t worked
out yet how to make that work properly. The available information on how to set
up and optimise your desktop for your preferred way of working is pretty scant,
even from the Googlesphere.</div>
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Then there are the new features: Edge and Cortana, both of
which aren’t great at the moment.</div>
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<b>Edge</b> is the new
browser replacing the late and not much lamented Internet Explorer. It is
fairly quick, but spoils the effect by waiting for images to load before it
lets you scroll. At least you don’t seem to get the annoying movement up and down of
text as the browser rearranges the page to put images in, like you get with
Chrome.</div>
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One issue to note with Edge: if you currently use IE, it
will import those bookmarks. If you use Chrome, and you try to import your
Chrome bookmarks, it annoyingly reverses the order of them. And once there, it
is nearly impossible to change the order or rearrange them – for some reason
Microsoft hasn’t put that facility in. I am still sticking on balance with
Chrome and occasionally Firefox. Maybe it’s that Microsoft wants you to use
Cortana to access your favourite web pages, except that...</div>
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<b>Cortana,</b> the much
heralded ‘digital assistant’, isn’t available yet for UK
users. So you can’t use it or try it out, unless you are prepared to set your
Windows location as the USA, and accept all the Americanisms that go with that.</div>
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One last point about Windows 10 is that just like Google, it
assumes the right to collect and use all sorts of personal data from your
usage. If you are nervous about Privacy issues, click here for a useful <a href="http://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-10-violates-your-privacy-by-default-heres-how-you-can-protect-yourself/">TechRepublic
article</a> that explains these and how to increase your own protection.</div>
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So for an overall summary, I’d say make sure you do upgrade
to Windows 10 whilst it is still free (Microsoft says it will be free for one
year, so upgrade by July 2016), but don’t feel the need to hurry in the short
term – Microsoft is still developing some of the features and there are rough
edges. Good luck and happy computing!</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-31129028053553100332011-07-05T17:23:00.000+01:002015-02-01T09:26:15.287+00:00A free-for-all in domain names?One of the biggest shake-ups in naming of internet sites has been approved by the relevant global authority, ICANN. They have opened up the top level domain (TLD) names to virtually anything. (See <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13835997" style="color: blue; font-size: 8pt;">www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13835997</a> for the relevant news article.)<br />
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Now, there are 22 current TLDs - these are the likes of .com, .net, .gov, .org and so on. These are not to be confused with country level domains like .uk which are often suffixed to TLDs but can be used alone. The plan now is to allow any organisation to apply for ownership of any new TLD name. <br />
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There is a down side to this: the minimum bid will be $185,000, but then if you gain ownership of a domain like .music or .sport you should be able to sell a lot of URLs to web site owners. After all, the tiny Pacific island state of Tuvalu now gains most of its export income from selling domain names using its country level domain .tv (including for example Channel Five's www.five.tv).<br />
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So what can we expect from this? Well, various global brands have already announced their intention to buy their brand name - for example, .canon and .nike. If they don't intend to have various domains within the TLD, then they will have a website which can be addressed simply as http://nike. One might imagine various global superbrands will follow this route. Even if the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Google and so on did not particularly want to change from current well-known URLs, they cannot sit back and allow someone else to acquire a TLD with their brand name.<br />
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Then there will be the "domain name investors" who will acquire the names which will be saleable as domain suffices. Besides the examples of .music and .sport already mentioned, there could be many more: other category descriptions from .air to .zoo; location domains like .london or .scotland; perhaps even some corralling of the, shall we say, specialist portion of the internet behind .porn or .adult. <br />
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One of the biggest expansion areas is expected to be for the likes of China, Japan, Korea and the Middle East, as non-Latin character sets will be able to be used for the first time in domain names.<br />
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What will it mean for smaller, sub-global companies? Well, one impact is that the increasing trend towards longer domain names may be averted for a while. I was lucky in that (a) I have a relatively unusual surname, and (b) I bought my domain name around 2000, when .biz was a comparatively new TLD and so there was an opportunity to get the www.emmens.biz name I wanted (the .com and .co.uk variants were already taken back then). These days, I'd probably have to go for something unwieldy, like www.emmensconsultancyservices.co.uk - definitely a candidate for one of the 'short URL' services if tweeting! I've also encountered medium-sized businesses with 20 or 25 character names which also use the email convention of firstname.surname@25charactercompanyurlname.co.uk, and when an employee with a long name like Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen - well, you get the picture. There's no doubt that shorter, snappier URLs are more likely to be remembered and typed than long ones, but at present the only other option is to find a weird, made-up company name that won't already be registered as a domain name, like zxrg421. (Yes, that one is still available, I checked. Feel free to claim it, I won't charge a finder's fee.)<br />
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Is there a down side? Well, there is some concern about organised crime getting hold of specific domain names that could enable them to spoof corporate network locations (see <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/04/dotless_domain_security/" style="color: blue; font-size: 8pt;">www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/04/dotless_domain_security/</a>), but I would expect ICANN to be fairly careful with the release of sensitive TLDs, so the risk should be small for most of us. There will I guess be a proliferation of web sites with the same name but different TLDs, which could get confusing, but no doubt as most of us find a site through a search engine, it won't be too much of a minefield. Wait though for the first law suits as for example small independent shopkeeper Mr. Clarke sets up his web site as www.clarkes.shoes, and the big corporation gets all proprietorial!<br />
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So in general, I look forward to the brave new future with more and more names available to choose. I'm off to relax with a www.glassof.beer!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-87935155435549012562011-04-11T14:43:00.000+01:002015-02-01T09:41:45.053+00:00Campaign for Real DaylightThere have been the usual arguments associated with the onset of BST about whether we should move to Central European Time in order to take advantage of even longer evenings before sunset, and the usual counter arguments about loss of morning daylight in winter.<br />
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Now I think these discussions miss the point by some margin. <br />
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The centre of the day - the mid-point of daylight hours, when the sun is highest - is noon, or in BST, 1pm. Centre an 8-hour working day around that, with an hour for lunch, and it starts at 07:30 GMT or 08:30 BST. <br />
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The real problem is that we get up later, and go to bed later, than we've ever done. Often we now work from 09:30 or even 10:00 and frequently don't leave work before 6:30 or later. Rather than trying to make the clock fit around what we now do, shouldn't we make a simple adjustment to our habits?<br />
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If 'Normal Office Hours' adopted the Real Daylight approach, and started at say 8am, then at a stroke we get more daylight back in the evening. Adjust public transport timetables, and let shop times match the office workers, and you are half-way there. <br />
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Most logistics companies already start much earlier anyway, and should not be affected (unless they want to get on the roads even sooner to beat the now earlier commuters). Farm workers, of course, are already geared to maximising use of daylight. <br />
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What other impediments are there to sensible getting up and going to bed times? Well, the TV schedules would be easy to move, and the likes of restaurants and bars would fall into line with customer requirements. <br />
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School times are already a problem for working parents, being able to deliver the kids to school and pick them up at times which don't impact their jobs. Shouldn't school times similarly adjust to what is convenient around the new office hours?<br />
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All it requires is a general voluntary agreement by most employers to make the adjustment at an agreed date - probably a clock change date - and it would be so easy to implement. Inside a month, we'd all have forgotten the previous ways of working, and the change would seem natural.<br />
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Would we need Daylight Saving (BST) any longer? Well, I'd suggest only if the rest of Europe fails to fall into line. Otherwise, we'd have automatically saved daylight by the simple fact of centring the work day on the daylight period. <br />
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Of course, many people complain they are 'night persons' or find it hard to get up early. What they really mean is they find it hard to adopt the self-discipline of going to bed at a sensible time. Such people will of course adjust to the new times, will still fail to go to bed at the appropriate time, and will still complain just as they do now!<br />
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So let's start the Campaign for Real Daylight now. Don't be seduced by arguments for yet more clock changes - use the natural daylight we already have!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-40523688507502296522011-03-09T10:57:00.001+00:002015-01-30T14:01:13.788+00:00Cookie ban takes the biscuitMost small businesses don't yet realise it, and even quite a few large ones, but there is an EU Directive that will affect the majority of commercial websites. As of 25th May this year, it will become illegal for a website to set a cookie on a visitor's computer without their explicit prior consent.<br />
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Cookies, for those who aren't technical, are small text files which a website stores on your computer so that it can help improve the experience of your visit. All major websites use them; any website with a user login facility will use them. Blogs use them. Websites which serve adverts based on site content or browsing history of the user depend on them. If you don't use cookies, your browsing experience will be the poorer - try disabling cookies in your browser tools and see what the result looks like.<br />
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So what is the EU trying to achieve? Well, some unsalubrious web sites are using cookies for unethical purposes, and the powers that be are trying to curb such behaviour. This is clearly however a sledgehammer to crack a nut. There has been no consideration by the lawmakers as to how a website can actually gain the required user consent, and it will not always be straightforward - some careful code will need to be written in many cases.<br />
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The UK body responsible for drawing up guidelines as to how businesses should comply is the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). They published an impact assessment last September which included this section titled "What are the policy objectives?":<br />
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"The aim of the E-Privacy Directive is to ensure that consumers have the opportunity to given specific and informed consent to the placing of cookies or other information on their equipment. This will have the effect of ensuring that they are more aware of the use of such technology by the websites they visit, and so are able to use the internet with more confidence."<br />
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It is hard to see how this statement could be less meaningful.<br />
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A spokesman recently said that work on the regulations was “ongoing” but would not be complete by 25 May. The minister for Culture, Communications and the Creative Industries, Ed Vaizey, said he appreciated that the delay would “cause uncertainty for businesses and consumers”. It is clear that the Government not only has no guidelines, but no real idea yet how to police the new regulation.<br />
