Workplace Engineering

Delivered this to the Chicago Corenet Chapter, March 2009. Still needs a lot of work, but the audience was very kind.

THE DOLLARS AND SENSE OF CHANGE. from Burnett Communications on Vimeo.

I just cannot stop watching this video. What an incredible vision from Microsoft. This is the kind of future I want.

The biggest “aha!” that I’ve had since starting my own business is how difficult it is to get your message out and to encourage potential customers to buy from you. I used to flatter myself that I was a good communicator and could persuade business leaders to follow my recommendations. Since last summer, I’ve found out that moving from selling to internal corporate customers to selling to real customers is like doing well in the little leagues and then walking out into the Superbowl. It’s enough to make you want to change your pants/trousers!

Here are some of the things I’ve learned:

1 - Great sales professionals deserve HUGE RESPECT! It takes a special kind of person to walk into a room, create rapport, build trust, maintain enthusiasm and have the stamina to eventually close the sale.

2 - A lot of sales professionals are not great. We’ve taken mentoring from a number of sales people along the way. As we’ve learned more, we’ve figured out that most just are not that good. Fortunately, we have one in our back pocket now who is causing the scales to fall from our eyes (you know who you are).

3 - The sales cycle isn’t like running a marathon, it’s like sailing around the world! In a marathon you have some control - train and eat well and put on a decent pair of running shoes and you should get to the finish line at some point. If you are sailing, you need the right training, right clothes, right boat, right equipment, right charts, right crew….and then you put to see, hoping that you’ll make all your checkpoints and get to your destination before you sink.

4 - Selling enterprise software is really hard! First you need to find out if a customer for your software actually exists. If you have an application that runs across organizational boundaries, it is especially difficult to find someone who can make a decision. If you can find someone who can be a champion for you, you are now in a race to get through all of the gates to an order before they move on to bigger and better things.

5 - Software is not a complete product (or at least ours isn’t). After spending six months as a pure software play, realized that we actually need to put food on the table. So, we’ve started to consult. Guess what! Now people are starting to get interested in our product…..provided we consult too.

6 - It’s the benefits, Stupid! I have spent six months extolling the features of our portal only to find out that our possible customers don’t really care. They want to know what our product can actually do for them. Our customers may not be able to calculate ROI is or even give a business school definition, but they have a very healthy understanding of what return on investment actually means.

7 - Focus. Focus. Focus. It is easier to sell a product that does one highly targeted thing well than a complicated the cure for world hunger. We’ve moved from selling a general light-weight online dashboard/scorecard that does everything to a services-vendor KPI reporting tool.

8 - It’s all about the customer. I did a Dale Carnegie course last year. It has taken me around a year of soak time to finally get the idea that it really is about them and not about me.

Big Up Respect to great sales people. I think I’ve at least found where the path to sales success starts now. 2009 is going to be about learning more and actually doing it!

Incredible question in the Harvard Discussion Leader article In 2009, Match the Urge to Purge with a Zest to Invest - Bill Taylor:

“For years now, as I have addressed executive audiences around the word, I have urged leaders to ask themselves one simple question: If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would really miss you and why? I first heard this question from advertising genius Roy Spence, who says he got it from strategy guru Jim Collins. Whatever the original source, the question is as profound as it is simple — and worth taking seriously as you evaluate how to navigate through this economic crisis.

Why might a company be missed? Because it’s providing a product or service so unique that it can’t be provided nearly as well by any other company. Because it’s forged a uniquely emotional connection with customers that other companies can’t replicate. Precious few companies meet any of these criteria — which may be why so many companies feel like they’re on the verge of going out of business, even in good times.”

For those of us who decided to launch businesses just before the reversal in economic fortunes, the question that we’ve got to answer is: “If your company went out of business tomorrow, would anyone know you existed in the first place?”

(Via Harvard Business Publishing.)

One of our advisors gave John this:

“I am a bootstrapper. I have initiative and insight and guts , but not much money. I will succeed because my efforts and my focus will defeat bigger and better-funded competitors. I am fearless.

I will be a fervent and intelligent user of technology, to conserve my two most precious assets: time and money. My size makes me faster and more nimble than any company could ever be.

I am a laser beam. Opportunities will try to cloud my focus, but I will not waver from my stated goal and plan—until I change it. And I know that plans were made to be changed. I’m in it for the long haul.

I pledge to know more about my field than anyone else. I will read and learn and teach. My greatest asset is the value I can add to my clients through my efforts.

