1. Build your story: By the time you get around to presenting a plan, you will know the subject inside and out. The people you are sharing the plan with will likely have no context or understanding, so methodically build your story. Too many people jump around between the details, big picture, strategy, execution…It becomes a confusing mess. Tip: If you are delivering the plan as a presentation and need a slide with lots of bullet points, you might as well stop talking, everyone will read the slide and ignore you. Either give people time to read the bullets before speaking, or (sparingly) use animation to build the list and unfold … Read More
Getting Software Implementation Right – Sustaining
If you have had the fortitude to endure this series on software implementation, you are rewarded with a short final installment. In prior posts we covered preparing the implementation, selling the implementation, and doing the implementation work. This post covers how to move a customer out of the implementation process and into a healthy sustaining relationship with your company. Graduate If you have ever been on an implementation team you know that it is sometimes nearly impossible to get a customer to stop calling you when they need help. You did a great job making them feel comfortable, well supported and welcome as a new customer…Maybe too good of a job?? … Read More
Getting Software Implementation Right – Prepare
Any software implementation is going to have ups and downs, but your experience and your team’s preparation are critical. Even though it may be the same package you have deployed 100 times, the environment in which your operating is brand new. Being prepared takes on several dimensions of which you must account for them all in order to guarantee success. Creating the Customer Experience Professional services/the implementation team should never define the implementation experience…but they usually do. This responsibility lands squarely with Product Management. Of course, Professional Services must collaborate with Product Management and Finance to determine what level(s) of service is feasible to deliver, but the determination between boot … Read More
Enabling Growth Through Business Architecture: Digitize
This post is the fourth and final in a series on enabling growth through business architecture. In the first article we covered how and why to understand your business capabilities. In the second article, I shared about the importance of establishing metrics and controls to understand and manage work. The third post was all about inexpensive and practical ways to train people involved in doing the brute force work necessary to scale, but has yet to be automated. This article caps the series off with digitization of workflows. Digitization is the automation of existing manual or paper based processes, by digitizing the information. Even the most technology oriented companies face … Read More
Enabling Growth Through Business Architecture: Training
This post is the third in a series on dealing with growth through business architecture. In the first article we covered how and why to understand your business capabilities. In the second article, I shared about the importance of establishing metrics and controls. In this post we will make a pivot to discuss how you keep supporting growth while your organization works to digitize and automate for limitless scalability. By now you have an understanding of the capabilities, major functions, and the supporting processes. Beyond that, you now also have metrics to track historical performance and projection information that indicates where the scaling issues will be most severe. These scalability … Read More
Enabling Growth Through Business Architecture: Establish Metrics & Controls
This is the second post in a series about enabling growth through business architecture and we will cover the importance of establishing metrics and controls. In the first article, we covered the understanding capabilities, so follow that link if you want to start from the beginning. The management adage “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” is critical to organizations that are at the cusp of hyper growth, and setting metrics and controls early keeps you grounded when making business decisions. Now that you have a good understanding of capabilities, functions and processes along with the performance characteristics, you have been able to establish the hot spots within the organization. … Read More
Q&A – How to keep a very large and remote team engaged over a very long project?
Q) We have a research team of 40 people who will begin working on a project next month. The team is a scattered group of people who may maintain low involvement for extended periods of time. I have to give them the opportunity to keep track of progress and contribute to general discussions. Do you have any suggestions or insights? A) It is important to keep in mind that low involvement = low engagement. When people only have a minor role to play on a project, keeping up with what is going on can become more of a distraction from the urgent regular work, so here are a couple of things … Read More
The first rule of change management
Don’t break my job! Change management is popular these days, and it seems the Project Management Institute (PMI) is especially interested in driving this aspect of the project management discipline lately; with good reason. 75% of initiatives fail to achieve the projected ROI(1), and a 2002 study by McKinsey found that on large projects there was a gap of 108 percentage points between those with excellent change management and those with no program or a poor change management program(2). As with many things, the right way to do it is also the common sense approach. I was doing a large scale operating system migration and deployment several years ago. As part of … Read More