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So what does this mean for the average small business website? <br />
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If your website is built with a popular content management system such as Wordpress or Joomla then it certainly uses cookies. Neither Wordpress nor Joomla have yet commented as to how they will change their products to make them conform to the new regulation, and it looks highly unlikely that any changes will be made before 25th May. <br />
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The best strategy for a small business at present is therefore to keep an eye on how this develops and wait for Government guidance. The Government cannot really afford to be seen to be loading any onerous requirement for web site developments onto small businesses given their declared support for them. <br />
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Your site may thus become technically illegal, but at least no-one is likely to police it! <br />
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For more about this directive see these news stories: <br />
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12668552" style="color: grey;">www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12668552</a><br />
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-tech-law/eprivacy-cookies" style="color: grey;">www.guardian.co.uk/media-tech-law/eprivacy-cookies</a><br />
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For more information about cookies, see:<br />
<a href="http://www.allaboutcookies.org/cookies/" style="color: grey;">www.allaboutcookies.org/cookies/</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-25486671680968466852011-02-18T13:45:00.000+00:002015-02-01T09:26:23.167+00:00When is Democracy a bad thing?It's a momentous time for Democracy. In Tunisia and Egypt, the population is clamouring for a genuine say in how the country is run. In the UK, we have to decide which is more democratic: first past the post, or the alternative vote. In the west, it is almost unthinkable not to have a form of democracy for public representation.<br />
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But would you apply democracy everywhere? Take business, for example. I have recently been working on a contract for a FTSE-250 company, guiding their information systems department through a reorganisation. They had taken the approach that the current heads of each section should develop the new organisation and create the objectives and terms of reference of each new team within the planned structure. Very democratic, you might think. The result was a structure to which all of the existing section heads had fully contributed and had "bought into". <br />
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However, there was a down side. Naturally, they each ensured that a nice piece of the organisation was created that could be led by themselves. This was not quite the optimum organisation, and there were a few who were not up to the task of leading a significant group within it.<br />
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So of course the responsible Director reviewed the organisation and decreed that whilst it was a distinct improvement over the status quo, some parts should be merged and others arranged slightly differently. The number of available leadership roles reduced significantly, and some existing leaders were going to be disappointed. The Director came out with the cliché: "This is not a democracy, it's a business."<br />
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So how do you get involvement, buy-in and commitment from your staff to new business initiatives? One extreme is to make the decisions yourself, as the business head, and your staff accept it or lump it. The other is to make the process entirely democratic, and then you have a result which is in the interests of the staff but not necessarily of the business. <br />
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There has to be a third way. Whether a small business or a FTSE company, to develop as an organisation requires all staff to make a contribution. They will generally know what would make their jobs easier, more efficient, more productive. The key skills that you as a manager can add are:<br />
- Create the environment where staff are comfortable generating ideas and proposing changes.<br />
- Ensure that you listen to opinions and get input.<br />
- Make the final decision as to what gets implemented and what not.<br />
- Provide a clear explanation to staff, not only regarding what will be done, but also why.<br />
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Because a business is not a democracy, but neither should it be a dictatorship.<br />
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<i>To help with determining the best way to organise or change your business, it can often be constructive to use outside assistance. A third party can bring wider experience to bear, recommend what has worked elsewhere, help to make the business case viable, and crucially provide the time outside day to day operations to define and implement the change. We have wide experience of all kinds of business change, from organisation to IT to business development - contact us for more information.</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-86290369584633738522010-10-23T21:16:00.000+01:002010-10-23T21:16:22.433+01:00A blog is not just for ChristmasBlogging for business is a serious business.<br />
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Once you start, you quickly establish a pattern in the minds of your customers which you break at your peril. If you set out to produce say a monthly blog, or indeed a customer newsletter, then your customers will come to expect the next one next month. Think of your blog/newsletter as a magazine. If it doesn't appear - even if the customer doesn't normally read them - then they may make an assumption that you are in some way unreliable, can't meet your commitments, or worse still can't be bothered. The fact that your business is booming, and so it is hard to find the time to write it, will be lost on your loyal readers.<br />
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So if you are minded to produce a blog for your business, what do you need to consider?<br />
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Firstly, what is your message? I don't mean the topic, that will of course vary from one blog to the next. I mean, how do you want your readership to react? Is it to be purely informational - readers will go to the blog just to find out which products are in stock this week, or if there is a special offer? Or is it meant to be informative (there is a difference), where readers might come to see, for example, if there is any impact on your industry from the latest government pronouncements? In the latter case, the message is more subtle - you are demonstrating to your customers that you understand the business and the environment it operates in, and it will lure readers back because it is relevant and entertaining, thereby continuing to expose them to your marketing.<br />
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Secondly, the periodicity. Blogs have an advantage over newsletters in that they can be shorter and perhaps more frequent - and to a limited degree more variable in timing - but avoid setting a pattern you cannot sustain. <br />
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Thirdly, plan ahead. You should always have half a dozen ideas for topics in a list, so that you know what will be coming up. This enables you to develop recurrent themes and orchestrate the marketing message better. You can bet that the lead topic for a large circulation magazine is planned a lot more than 6 issues out. Doesn't mean you can't switch topics if unexpected things happen - the impact of the protests in France might be one example. <br />
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And fourthly, make sure the logistics of publishing are clearly established: how you load your blog; a tight link with your website home page; promotion of each issue through Twitter or whichever other social media you use.<br />
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Finally, all you need to do is to write! If you find this difficult, either because you are not a natural writer or you find it hard to make the time, then that's where Emmens.Biz can help. We will invest some time talking to you to understand your company, your brand and your brand values, so that we can establish the style that's appropriate. For subsequent issues, we should need only to spend maybe 15 minutes on the phone to talk over topics and angles, and then produce a draft for you to review. We can offer an introductory price which enables you to see how well we meet your needs before you make any longer term commitments. <br />
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And hopefully we can show that although blogging for business is serious, it can also be fun!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-2938625721279592282010-07-14T15:43:00.001+01:002010-07-22T13:25:19.596+01:00The power of wordsOne of the things I have inherited from my father, apart from a large nose and a distressing ability to walk past friends and loved ones in the street without noticing them, is a love of words. <br />
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My father wrote English textbooks for schools, and waged a fierce campaign throughout my youth to try to mould me into a person who uses language sensitively. Eventually he got me to deny the split infinitive, to reject the unnecessary pronoun, and even to use 'different from' instead of 'different to'. <br />
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Thus we now share our amusement at ambiguous public use of English. I share my father's penchant for the sign in department stores that states 'Menswear'. We both always knew they did, particularly in moments of stress. He shares my delight in a sign outside some stables near my home which exhorts: 'Horse manure - please drive in'. We chuckle at American instructions like 'take out window' and 'pick up counter'.<br />
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Of course, when I joined the corporate world, I found a whole new language with just a passing resemblance to English: Jargon. I now talk of methodology without intending to refer to a study of methods. I will attempt to think out of the box without any consideration of containers. I cheerfully discuss blue sky business without any care for the prevailing meteorological conditions. These things cause my father to mutter under his breath, but he reluctantly accepts they have a place and are, frankly, inevitable. Nevertheless, in many ways, businesses fail to use jargon effectively, and instead of providing a shorthand for meaning, they confuse and obscure it. And that is just the start of the ways in which businesses frequently commit crimes against the language.<br />
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Now, I can accept that in the heat of the moment, speech is not necessarily an expression of purity of grammar and construction. The objective of the spoken word is communication, not the formality of syntax. Nevertheless, when it comes to the written word, the situation is different. I'm not talking about the casual, one-to-one scribbled note or email - that's just a written version of a phone call. I mean text created for wider consumption on behalf of one's business - text in brochures, presentations, blogs, newsletters, business reports and so on. Here, the writer has had the opportunity - indeed, the obligation - to clean up the stream of consciousness that comes in speech. I find so many instances of poor use of the language - even taking jargon into account - that it causes a sensitive soul like myself much distress. <br />
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But more to the point, it jars with an awful lot of people who are, perhaps, less likely than myself to hone in on whatever precise grammatical construct is broken, but know intuitively that it isn't expressed very well. I appreciate that some of us are to a degree dyslexic, but in important documents - particularly customer-facing ones - such people should ensure that their output is verified as free from error. <br />
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Some years ago, the chief executive of a well-known airline made the point that the cleanliness of an aircraft interior was important, because a passenger would extrapolate from insufficient care on interior maintenance to insufficient care on mechanical maintenance. The same is true of important or widely distributed written communication: if you can't present an topic in an organised way, and in a well-structured and well laid out document, then your customer (or stakeholder, or manager) will construe a similar lack of professionalism in your business. <br />
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I am conscious of this importance not just because of my heritage but also because I have seen it in countless business situations. I know that when receiving proposals from suppliers, it is possible to look beyond the language and style at the basic information content, but it is hard to do so, and there are inevitable inferences about the suitability of the supplier as a result. I have worked for executives who, on receiving a report that is not structured for quick assimilation by a busy director, will simply throw it back at you as not fit for purpose. And I have all too often read promotional material which simply does not focus the reader on the worth of its product.<br />