I am the underdog. I realize that others are rooting for me to succeed, and I will gratefully accept their help when offered. I also understand the power of favors, and will offer them and grant them whenever I can.

I am a guerrilla. I will be persistent, consistent, and willing to invest in the marketing of myself and my business.

Most of all, I’ll remember that the journey is the reward. I will learn and grow and enjoy every single day.”

Successfully outsourcing can result in considerable cost savings and performance and capacity improvements for an outsourcing organization and can provide opportunities for economies of scale that would be otherwise impossible.  If an organization could achieve all of its goals by itself there would be no need to  enter into business partnerships and the outsourcing industry in particular would be much smaller than it is today. Ten of the pitfalls an organization faces are:

1. Poor Planning
2. Marry in haste, repent at leisure
3. Faulty Financials
4. Underinvestment in the Transisition
5. Brain Drain
6. Passive Agressive Teamwork
7. The Tower of Babel
8. It doesn’t last
9. Losing the wood for the trees
10. Unrealistic expectations

These pitfalls can be avoided through planning, insight, and a commitment to communication and sustaining the change that comes along with a successful partnership.

The failure to meet unrealistic expectations can have a huge detrimental impact on a business partnership. Business partnerships and outsourcing relationships in particular are complex, lengthy, involve considerable change and require both personal and organizational investment to be successful. Lack of understanding, over ambitious promises and lack of preparation and rigor can all lead to expectations that are not matched by reality.

Knowledge, preparation and communication are the answers to unrealistic expectations. Developing a deep and structured knowledge of your processes, needs, performance requirements and your partner capabilities drives realistic criteria. Deep preparation leaving little to chance ensures that scenarios are thought about and surprises are reduced. On-going, honest and clear communications ensures that everyone is on the same page and there is little room for unrealistic expectations.

There is a temptation to over measure and get lost in detailed performance metrics and lose sight of the overall objectives of the partnership. After taking the time to develop detailed processes, understand key quality items, benchmark and then developing a complex algorithm linking pay to performance that a mad scientist would be proud of, performance stubbornly refuses to budge and great expectations are dashed.

This temptation to measure and set targets for everything the greater the possibility that they will influence each other (in possibly not fully understood ways) and  prevent major gains in any one area. In statistics, this is known as “regression to the mean,” for the poor individuals managing or performing in this scenario it is a classic no-win situation.

It can also be tempting to set arbitrary standards because they seem to make sense at the time. The percentage is the biggest villain here. 98% performance may sound great or 99.99% may sound like perfection. When that becomes a target for missing mail for an organization delivering 100,000 letters a day to a business, it means that that means 99 can go missing each and every day. Reality checks are critical when setting targets.

Both of these problems can be avoided by taking a step back to clarify objectives and what actually needs to be measured and then give that balanced scorecard a healthy dose of reality.

Unless there are clear tangible and intangible benefits from the new arrangements there can be a significant tendency to revert to old ways of doing things.

Investing the time and energy to make the partnership and the relationships with in it are the only prescriptions for ensuring that the change holds and continues to deliver value. Using Prosci’s ADKAR stages of change can provide an effective gauge of personal and organizational progress in a transition

• Awareness - Identified that a change is coming
• Desire - A willingness to change (have decided to support the new over the old)
• Knowledge - knowing how to change
• Ability - implementing new skills and behaviors
• Reinforcement - maintaing the change once it has occurred

(Adapted from “Employee’s Survival Guide to Change by Jeffrey M. Hiatt)

It’s quite a time consuming and resource intensive process to find and transition in new ways of doing things. It is the small interventions all the way through that ensure that the change becomes as embedded as the old way of doing things.

Even within supposedly single industries with common training structures, regulated activities and well defined professional organizations there is a surprising amount of disagreement over fundamental definitions of an object, service or performance. 

Turnaround or response times are a key item in many outsource partnerships, yet the start and finish point can be a major point of disagreement. For a customer, the start point may be when they first picked up the phone and had an informal conversation, for the help desk when the work order was actually entered, for the maintenance manager when they got it and the ultimate performer when they were asked to do it.

The possibility for confusion and disagreement around definitions, standards and service levels are enormous. Although reference to recognized to standards endorsed by IFMA, OSCRE, BOMA or other institutions is a great start, time must be taken to develop an agreed set of performance criteria that can be measured and actually reflect a common understanding of the operation or service.