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Having produced countless documents of all of these types in my career so far, and learnt all too clearly what enhances as well as what gets in the way of the message, I want to help other business people to produce better quality written text. I am offering a service to prepare and improve all manner of written documents, from Powerpoint slides to technical manuals, under the headline "Is your business being heard?" The initial assessment and recommendation is free and without obligation. Playing even a small part in improving the written word of the nation's businesses is a passion and a pleasure. <br />
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And I know that my father will be delighted.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-40661118436459647752010-03-15T10:39:00.000+00:002010-03-15T10:39:13.535+00:00We should go to work on climate changeLike many others, I am concerned to the point of alarm by the scientists’ warnings about our planet, and worried about the lack of international accord and serious commitment to act. So I try to heed the advice to save energy at home. I turn off unwanted lights and look at where I can install low energy bulbs. I am uncomfortable when I fail to turn off the video recorder and TV, leaving them on standby. I have installed cavity wall insulation and the recommended level of loft insulation. I wear jumpers and keep the thermostat turned down.<br />
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However, the media focus on all of us domestic energy users does I believe distract attention from the rampant energy waste in the business and public sectors (and, yes, the offices of the press themselves).<br />
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At work, I visit many different company offices, and they almost all endowed with excellent natural lighting, to the extent that on sunny days, the blinds are pulled down to reduce the glare and the heat. Yet the office lights stay on all day, every day. Recently, on a quiet day in the office with the sun flooding in and almost everyone else out, I thought I might take the radical step of turning the lights off. I couldn’t even find a switch.<br />
<br />
Every office I see these days has scores of computers, screens, printers, scanners, photocopiers, coffee machines, shredders and so on which remain powered on for the 120 hours a week they are not in use, as well as the 50 hours that they might be used. None has any instruction from the employer as to turning off when not in use. Indeed, at one office I worked in recently, I was specifically instructed not to turn the PC power off, so that central IT could if it needed install software upgrades over the network overnight. <br />
<br />
Where I have been working recently, we use laptops which plug into a docking station at the desk. There is no way to turn off the docking station except by crawling under the desk to find the plug, so this runs permanently on standby. Do companies consider these factors when deciding which manufacturer’s laptops to acquire? Of course not, it doesn’t even register.<br />
<br />
And what about heating (and air conditioning)? I doubt if many offices are insulated to the degree that my home is. Consider also if you will the retail park warehouse - a vast open space, expensive to heat (but heat it they must, or the Shops, Offices and Railway Premises Act will enable the staff to walk out), and often an uninsulated metal shell of a building.<br />
<br />
Of course, in summer, if it is hot in my house I open the windows. In an office, the heat builds up thanks to the sunshine - the Greenhouse effect again - even with blinds pulled down, so more power is fed into the air conditioning, which as always results in too hot and too cold spots in different parts of the building. In an office, you can never open a window.<br />
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Local authorities are not much better. Do we really need comprehensively lit back streets at 3am? Do we need traffic lights at pedestrian crossings throughout the night?<br />
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Things are no better when it comes to transport. My own car I try to use more sparingly, and attempt to drive in a way to reduce fuel consumption. Yet I see no real attempt by industry to reduce fuel consumption or journeys, unless they perceive a competitive advantage, or publicity in some kind of ‘green gesture’. I am now more aware of the impact of taking flights to go on holiday, and so probably fly less than I did. But business trips continue as they always did – the only constraint I ever hear of is in terms of the costs. <br />
<br />
I try to travel for work more by public transport than by car these days. But the government has made it much harder here than in other countries I have worked: here, public transport is painfully expensive, there is no co-ordination between companies, and local bus services are frankly useless – infrequent, expensive, unreliable, and poor route coverage. Can it be right for the environment that use of a car is not only much more convenient, but also much cheaper than public transport?<br />
<br />
Recently I have been using the trains from Paddington, mostly the commuter trains rather than the intercity, but it is noticeable that both are diesel driven, not electric. When I observe the massive amounts of exhaust these trains produce, I realise that these too use a lot of energy. But more concerning for those who live alongside the railway must be the diesel smoke they produce: some of these trains, especially when starting away from a station, produce prodigious amounts of smoke. If these were road vehicles, I doubt whether they would pass an MOT. Furthermore, why is it that a train typically waits in Paddington for at least 15 minutes, and sometimes for much longer, but still the engines are kept running the whole time? Is it so hard to start them up again?<br />
<br />
It is time that Government started to give a real lead. There are many ways they could really kick off energy consciousness, but the lack of action smacks of business demands being more important than the environment. <br />
<br />
They could set real thermal insulation building standards for new commercial premises as well as homes to be more ‘carbon neutral’, instead of weak guidelines. They could encourage micro-generation with incentives for solar panels and turbines for both commercial and domestic buildings, as they have started to in Germany and elsewhere. And they could make a real attempt to discourage fuel use by the road and air sectors of industry. But action in these areas is likely to be incremental and cautious.<br />
<br />
The Government also argues that our country cannot take steps in isolation which reduce our international competitiveness – but isn’t that exactly the kind of selfless restraint they are encouraging us to take as individual citizens? <br />
<br />
However, companies can themselves start to take action. Let's see businesses develop energy policies and provide guidelines to staff to minimise the rampant energy waste that goes on in every business in the land today.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-4696223670731542902010-03-02T14:12:00.003+00:002010-03-02T14:18:09.920+00:00Decline and FallThere is a natural cycle of dominance on this planet. The great geological ages have come and gone, the climate moves from ice age to global warming, the dinosaurs gave way to the mammals and ultimately to humankind.<br />
<br />
Much the same happens to human activities. Within the last 100 years we have seen the position of dominant superpower pass from the Britain of Victoria to the United States, and now perhaps we are seeing that starting to move to China.<br />
<br />
And so it is with ICT platforms and corporations. When I was a trainee programmer in the 1970s, one company dominated computing: IBM. At its heyday, almost 7 of every 10 mainframe computers sold were IBM's. Its competitors - the likes of Univac, Burroughs, Honeywell, Britain's ICL all failed to match 'Big Blue'. So what went wrong?<br />
<br />
Well, the invention of the microprocessor. Still IBM could have kept its position: it had the first real 'Personal Computer' - indeed, IBM is responsible for the current widespread use of the term 'PC'. However, in a misjudgement of earth-shattering proportions, it allowed the IPR of the first PC operating system, DOS, to remain with the small subcontractor producing it - Microsoft. The rest, as they say, is history. Software, not hardware, was where the money was moving. IBM is by no means a small company now, but it is no longer such a market dominating force, and is now better known for services and business software than for hardware.<br />
<br />
Which takes us to Microsoft. Its software is everywhere: most modern PCs run its Windows operating system, and so do a large proportion of the computer servers which run the significant business systems and networks that drive commerce. We all know Outlook, Word, Excel and so on. The de facto standard document types are .doc, .xls, .ppt - indeed, the very existence of such ways of describing file types is because of Windows.<br />
<br />
But the first signs of decline are already detectable. Microsoft is dependent on us all buying licences for its software - and with a saturated market, that means we must buy new versions of old programmes, hence the huge publicity for the launch of Windows 7. But there are two trends, each still a trickle rather than a flood, but swelling in volume: software that is free for personal use, and the Cloud.<br />
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Free software is often open source, usually collaboratively developed; in the case of business use, it earns money for its developers through implementation and support services. The Cloud refers to software that is hosted on some remote server somewhere - where exactly the user does not need to know, any more than where a web site is hosted - and is accessed over the internet. This is typically charged as a simple fee per user per annum.<br />
<br />
Many see the Cloud as the future for, at least, general office applications such as email, messaging, document sharing and intranets, and here one company is surging to the fore: Google, with its Google Apps offering.<br />
<br />
The concept is appealing: many companies struggle to maintain their Microsoft Exchange servers, with volume constraints on mailboxes, down time for maintenance, constant upgrades and patches, and the overhead of resources to look after all this. Google Apps offers a service where almost all the business needs to do is configure its user accounts, and use the service. These applications still look a bit immature in places, but make up for that by taking a fresh approach to the user interface, and in speed of use (depending of course on the web connection).<br />
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It won't suit everyone, and there are still issues which some companies are nervous about, such as data security (not that Microsoft is exactly a byword for unhackable software), but nevertheless the ease of use, minimal staff overheads, and most of all costs currently often estimated at well under half those of an Exchange model, are creating a fast growing community. <br />
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Now Google is not exactly a small company already, and with Google Apps looking like one vision of the future, it would not surprise me to find that in ten years' time, Google will have become the dominant computer company of its age.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-46070675103673153392010-02-08T08:41:00.000+00:002010-02-08T08:41:30.715+00:00Can contract recruitment agencies raise their game?The relationship between contractors, such as Interim Managers, and the agencies who undertake to find candidates for interim roles for their clients is frequently a fraught one. The agency is paid by the client and has the dominant position in the commercial relationship with the interim - therefore their focus tends to be firmly on the client. The interim is their means of earning commission, but all too often is not treated as a supplier or partner, but as a necessary evil. <br />
<br />
Now I have found in the course of my trawling for the next opportunity that there is a huge variation in the way that the potential contractor is treated, not only between agencies but also by individual agents within organisations. There are many who act responsibly and ethically towards their candidates, but regrettably there are more - and a growing percentage - who treat candidates poorly. <br />
<br />
It is interesting that a recent discussion thread on LinkedIn's 'Interim Management Jobs.net' group, expressing concern about the status of the sector and the agencies' roles in it, attracted a torrent of comment from similarly dissatisfied interims - 83 comments at last count, and some other threads spawned (see it <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=2114051&discussionID=8179402&split_page=1">here</a>).<br />
The general unanimity of discontent of these comments must signal a warning to the interim provider industry. Notable recurrent themes include:<br />
<br />
<i>Candidates are not kept informed</i><br />
It seems to have become the norm for many agencies that the candidate is only informed of positive news - requests for more details of the candidate, requests for interview, and of course any job offers. If the candidate has been turned down, or not short-listed, then he or she will only find out by contacting the agency for information - if of course they can get hold of a responsible adult. If there is no news, then there is scarcely a single agency I have worked with recently who will contact me to tell me that - and more to the point, to advise what actions they are taking and what they consider the implications of no progress to be. The rule seems to be: if you are on the client's radar, the agency is all over you; as soon as there is a drop in interest by the client, you are dropped faster than a toddler's ice cream cornet.<br />
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<i>Opportunities are misrepresented</i><br />
It seems that virtually all interim managers - myself included - have experienced agencies who engage in dubious practices, such as advertising jobs that don't exist, and initiating candidate searches for positions which the client has not yet confirmed and does not have signed off. I no longer bother applying for jobs advertised online, as they not only don't go anywhere, but all too often it is not even possible to follow up with the advertiser.<br />
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<i>Price erosion is rife</i><br />
The recession has significantly affected the opportunities for interims, not only due to the reduction in number of roles available, but also due to the number of "permies" who have been made redundant, and who are clutching at interim opportunities as a way of getting back onto the treadmill. These individuals may be very competent in their fields, but there is more to interim management than simply a willingness to work to a limited term contract. This has had the natural market effect of supply and demand, but many IMs clearly believe this has been exacerbated by the agencies. One comment suggested that the agencies are deliberately driving down prices "to appease clients and screw the interim". <br />
There also seems to be an increasing trend for opportunities at "pro rata permanent salaries", which is a nice way for the employer to obtain temporary staff without any overhead costs (National Insurance, tax, holidays, pension and so on), which the contractor must then fund out of their fees, as well as funding the gap between contracts, meeting limited company costs and the necessary accountant's fees, and so on. I was approached recently by an agency for a short term senior project management role, demanding significant experience, at a day rate well below what I'd expect net of tax as a salary.<br />
When rates get squeezed like this, it fuels what appears to be a considerable suspicion amongst IMs that the agencies are not bearing their share of the pain, or are failing to challenge their clients as to the wisdom of prices being demanded.<br />
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Now I believe that these kinds of treatment by agencies are very short sighted on their behalf - when I undertake a contract as an interim manager, I am frequently in the position of having to recruit other interim (and sometimes permanent) staff to resource the programme I am working on. Like other interims (and permies, for that matter) I will favour those agencies I consider have treated me responsibly and fairly. Those who have been cavalier, I now avoid giving further business to. I know that other interims, like I now do, maintain a list of both individuals and agencies who they trust or abhor, and act accordingly. Indeed, there are now 'consumer rating' websites to share experiences and score agencies. <br />
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<i>So as the recession comes to an end, and a market recovery staggers onward and upward, there seems to me to be a clear warning message for recruitment agents: your attitudes and performances are being noted, and you will reap what you sow. </i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-80797773972618234342009-11-06T14:19:00.000+00:002009-11-06T14:19:27.786+00:00Are operators converging billing systems?A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about convergent billing, where I argued that there was not yet a real case in terms of customer features for convergence of prepaid and postpaid billing infrastructure (see <a href="http://emmens-biz.blogspot.com/2009/08/prepaidpostpaid-convergence-is-it-worth.html">emmens-biz.blogspot.com/2009/08/prepaidpostpaid-convergence-is-it-worth.html</a> ). Whilst I still doubt there are sufficiently sexy consumer products to be developed around payment convergence to be worth the painful journey to get there, I think it's time to review this position from a slightly different perspective.<br />
<br />
I recently took part in a webinar on billing convergence, where the keynote speakers were from an American billing system supplier who should probably remain nameless. They were discussing why telecoms companies were moving towards convergence, mostly for reasons of convergence of service type (e.g. triple and quad play services) but also for convergence of payment type. I'm afraid I got distracted from the message by the unnecessary obfuscation of management Newspeak, culminating in a slide which gave the three key "Customer Experiences" as Real-time Policy Enforcement, Value-Centric Rating/Charging, and Proactive Contextualization. Now I have no real problem with the first two, but I spent some time distracted from the presentation trying to work out what on earth Proactive Contextualization might be, and failing. I know Americans love complicated jargon - I recall once seeing a weather forecast on American TV where the weather man announced gravely, "There will be a 50% probability of precipitation activity". Why didn't he just say, "It might rain"? <br />
<br />
Anyway, the one interesting thing to come out of an otherwise disappointing webinar arose from the online audience survey. The first question was as follows (I paraphrase the wording):<br />
<br />
<b>What is the status of your strategy for convergence?</b><br />
<br />
<ul><li>In place – 26%</li>
<li>Considering options – 52%</li>
<li>Understanding the problem – 22%</li>
<li>Not considered to be necessary – 0%</li></ul><br />
Particularly noteworthy I think that 74% of respondents are in the process of working out what to do to implement convergence, and that none consider it unnecessary. Now I think that service convergence is highly desirable, and would even argue that payment convergence is advantageous in terms of platform simplification and future flexibility. For me the issue is that whilst service convergence is going to be non-trivial programme, it is relatively speaking a like for like systems migration. Payment convergence, on the other hand, involves considerable architectural upheaval to marry the flexibility and capability of postpaid billing systems for rating, package building and discounting with the realtime capabilities of prepaid billing systems for event authorisation and balance management. <br />
<br />
There is an interesting battleground developing in the software supply industry as to whether this comes about by extending the 'Billing' capabilities of the prepaid platform (essentially an IN-based solution) or by developing the realtime balance management capabilities of the postpaid platform (a traditional transaction-based solution). In either case, however, there is a platform architecture change and a major migration project attached, therefore with considerable accompanying risk. I'd be interested to know to what extent the webinar correspondents were answering this question as referring to both service and payment convergence.<br />
Maybe the second question shed some light on this.<br />
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<b>What is the biggest challenge you face:</b><br />
<br />
<ul><li>Launching competitive price plans – 6%</li>
<li>Time to market – 28%</li>
<li>Churn – 18%</li>
<li>Reduction of complexity and Opex in IT – 47%</li></ul><br />
So almost half of respondents are dissatisfied with the state and cost of their IT to the extent that it is their biggest challenge. Clearly, a programme to rationalise their billing environment by converging all onto one platform would simplify that (and probably also significantly reduce the time-to-market problem). I suspect however that it will not be until there is a more robust economic recovery that companies will feel confident enough to initiate such a major programme.<br />
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I certainly look forward to getting involved in a programme of this sort in the not too distant future!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-40934044818379252602009-09-30T12:26:00.000+01:002009-09-30T12:26:30.554+01:00Programme Management and Roy KeaneI have a confession to make: I am an Ipswich Town supporter. I know, don't mock, I suffer enough as it is. I have watched over the past five months after Jim Magilton was sacked for only taking Ipswich to 10th in the Championship, and Roy Keane brought in with a great fanfare as the man to put an end to Ipswich's "underperforming" and win promotion to the Premiership. <br />
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He immediately professed himself satisfied that the core of his squad was sound, and that he was confident of winning promotion within 2 years. Since then, he has acquired I think 9 new players - I tend to blink now and again and miss one - and has transformed the team into one making a realistic challenge for - er, relegation, actually, bottom of the table in 24th place.<br />
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Now I have in my career a few times been introduced as a replacement IT programme manager for a failing project and told to improve matters. On one or two occasions, I have also been told to reduce costs because the budget was already overspent. As any PM knows, you can only juggle with four basic parameters: cost, timescale, quality, scope. And what is more, these are closely linked - you can't change one without affecting another. Reduce cost? OK, then unless you are a magician with higher productivity yet cheaper resources to produce out of the hat, at least one of the other three must move in balance. Now in Roy's case, he has an increased budget, a fixed timescale, pretty much a fixed scope, and so should see quality increase. The jury is still out on that one, but it now looks pretty unlikely that he will win promotion in his first year - indeed, I begin to be a bit nervous as to whether he will keep us in the Championship at the other end. At least the scope was set as 'within 2 years'.<br />
<br />
So I started to think around some of the similarities between the roles of Programme Manager and Football Manager. Broadly, Roy has three main communities to keep satisfied: his team's chairman and board of directors (in Ipswich's case, the owner, Marcus Evans); the players; and the fans. That ties in nicely with a PM, who also relates to three communities: the "chairman" (usually the COO or CIO) and a Programme Board of business stakeholders; the implementation team; and the user community. Let's look at how these relationships work.<br />
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No outsider really knows what Roy's relationship is like with his Chairman and Directors, and indeed they shouldn't. Similarly, a PM will keep that a confidential relationship. In both cases, the approach, costs versus budget and performance against planned milestones must be reported, progress highlighted and shortfalls explained, and sufficient confidence in your competence and performance maintained. <br />
<br />
With both the players and the implementation team, the Manager has to build the right environment for them to be as able as possible to do their job, then structure them and set objectives and priorities, and of course ensure that as far as possible the best resources are part of the team. An important part of that is motivation, and giving them the confidence to deliver their part. Now, often a "parachute PM" dropped into an existing team has limited ability to execute rapid large-scale change of the environment and the resources, so the key is to ensure the structure is right, the objectives are appropriate and achievable, and that the team morale is lifted to the optimum level. In Roy's case, we have to assume he is capable of creating the right team structure and delivering the motivation - his track record with Sunderland, and the fact that several Sunderland players wanted to rejoin him at Ipswich suggest that is the case. <br />
<br />
So what about the final community - the fans/users? In both cases it is harder to win wholehearted support than doubt and criticism. In both cases too the community responds to results - or lack of them. Here the PM has a marginal advantage over the football manager, in that the latter has to deliver results once or twice a week, whereas the PM's deliveries are normally months apart. Clearly Roy Keane has what is hopefully a temporary problem in this regard, and the opinion of the fans is clearly getting a little frayed. <br />
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What is key in both cases is that the right message must be communicated to all communities. A PM has to make this happen, ensure the opportunity and the timing are appropriate, and that the message is exactly right. The football manager has to do this for two of his communities, but the fans are normally addressed through the media, which is a much tougher proposition. Getting the message right here is harder because it is not possible to pick the moment, and the resulting message is all too often interpreted the way the press want to present it, not necessarily how the manager intended it. In this regard, Roy has done better than I expected - his TV interviews have been thoughtful, and whilst some may consider him too dispassionate, I have been fairly impressed with his control and care with words.<br />
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Now all both he and I need to do is to deliver...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-89367381439621965352009-09-17T14:55:00.003+01:002009-09-18T16:21:15.590+01:00Crystal ballsIt’s always fun to speculate about the future.<br />
<br />
History is of course littered with men who made predictions which were ever so slightly wide of the mark: my favourite is the prediction of Thomas J Watson, IBM president in about 1950 who opined: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” To be fair to him, that was probably true of the computers of the day, but even so it was a bust flush by the time the fifth was delivered.<br />
<br />
To take great leaps of imagination about the more distant future is relatively safe. I could aver that by 2100 we will be taking holidays on Mars, and we might agree that this is an interesting speculation, but since both I and my audience will be dead long before then, it is not exactly sticking my neck out.<br />
<br />
Looking at the near future, extrapolating from the world today is more interesting: it is possible to get pretty close to what is likely to happen, but getting the timing right is much more difficult. For example, the use of mobile handsets to run non-telephony applications has been not only long predicted, but operators have been trying to go there for some years now. Only recently however has this started to become the norm with modern high spec smart phones now reaching the mass market. <br />
<br />
Now I started to think again about predictions as we seem to be debating the future on several related communications issues. We have the concerns about delivery of television programming, and the (this time predictable!) self-interested complaints from Mr Murdoch; we have comments about the potential demise of newspapers due to competition from digitally provided news; there’s discussion about how we deliver faster broadband across the country (and who pays), and meanwhile the mobile operators are at last moving their services into information provision (or at least enablement for third party information providers), fuelled largely by the surge in smart handsets – thank you again, Apple, for the stimulus of the iPhone. <br />
<br />
I’m sure we can draw some strands out of these trends. Here then are my top five predictions.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">1. Broadcast TV is doomed.</span></span><br />
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The BBC iPlayer is the first step in this process. Essentially, we will all move more and more towards watching what we want, when we want it, from the internet – even for live events: not home in time for kickoff? See it from the start when you do get home. <br />
<br />
This would mean the TV channel companies becoming more aggregators of content, probably published on a daily or weekly basis, rather than to a serial timetable like today. Content providers will be like the TV production companies or film companies today, and may well start publishing directly since they don’t need airwaves.<br />
<br />
I would not be surprised to see the BBC therefore become more a channel to market for published content, including pay per view (which is much easier to arrange on the internet), and focusing its production efforts more on information and news services.<br />
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Of course, all this requires adequate high speed internet access – and a lot of it will be mobile. The government no doubt will be slow to give up on TV due to all that investment in the digital switchover, but the frequencies can no doubt be put to other profitable uses, including more wireless internet services. I wonder what Sky will do with all those satellites?<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">2. Telephony is doomed.</span></span><br />
<br />
OK, I’d better qualify that a bit. What I mean is that making and receiving voice calls over a switched network is already looking outdated. Skype is pointing the way: internet based voice traffic (VoIP) is increasingly how both business and personal calls are made – unless a mobile is used. And in the case of mobile, with more handsets becoming WiFi enabled and mobile broadband aware, I see VoIP increasingly the way in the mobile world as well. <br />
<br />
What this really means is that both fixed and mobile networks will evolve into data only networks delivering just broadband service, with old fashioned switched voice dying a death. It already irks that there is a complicated tariff for voice calls, and in order to attract customers they have to build even more complicated products to give a lot of it away again. Very little call traffic nowadays actually needs individual call pricing: premium rate numbers perhaps, where the operator is collecting a fee for the called party, and – er – well, nothing else really. Even calls to other operators’ networks – including international – could be covered by inter-operator agreements given the low cost of carriage over IP.<br />
<br />
This will change all sorts of areas. Billing systems can be much simplified with no need to price most calls, and with effectively all bills becoming prepaid monthly service charges. Quite a lot of things will change in the networks, with no further need for voice switches and IN platforms – ‘calls’ will still need some form of processing but not through this technology. Even the needs of security forces will be impacted – phone taps are different in VoIP networks!<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">3. Books are doomed.</span></span><br />
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Alright, I don’t really mean it, but I do think that we are close to the point where eBook readers will become mass market. I doubt we will see dedicated eBook devices, but I do anticipate that smart phones and notebook PCs will quite soon start to become the devices of choice for books (and, indeed, whatever passes for newspapers in the new digital age). As people become accustomed to taking these devices everywhere, thanks to the ‘internet anywhere’ attitudes now emerging (maybe this should be a prediction too? – no, it’s already happening), no-one will want to carry a large paperback as well when it can just as easily be downloaded for no extra weight.<br />
<br />
This will have considerable ramifications for the publishing industry. Anyone will be able to publish their latest novel; the only value the publisher will add will be the marketing organisation and revenue collection – oh, and the ability also to produce the hard copy version (which I’m sure will still exist, albeit in reduced form, much like CDs today alongside MP3 downloads).<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">4. The ‘core network operator’.</span></span><br />
<br />
It has been interesting to note the growing proliferation of Virtual Mobile Network Operators (MVNOs), buying their airtime in bulk and then addressing everything from tightly focused market sectors to broad spectrum markets. In addition we have the recent coming together of Orange and T-Mobile in the UK. <br />
<br />
In effect what is happening is that we have a saturated market – no likely significant growth in the overall subscriber base – and a steady erosion of revenues as services become commoditised and competition drives prices down. The operators are trying to push up the added value chain with triple and quad plays and data services, but network costs are a significant issue for them. One of the significant factors for the Orange/T-Mobile merger is in network savings.<br />
<br />
Now in effect we have only two national local loop wireline networks in the UK: BT and Virgin Media (other networks from the likes of COLT are local and business oriented). Virgin’s network is of course dominated by television; but BT is increasingly losing out on telephony service delivery to many other wireline service companies, such as Talk Talk. This ecosystem nevertheless continues to be sustained on the single local loop network that BT runs as a regulated service.<br />
<br />
But we still have four mobile networks, effectively providing the equivalent of a ‘mobile local loop’. Now I can see continued cost pressures reducing that number further – even perhaps to one regulated core network? Wouldn’t it be better for the network operation to become a separate business, delivering service through as many MVNOs as wish to set up in business? There’s plenty of market space for the likes of Virgin Mobile, Tesco, and so on to compete for the end user, so why should a mobile operator sell them air time, only to compete with them for customers, and all the while groaning under the cost of maintaining an expensive national network? Might it have made sense for Orange and T-Mobile to combine and float off their networks and continue as separate retail companies?<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-style:italic;">5. A wallet on my phone</span></span><br />
<br />
The advent of the electronic purse has been predicted for a long time, but progress has been slow. Mobile operators have explored how this might work for several years, but trial services like buying your can of cola from a machine have not been wholly successful – the palaver of texting to make a payment is so much more long-winded than sticking a coin in a slot. Operators have shied away from serious solutions partly because of concerns about straying into the territory of banking regulations, money laundering and so on.<br />
<br />
This is an area where more advances have been made in developing countries – particularly in areas like the Philippines – where banking is less well developed or accessible to ordinary people. Services are now available there for transfer of small amounts of cash, using the mobile phone account as a kind of purse. This is another key development – it’s one thing to use a phone to pay a retailer, but the ability to pay small amounts to friends and family is what will make this into a mass market service.<br />
<br />
I am not an expert in financial regulation, but I suspect the pressure to be able to deliver such services in the UK will lead to ways being found before long.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-style:italic;">So in conclusion, I don’t think these are particularly outrageous predictions; however getting the timing right may be tricky. I don’t think I’ll stick my neck out there...</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-62790970549663692012009-09-02T12:44:00.004+01:002009-09-02T13:04:28.889+01:00Why is Customer Care so hard?Network operators and service providers are uniquely positioned amongst all industry sectors, in that they have the data that describes exactly how all their customers use their services, through call and data records. Every single time a customer uses the network, there is a record logging this.<br /><br />All this data is painstakingly collected so that bills can be produced. And what else is done with it? Well, not enough in most cases. It will be used to ensure quality of service thresholds are being met, where appropriate, and it is aggregated to help with network planning and optimisation. No doubt various other reports are spewed out of data warehouses to tell directors if the number of call minutes has gone up or down this month, and other pertinent management information, but as to using the information to manage individual customer relationships – well, er....<br /><br />One of the problems for telcos pretty much ever since number portability became mandatory has been that of churn. Estimates of churn rates vary wildly, and even those that the operators will admit to are difficult to compare, since what constitutes churn can be defined and measured in different ways. Nevertheless it is likely that a mobile operator in the UK will lose as much as 30% of its customers every year, and for ISPs it is even higher, perhaps as much as 50%. <br /><br />Now these are pretty eye-watering numbers. Some churn is inevitable – people move away from the coverage area, or even die, companies may cease trading, and indeed some customers (such as bad payers) might even be encouraged to leave; however this would be a core churn rate down in the single figures. Something is not right!<br /><br />Clearly it is much cheaper to retain a customer than to have to recruit a new one as a replacement, and add to the recruitment cost the loss of revenue stream from the existing customer and it all adds up to a significant cost of operation.<br /><br />Now telcos do make efforts to identify potential churners through data mining and pattern analysis, but clearly these efforts are not bearing significant fruit as yet. The trouble is that the main actions of these operators is to find more attractive products and tariffs, such as double and triple plays which (in theory) are more difficult to churn from. But this simply fuels churn, as the ‘arms race’ between operators means that there is always a more attractive offer out there if you can find it. People are not entirely driven by slightly better deals elsewhere, however, especially as this requires effort on their part – there is usually some other reason why they are ready to move.<br /><br />One survey by Pitney Bowes identified the three top reasons why people change supplier, and found that these are consistent across Europe and the US. They are:-<br /><br />1. not being recognised as a valuable customer (all countries average – 55%)<br /><br />2. unhelpful staff (all countries average – 47%)<br /><br />3. ineffective call centres (all average – 42%)<br /><br />Now although this research is almost 2 years old, I very much doubt the position is significantly different today. This should be giving COOs sleepless nights – this implies that better or cheaper deals may dictate the operator a customer switches to, but the trigger for leaving the existing supplier is poor customer care.<br /><br />Take the first point: the worth of a customer should be apparent to an operator very easily – we are back to the fact of a complete data record of a customer’s activity. Of course a customer will have an inflated view of their own value, but take into account both revenue streams and cost of losing the customer, and most customers are valuable enough to merit effort to retain them. The second and third points above are simply variations on the theme of bad customer care.<br /><br />And we all know from personal experience how frustrating these companies can be. Not just the call centres, which seem to specialise in getting you through to any department which can’t solve your problem, but also the web sites for self care, which are often impossible to navigate around and find what you want without resulting in dangerously elevated blood pressure.<br /><br />The problem isn’t the people: they are usually trying to help you as best they can. The problem is partly in the technology that supports them (back to ways of analysing and understanding that customer data), partly the result of poorly designed processes and business flows, and partly the corporate structure, which stove-pipes customer care and treats it as a business cost to be handled as cheaply as possible. <br /><br />Communications companies have to be better at treating customer care and customer value holistically, or these high churn rates and costs will never reduce - and as consumers we all pay the price.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-14934750986336979562009-08-26T14:58:00.002+01:002009-08-26T15:02:05.830+01:00Whither WiMAX?There are strongly divided opinions about WiMAX. <br /><br />Its supporters have a vision of a world where many devices are wireless mobile enabled, so that for example a camera can take a picture and have it automatically and immediately uploaded to the photographer’s own picture archive on a server somewhere, gaming devices can use mobility and geography as part of the game, a phone can make a freed VoIP call, or the expected new generation of digital notebooks as well as laptops can access videos, books, online newspapers, and social networking sites seamlessly. Access to the web anywhere on any device at high end broadband speeds.<br /><br />On the other hand, observers point to the approaching ‘Long Term Evolution’ (LTE) standard for transforming 3G mobile networks (UMTS) into 4G networks based on IP. These will offer speeds in excess of current WiMAX technology, but less than next generation WiMAX (and both are in excess of speeds likely to be achievable over current fixed wire local loops). They say that there is no business case to build a WiMAX network when the mobile companies can deliver the same through the current mobile networks enhanced to 4G. <br /><br />So should the title to this article be “Wither WiMAX?”<br /><br />The position in the UK is not promising. At present, Ofcom has only licensed two operators to provide fixed point services based on the 802.16d standard. This has limited capacity and does not enable mobility (802.16e is ready for deployment and enables mobility including cell handoff). Therefore at present WiMAX can compete with fixed broadband services but not mobile – yet mobile is the raison d’être of WiMAX. Meanwhile the WiFi hotspot operators and GSM/3G operators are signing up mobile broadband customers as fast as they can, which is mopping up all the pent up demand that would otherwise be potential WiMAX customers. <br /><br />If this particular cork were removed, how would WiMAX operators respond? They are broadly ready to deploy 802.16e technology but face significant problems in getting a return on investment.<br /><br />Firstly, it will be a major undertaking, and investment, to build out a network of base stations to support wide area coverage. Mobility is not an easy sell unless coverage extends to at least the main areas a mobile user may go to – this means at least metropolitan cover in the area you live and work, and probably most of the main metropolitan areas in the country to be a convincing proposition. The big issue in base station building is in acquiring sites appropriately located for WiMAX frequency and wave propagation characteristics, which are much more significantly affected by topography and are less able to penetrate buildings than are GSM frequencies. The mobile phone companies on the other hand already have all their base station sites, and therefore cost of deployment is much less and the speed of deployment much greater – even though LTE is behind WiMAX in terms of development, it may be able to overtake WiMAX on deployment.<br /><br />Secondly, the WiMAX-enabled user devices are not by and large on the market yet. Smart phones and PDAs on the market today are WiFi and GPRS/UMTS enabled but not WiMAX. The latest laptops are starting to be deployed with WiMAX as well as WiFi built in, but the rest of us will need to buy a dongle transceiver.<br /><br />Thirdly, the technology is still on the leading edge, and despite deployments elsewhere in the world – most notably by Sprint in the USA – is not yet routine in terms of deployment, network management, or coverage prediction. <br /><br />And finally, can the services offered by differentiated – and priced – competitively with both WiFi and GPRS/UMTS? On the one hand, it may compete for speed, especially uplink (WiMAX is a symmetrical service, unlike wired broadband, so uplink is very fast compared with normal domestic broadband), so this might suit those needing capacity to upload large files on the road, such as photos or videos, or even some fixed location users for similar reasons; but this advantage is offset by the very limited coverage until a lot of network building has taken place, which will take years not months. <br /><br />It seems to me that WiMAX has its greatest potential where mobile (especially mobile data) is less well developed, particularly in developing countries, and where fixed broadband is not universally available; but with regret I have to conclude that the odds against WiMAX succeeding in the UK are long.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-89926221250447771602009-08-20T18:16:00.003+01:002009-08-20T18:35:53.407+01:00What's in a name?<meta equiv="Content-Type" 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mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal">I've been in the IT industry for - well, you don't need to know, but suffice it to say many years. There has been such huge technology change in that time: when I started as a trainee, there were no personal computers, only monolithic mainframes which you programmed by writing code with paper and pencil, and then sat at your desk and effectively executed the program line by line on paper. When you were happy, you sent this to a room wherein young ladies of the type much admired by male trainees typed onto punched cards for loading onto the mainframe.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">But it's not so much the technology change, constant and amazing though it is, which I am interested in exploring here; it is the continual change in job titles. Thus I was a Programmer, but these days of course you don't have Programmers, you have Developers. You don't have Programmers because you don't write Programs any more, you write Software. I don't know why the change arose, because despite the technology now enabling code writing and testing to be done online and in real time, it is still essentially the same job of producing logic instructions to achieve a business requirement.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In the main, however, the issue driving changes in job titles is essentially one of 'job inflation'. When I started my career, a company was administered by the Board (as it still is today), but headed by a Managing Director, assisted by the Finance Director, Operations Director, Sales Director and so on. Then there was the management layer, where the managers were all called - well, Managers. At the Project level, you had a Project Leader running the show, and within the Project there were Teams, each led by a Team Leader.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Then it was decided that being called a Manager was not sufficiently important sounding, especially if you were in Sales, and if you were called a Director you sounded much more impressive to a prospective client. That in turn meant that the Board's important titles were diluted, because you couldn't tell if a Director was really important or just moderately important.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Much the same thing happened in the States, where Directors were known as Vice-Presidents. A few years back, I encountered the delightful title of "Vice-President of Blue Sky", which I gather meant he looked for new business markets. (So were existing customers, by implication, Grey Sky?)<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">So the Board members became Chief Officers, and the Managing Director as a title now means the head of a subsidiary or division.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Interestingly, there is now a trend where the management layer is populated not by Managers or Directors, but by Heads of Department. My own favourite job title, which I came across recently, is "Head of Web", a title I now espouse when assisting the technologically challenged amongst my family. They of course, in their ignorance, still think a Head of Web is what you find in those corners you don't dust as assiduously as you should.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Now, large developments are not just big Projects, today they are Programmes, and Leaders have become Managers (since the Management layer no longer needs the term, and it sounds more impressive than Leader). Except that even quite modest developments are now Programmes, so that what used to be a Team is now a Project. Thus the leader of a small team is now a Project Manager, and quite possibly has no Project Management training or accreditation. It is getting harder to decide if it is better to present myself as a Project Manager, a Programme Director or a Head of IT Implementation.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">We have also started to see that the leader of some project teams is known simply as 'Lead'. Thus the head of the Testing team, who has recently been known as the Test Manager (Head of Testing is obviously too grand for what is an essential but regrettably unglamorous role), now seems to be increasingly termed 'Test Lead'. Clearly this is not the same as Test Leader, because we don't want to go back to the past, and Lead sounds more modern - or at least, with the use of an adjective as a noun, more American.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">So, where next? I suspect that the next round of title inflation is overdue, that the Director will become a Chief of something, if not a Chief Officer, and all Project Managers will become Project Directors. This will only be acceptable to the Board members if they in turn have their escalation route mapped out.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I have a suggestion: how about Minister? After all, the important Government ministers are now all Secretaries of State, so their importance can still be maintained. And I would love to go into a meeting with my Board level boss and be able to agree by means of a simple "Yes, Minister!"</p> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-15726931064269079112009-08-12T17:05:00.005+01:002009-08-12T17:14:25.261+01:00Agile Waterfalls?There is something of an ongoing debate at present concerning project methodologies between the traditional approach known as Waterfall, and the new kid on the block, Agile, which has become somewhat - dare I say it - trendy. So is it appropriate to change IT development strategy from Waterfall to Agile?<br /><br />Now there are many different flavours of each of these models, but broadly speaking the principles of each are as follows. Waterfall requires that the project moves through defined stages (broadly - requirements confirmation, design, development, test, acceptance, deployment), whereas Agile is about reducing time into service for software developments by establishing a collaborative relationship between developers and users, and using iterative development techniques to ensure best correlation between requirement and solution. This is normally achieved by time-boxing the overall interval between releases to typically 3 months, and by reducing the project stages to four: release planning, where the approach to the release, including dates, budgets, resources and functionality focus areas, is agreed with the principal business sponsors; the hothouse, an intense, competitive workshop over normally 3 or 4 days to agree the requirements scope and the business case for the release; iterative development, a period comprising typically four or so iterations through the development cycle, delivering successively refined prototypes of the solution; and finally deployment into service.<br /><br />So should all developments in future move to an Agile model? Agile certainly has some key benefits that are highly relevant to certain project scenarios.<br /><br />Implementation of new products and services in a fast-moving business can happen more responsively due to the short release cycles. This in turn leads to increased customer satisfaction due to rapid delivery of usable functionality.<br /><br />There is a closer relationship between business benefit and functional delivery prioritisation, which has to be a good thing. Furthermore, the close co-operation between users and developers leads to a better understanding of the business by the developers, and an increased sense of collaboration and ownership of the solution by the business.<br /><br />New requirements that are developing during a short implementation timeframe can be accommodated in a method which allows for some flexibility of requirement and prototyping during the development iterations.<br /><br />However, there are also disadvantages of Agile compared with Waterfall.<br /><br />Pressure for throughput of development can lead to short-termism of design - a lack of attention to the overall solution architecture and the way that this supports future flexibility and maintainability. Similarly, the rigidity of the time-boxed development cycles can lead to releases being changed in scope at a late stage.<br /><br />Agile relies largely for its success on a high level of involvement of user communities with the development teams through the iterations, in order to maintain a close link between requirement and solution. This is much harder to deliver effectively where the development teams are off-shore.<br /><br />Developers need to be experienced and responsible in order to maximise business benefit from the development cycles. This can also be an issue with Indian development teams due to the strongly hierarchical culture in India. Furthermore, it can also increase the average cost per developer day, as it is harder to use more junior resources effectively.<br /><br />Requirements documentation is often insufficiently precise to form a sound basis for acceptance (or indeed for business process amendment and staff retraining) and can lead to commercial issues between supplier and user, as well as scope creep during development iterations.<br /><br />Finally, because of the fluidity of requirements and delivered scope inherent in the Agile approach, it is harder to tie a supplier’s contract price to functionality.<br /><br />In conclusion, it seems to me that where there is the need to provide change on an existing environment, and to keep that change focused on maximum return in a short timescale, then Agile provides a compelling case. However, for major developments - particularly for large scale IT refresh programmes (e.g. billing system replacement) or for greenfield developments for start-ups - there seems still to be a strong case for these being managed in a Waterfall based approach. But there are lessons to be learned here from Agile experiences: large Waterfall projects also benefit from being broken into appropriate phases for frequent delivery of value, from establishing and maintaining a close involvement of the relevant communities within the business, and from a more progressive approach to Acceptance.<br /><br />Although the advantages of Agile are widely promoted at present, it is also becoming increasingly clear that not every project would benefit from being implemented through wholly Agile techniques.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-20294187947216393572009-08-10T10:11:00.002+01:002009-08-10T10:16:01.732+01:00Management by TargetsThere's been quite a lot in the news over the past year about the management styles of the banks that led them to reward the wrong behaviour and drive them to the brink of insolvency. That started me thinking about the way that management style has changed in the past three decades I have been working.<br /><br />When I began work in the seventies, the office environment was quite different. There were no office computers for a start (the only ones used by business were in large rooms tended like temple gods by priests and priestesses behind locked doors, and used only for applications with high returns given the then astronomical cost of computer power). There were in relative terms large numbers of secretarial staff, as all documents needed to be typed. Businesses communicated by phone, letter and occasionally by telex.<br /><br />The management environment for staff was different too. Staff expected to change jobs less often. The emphasis was in doing well, and employers encouraged staff to improve - there was much focus on training, development of individual capability in the right directions for the business, and getting staff to the point where promotion could be envisaged.<br /><br />Staff performance assessment consequentially was more qualitative than quantitative. This had the drawback that assessment was more subjective, but usually there were enough people involved in the review processes that there was little scope for personality clashes to spoil a person's career. What we didn't have were individual targets (sales personnel excepted), but I don't think that made us any less committed to do well. We did have bonuses, usually related in some way to company performance, and relatively modest in scale compared with today's incentives.<br /><br />Today of course every member of staff in all the companies in which I've recently worked have individual targets, and often large bonuses, based largely on achievement of their own personal targets. These targets are by their nature short term, and so increasingly are corporate objectives - show revenue and profit growth not just this year, but this quarter or even month, and we'll worry about next year when we get there.<br /><br />The results are predictable. Managers drive their reports rather than lead them, often with unpleasant "macho management" (at least the real bullies of old are now curbed by modern employment law). Staff work in stressed conditions, focus single-mindedly on their targets even when it becomes clear these are not in the company’s interests (the company being powerless to change them once committed), and matters of true good performance and development of capabilities are lost. How many staff in, or aspiring to, management grades work the contracted number of hours per day or week? Many routinely work up to a couple of hours a day extra, with getting in a bit early, cutting lunch hour, and leaving an hour or more late - and this is not paid overtime.<br /><br />It certainly riles me to go into a staff assessment interview, and have a discussion on the lines of:<br /><br />"You didn't achieve your targets."<br /><br />"No, but they became less important due to x and y, and I couldn't achieve them. I think I am good at my job, don't you?"<br /><br />"That's not for me to say: you didn't achieve your targets."<br /><br />This inability to recognise competence unless it is measurable - and only targets are measured - is one of the reasons why I've focused more and more on contract work than employment, where you are judged on performance and "results" (in a general sense) and not on targets.<br /><br />There are of course some notable advances in modern management methods. In particular I would note the improved way that women are treated nowadays, which in most of the offices I've worked in recently is genuinely on an equal footing with men. <br /><br />However there is no getting away from the fact that target based staff management rather than competence based rewards does seem to me to be a doubtful improvement - one the victims of the excesses of the city traders and bankers might well agree with.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-18961880573442182962009-08-08T09:13:00.005+01:002009-08-08T09:23:53.018+01:00The Thrill of the Start-upI have been involved now in several telecoms service providers either as greenfield start-ups or as 'early life growth' companies, and there is no doubt they are very exciting places to be. There is a vibrancy about them - a will to overcome problems, to get their message and their services into the marketplace, and to dare the market not to let them succeed!<br /><br />Regrettably, not all do succeed. Many have particular problems with the IT implementation which is sometimes the cause, but more often I think the symptom of the underlying issues. Start-ups have certain characteristics, which are both the nature of the beast and also the source of problems with the IT requirements.<br /><br />Firstly, they are almost always developing the IT infrastructure before the business has determined in detail how the network will be configured and managed or how the launch products will be defined. This is because to set up significant IT infrastructure generally takes as long as building a core network, and longer than creating products and services. This means that significant architecture and design decisions are taken before all the data impacting that decision are known.<br /><br />Secondly, since the company starts from a base of no staff, there is almost no-one to be involved in detailed planning of business processes, whether the products will be sold through resellers or retailers and if so how to engage and remunerate them, how the logistics around supply and sale of handsets/SIM/routers/numbers/etc (delete as appropriate) will be managed, and so on ad nauseam. Therefore once again the IT infrastructure starts out in a certain direction, and too often the business later decides on a different course, with consequent impacts (not always taken into account) on the IT build programme.<br /><br />Thirdly, business plans made well before launch have a habit of being adjusted the closer to launch you get. Suddenly, volume assumptions about wholesale vs. direct, business vs. residential, self care vs. call centre, in house processing vs. external - the list is again endless - get thrown on their head, and you find you have either too much or too little IT capacity (sometimes both!). More pertinently, you may find sudden adjustments in Capex or Opex budgets which significantly compromise the IT support you can deliver to the business.<br /><br />And fourthly, start-ups have a habit of changing their ownership during the run up to launch, as funding needs necessitate new investors with an incentive to investigate how their money is being spent. Often these investors have strong preconceptions about how the infrastructure should be architected - for example, corporate policies about specific suppliers, perhaps a new requirement to converge solutions with other group operating companies - and you may find at best a distraction from the build issues, at worst a major reappraisal of direction.<br /><br />I have therefore come to some simple principles to help guide IT delivery for a start-up.<br /><ul><li>Design the functionality as openly as possible, and keep it all simple, basic and targeted on the major volume transactions. Requirements will change, so be ready to go in different directions. Complexities and automation for the exceptional transactions can be added later.</li><br /><li>Design the architecture so that the systems are scalable, but build the initial configurations for the early volumes - resist the temptation to build for 4 years out on the basis you have the capital available!</li><br /><li>Define and use the change management process from the earliest days.</li><br /><li>Set up and use rigorously one tool omitted from the Prince2 methodology, but in my view essential for such projects: an Assumptions and Decisions Register. You will certainly have a conversation with someone very senior and new to the organisation, probably about a month before launch, along the lines of 'Why on earth did you do it this way?' You will, I guarantee, need to produce your record of all significant business and design decisions or assumptions, who endorsed them, and why.</li></ul><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">But despite these trials and tribulations, if given the choice between mature organisation and start-up, I would prefer to work for the start-up - they are just more lively and more fun!<br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-73898791653215130772009-08-07T10:25:00.003+01:002009-08-07T10:35:46.999+01:00Permanent or Contract?For the first twenty-odd years of my career, I was a Permie - a salaried employee of the company I served. It didn't really occur to me to do anything else - I was a Project Manager, and Project Managers are professionally risk-averse. And I saw contracting as a risky business - you couldn't know where the next job would come from, or how much you would earn from it.<br /><br />Being made redundant for the first time didn't really change that view. This wasn't a time of recession, it was simply because my employer wanted to reorganise and relocate, and I didn't want to move. I cast around until I found a new permanent position.<br /><br />The second time was in a recession. The outlook appeared bleak. I was lucky - I called a client I'd previously worked for as a consultant, and he wanted me back - as a contractor. And so I had my 'road to Damascus' moment'.<br /><br />Now I have several years' experience as a contractor - or as it is now more politely referred to, an Interim Manager. I can look at both types of role, and have some observations to make from the resource side of the fence. <br /><br />Firstly, it is clear that the decline in job security has eroded the difference in risk between permanent and contract. It is no longer 'safer' to be in a permanent role - as soon as the company hits choppy waters, over the side goes anyone now seen as 'non-essential'. Nor indeed are the benefits any longer compelling - nobody now expects an employer to provide a generous pension scheme, and most employees find a company car is a tax liability.<br /><br />Secondly, as I hit the latter stages of my career, I find there is a difference in approach by companies for permanent or contract staff. When I go for a permanent job interview (and I still do from time to time) I get the impression they are disappointed that I am nearing retirement age. They seem to seek someone either aiming to step up for the role, and so keen to prove themselves, or else they are looking not for the current role but for some future one not yet available. Often the job description requires someone who is 'ambitious' - but for what? I am no longer ambitious, if that means wanting to get there and immediately seek advancement. I don't want to work my way up to CEO, but that's not the same as not wanting to do as good a job as I can in the role I was hired for. On the other hand, for contract work, companies do indeed require experience - they want the grey hairs and battle scars, and are much less inclined to take a punt on someone keen to make a name for themselves. This is one reason why I've focused more on the contract market as I get older.<br /><br />Thirdly, contractors seem to be more self-reliant. We have to be - we don't have an employer taking care of national insurance, taxation, health cover, life insurance, car allowance and the rest. Employees sometimes look at contractors' fee rates and think we are pampered - but take into account the costs they don't have to bear and the periods between contracts, and the higher remuneration isn't significant. But I have noticed that the contractor community is stacked with individuals who have the 'make it happen' attitude - an attribute our clients generally really need.<br /><br />Fourthly, most of the contractors I have worked with take tremendous pride in their work. We all seem to work hard - often harder than the permanent staff - and derive great satisfaction from a job well done. That in some ways runs contrary to popular opinion, that contractors are 'only out for themselves' - but the real truth is that a contractor lives by his or her reputation, and so must constantly prove their worth. <br /><br />It is clear to me that for the resourcing of projects, which are by definition finite in duration, employers are well advised to look at the contract market. The overall costs of such staff are certainly comparable to those of permanent staff (particularly if it comes to redundancies), and it is easier to get a resource which is closely matched in experience and capability to the new project in hand. Furthermore, the issue of what to do with the resources at the end of the project is no longer a concern!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-3742732984266483302009-08-06T18:31:00.002+01:002009-08-06T18:37:39.159+01:00How to get CRM wrongI've been involved with the delivery or enhancement of information systems that support customer services for many years, and I am eternally disappointed at how companies seem determined to miss the point of customer service. Customer service often seems from a consumer's point of view to be something they hate, and can result in really negative views of the organisation in question; and yet companies seem unable to address this.<br />Accordingly, since so many companies seem determined to deliver bad customer service, I'd like to help them by presenting my guide to making CRM unsuccessful!<br />Here are my top 5 decisions to ensure a reduced business benefit from CRM investment. (I could do many more, but in the interests of brevity...)<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Customer service is a cost of doing business - so we will just try to handle problems as cheaply and efficiently as possible<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span><br />Most of the significant inadequacies in customer service arise from the view that the cost of it must be kept under strict budget constraints. However, the results of poor customer service are felt in increased customer churn, longer payment times, reduced ARPU, negative recommendations by customers to their social circle, and adverse brand image generally. Conveniently, none of these are reliably quantifiable, and none affect the budgets of the Customer Service operation.<br />As with so much else in life, customer service costs are about value for money - the service levels (both measurable and 'feelgood') should be carefully defined, and only then can strenuous efforts can be made to deliver that at a sustainable cost.<br />This is especially true with offshore call centres - there is a tendency for these to be staffed with agents who clearly don't know the company or products they represent, don't understand how these products are used in the context of British life, and don't understand UK geography. This can only work with very careful attention to training. <br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">We will stream customer contacts by subject of call<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span><br />Like everybody else, I have had some bad experiences with calling Customer Service lines. There are plenty of ways to annoy the customer before even speaking to an agent: the interminable "press 1 for x, press 2 for y" menus, the long wait whilst "none of our agents is available", and the meaningless platitude that "your call is important to us" when all the evidence is to the contrary. But worst of all, on getting through, finding that the person you speak to is not the right one after all, and you need to be handed on to another department (or even in some cases asked to call another number altogether). I have been on calls to companies who should remain unnamed where I've been passed from one department to another, only to be transferred back to where I started.<br />Every company has a good reason for streaming. Mostly it is about the complexity of the issues that can arise and the degree of staff training to cover the board; often about systems and the lack of ability to join together all the data that may be required; and sometimes it is because the company needs to be careful about what authorisations they permit which staff to have (a significant portion of fraud is regrettably internal). Too few companies design and manage the streaming in an externally focused way rather than to suit themselves.<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">We can solve a lot of problems through the IVR programming<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span><br />This should actually read, "we can create a lot of problems through IVR programming". Besides the menu chains so often leading to dead ends when the choices don't exactly tally with what the customer is seeking, often with the use of standard messages instead of a person and with no way back but to start again, there is a tendency to request meaningless information along the way. I am particularly irritated by the recorded announcement asking me to key my account number using the telephone keypad, only for the agent on finally getting through beginning by asking me for my account number. It's no good arguing, this poor soul can't help it, the systems haven't passed the data on with the call.<br />Not only should IVR routings and messages be carefully set up, but should also be frequently reviewed and revised. I believe that companies should force their senior managers and directors to use their own products but not as corporate facilities, but as real external customers. If the CEO of say a mobile operator had to call customer service like everybody else when a problem occurred instead of getting their PA to call the CS Director, the situation would improve dramatically.<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Once we've got self-care set up, all we need to do is monitor the daily reports and let it take care of itself<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span><br />Self-care seems to be particularly widely abused by Customer Service operations. There is no doubt that some self care works really well: for example, those energy companies I've used have excellent and efficient web sites and IVR systems to take requested meter readings. For anything except a routine request, however, it seems to break down.<br />There are a few simple rules that need to be followed for self-care (whether web or IVR based) to work better. Firstly, design the flows from a customer viewpoint - think of minimising number of clicks or time taken, ease of use, escape routes. Secondly, design usage data reports such that you can tell what is working and what isn't. Thirdly, keep on and on reviewing how easy it still is to use after changes for new products, new processes, new journey flows etc. <br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">We aim to deliver the same level of customer service to all of our customers<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span><br />Unfortunately, this usually means dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator. You should aim to treat every customer with the same level of respect and care, but not all customers are equal. This mantra is often an excuse for the failure to recognise customers who might have cause for complaint, or who are particularly valuable and should not be aggravated, or who are at risk of churn. These failures are usually for systems reasons - again, the inability to pull together the elements of customer data that can identify such conditions and warn the customer service operator. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Customer Service has such a bad reputation amongst the public at large - but we don't have to accept that 'industry standard' poor levels of service need to apply to our own organisations.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-494479243054731712.post-59162465194913957072009-08-05T14:30:00.003+01:002009-08-05T14:37:18.511+01:00Prepaid/postpaid convergence - is it worth it?<p class="normal"> <span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Suppliers of billing software to the mobile industry are advancing the capabilities for prepaid/postpaid convergence in leaps and bounds - but like many a handset feature, is it something customers really want? </span></span></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="normal"><span style="font-size:85%;"> It is worth remembering that operators developed the prepaid market largely because of the fraud risks with postpaid: the period from a new user being granted service, to first bill, reminders and dunning processes, to service cutoff could be up to 10 weeks. Therefore operators set a high creditworthiness threshold, and so limited the market sector they could address. </span></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="normal"><span style="font-size:85%;"> It was the advent of IN platforms for in-call management - initially aimed at number translation and routing services - that provided the opportunity for developing prepaid services. These proved very popular with customers: people liked being able to predict costs with no surprises at bill time, and also appreciated the simpler and more immediate buying experience. </span></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="normal"><span style="font-size:85%;"> However, as a result, operators ended with two distinct systems infrastructures for rating, billing and customer care. This got more complex with the advent of various data services and increasingly diverse billing arrangements. But does that matter? </span></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="normal"><span style="font-size:85%;"> There is no doubt that running two significant infrastructures is costly. This is true from a pure IT point of view, but even more so from a business point of view. The different capabilities of prepaid and postpaid billing systems tend to mean that an operator will have separate products, with separate marketing and product management functions (and a more complex marketing message), impacts on staff training and sales, considerable complexities in migration of a subscriber from pre to post or vice versa, probably separate call centres and all of the CRM that goes along with that - rewards, customer retention and recovery, revenue assurance and fraud detection, and so on. Simplification of these business functions would bring management and cost benefits. </span></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="normal"><span style="font-size:85%;"> What about the customer point of view? Would a convergent solution provide additional customer benefits? </span></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="normal"><span style="font-size:85%;"> Well, there are certainly customer options available with a convergent solution that can't be made available (at least easily) on a diverse solution. For example, it would be possible to vary payment method by date/time, or by numbers called or services used. Consider these scenarios: </span></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="normal"><span style="font-size:85%;"> 1. A business provides an employee phone where calls during the working day are postpaid by the business, and calls made during the evening are prepaid, with top-ups the responsibility of the employee. The business can provide a phone for business use without preventing reasonable use by the employee, whilst the employee can use the phone for personal calls when not at work without worrying about the company view of the cost. </span></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="normal"><span style="font-size:85%;"> 2. Parents can provide phones for their children knowing there will always be enough credit available for them to call home or to receive calls, but that they will not run up big bills on calls to friends, or downloads, games or mobile surfing to Facebook etc, for the parents to pay. </span></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="normal"><span style="font-size:85%;"> 3. A business can provide phones to its delivery drivers but limit usage to calls to the company office or corporate VPN, paid by the company. The driver can still use the phone for personal calls on a prepaid basis if he tops up the credit. </span></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="normal"><span style="font-size:85%;"> There is no doubt too that there are benefits for the operator in being able to treat all customers the same however they pay. Any product can now be sold to any customer, greatly simplifying the marketing message, since payment method becomes just a purchase option. Any postpaid account can apply a top-up at any time. Discounts applied to hierarchies can be more easily applied to mixed pre/post hierarchies, with again a simplified sales message. And of course with only one solution architecture to update, new products should be more easily and more rapidly introduced. </span></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="normal"><span style="font-size:85%;"> But still - is it worth it? If you were a new operator with greenfield systems and processes, no doubt you would go the convergent route. But for a major operator with long established legacy systems - which will by now be horribly complex and intertwined - unpicking this to become convergent is a major undertaking: costly, risky, and lengthy (and hence highly impacted by business change). Some operators have taken the plunge, but they are still a minority. A large mobile business needs a lot of convincing that the benefits justify the pain of getting there. And as a customer, there are many more important factors when buying your mobile service. </span></p> <p style="font-family: verdana;" class="footnote"><span style="font-size:85%;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">So whilst I envisage convergence slowly increasing its presence in the industry, I don't expect to see convergence revolutionising mobile sales in the High Street any time soon. </span></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0