Category: Opinion

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Opinion TBM

Demand Budgeting in a Service Enterprise

Demand budgeting.  Once the discussion with customers has begun around services, this is the essential next step. Imagine working with a  restaurant for meal delivery. Service discussions mean that we offer and want customers to  order things like “ lasagna and side salad”. But if  demand planning continues the “GL Account” way, then the conversation would go like this:  “Today for lunch I want lasagna and a side salad. Tomorrow I am expecting company, so I will want 3lbs of ground beef, a pound of noodles, a head of lettuce, two tomatoes and 2 cups of ricotta. *“ You can see that this is not only MORE awkward than 100% component discussions, it  works against the enterprise making the shift.  In order to become a service based organization, services need to be the unit of discussion at all phases of the conversation. This means creating a shift in process and tools so that you can have a relationship and ongoing conversation with customers about how  the value they are getting out of your current services are shifting. Demand should not just be a conversation around adding or decreasing heads in the organization, but should be a discussion about the bottom line business value of services and how shifting business goals may impact the demand for those services.

*yes, I know this is not the real recipe for lasagna

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Opinion

Becoming a better consultant

As CEO, part of my job is to look for ways to help our employees grow professionally. For technical staff, there are many ways to grow and develop skills- it is a process of focusing or narrowing the field of possibilities.  For consulting staff, the challenge is greater.  While there are lots of seminars and webinars that claim to turn someone into a better consultant, my experience has been that it really takes two things – temperament and experience.  This got me thinking about where I first learned some of my consulting skills. Interestingly enough, it was not from past clients- my learning and experience curve started much further back.

iStock_000009759865XSmallOne of the characteristics that makes a consultant successful is the ability to stand up in the middle of chaos and indecision and present a path forward and then lead.  My first experiences with this were as a Cadet Girl Scout in middle school.  There were several occasions where the council threw all the cadet troops together in a meeting to plan out activities for younger scouts for the council wide camp out. Imagine if you can, 20-40  middle school girls ( ages 11-13) in a room turned loose to collaborate and plan.  Although there were girls with marvelous ideas who worked with their little clique to plan activities, I learned fast that the scouts who were able to pitch an idea and then collaborate across groups to create excitement ( we did not call it “buy in” back then) were the ones who were most successful and ended up having the most fun.  I continued with scouts into college and consider my experiences formative ones, thanks to amazing leaders and adult volunteers.

There were a lot of events- some chosen, some not- in my life that put me into situations where listening carefully, designing a solution and being willing to be accountable for setting a direction were critical for success. Over time and through analyzing mistakes I got more and more comfortable with that role. At Thavron, we pair less experienced consultants with field honed employees and use a process of ongoing analysis and discussion to help everyone -even the most experienced consultants learn something from every project. But as I mentor folks informally, I tell them to find volunteer activities that put them into a zone of uncertainty, where leadership and accountability are key to success.  No matter your passion, there will be an organization you love or believe in who is trying something new where the path is not known. Step up and take leadership on those projects. It is on projects where there is disagreement, dissension and a new path forward to be planned that the skills of great consultants are honed.

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Excellence Frameworks Opinion Services

Always exceeding expectations? That doesn’t mean you are excellent.

In consulting, there is a constant push to “exceed customer expectations”. It makes sense in our business- since we are coming in as experts, we should have experiences and perspectives that allow us to see broader trends and opportunities than our clients, who are often buried in the details of running and growing a single business.
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But today, I want to challenge the idea that always exceeding customer expectations is a good measure of excellence. Exceeding expectations can happen when one of two things happens- either expectations were too low, or you behaved better than anyone expected.

Expectations being set too low could be a symptom of a lack of confidence, poor communication, or in some cases, just plain laziness. Exceeding these low expectations is certainly not a sign of excellence.

But, you may protest- what if the expectations are realistic and correctly set? Isn’t exceeding correct expectations a sign of excellence? To which we would answer- it depends.

At what cost were expectations exceeded? If manufacturing specs were exceeded without extra processing time or cost- EXCELLENT. But if exceeding the specs doubled the cost or time of manufacturing- not so great at all. If you successfully close a major project 2 weeks ahead of time with no unintended impacts- EXCELLENT. But if you beat the deadline by focusing more resources on that project, and thus missed the deadline for 4 other projects- that is poor program management, not excellence at all.

Certainly then, if the expectations are realistic and exceeding them produces no negative impact, an organization where expectations are always exceeded is an excellent one, right?

Far from being excellent,  an organization that always exceeds expectations is one headed for obsolescence. If targets are carefully set and always exceeded- then there is no stretch, no growth, no risks and no innovations.

In a healthy, thriving, growing business we would expect to see some goals met, some goals exceeded and some which fail.  The mark of an excellent organization is not how many goals they exceed, but in how they react to the successes and failures.

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Opinion

Picking Smart Partners

It was a 6am conference call type morning, and I found my self at 5am, sitting drinking coffee and reading through LinkedIn headlines while my brain woke up. The one about working for smart companies​ caught my eye.

Although the article focused on moving your personal career forward,  as we choose technologies to recommend to customers, we use the same rule of thumb the article recommended for  evaluating the tech that companies use.

As that 6am conference call progressed, I heard the same questions coming up.. Is it HTML5? How does this do triggers and notifications? How does mobile access look and feel? I was proud that we had chosen tech  (in this case Metric Insights and Aspen Advisors) whose approach to doing business aligns with the future growth of how customers want to use technology.

We are always looking for interesting new technology partners, if you are a tech/tool provider, or have a favorite provider – please share.  We are vendor neutral, but we are glad to share and highlight vendors who we think bring the right stuff to the game.

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Opinion TBM

What about the Enterprise Architects?

Google’s ngram viewer shows that the word “architecture”, which had a stable usage from 1800-1980.  It slowly rose through the 80’s then sharply spiked in the 1990’s and remains stable at a rate double it’s previous usage since about 1998 ( you can see the architecture ngram here).  That rise was interestingly co-incident with the rise of computers( and computer architecture) and the birth and growth in the 1990’s of that beast known as an Enterprise Architect. In the 90’s, enterprise architects went on a search for the computer systems equivalent of physic’s Grand Unified Theory. Creatures such as TOGAF, DODAF and other “universal architectures” were born and then failed in their mission.
The biggest problem was that most of the enterprise architectures ended up layering on more overhead, processes and paperwork than they actually supplied solutions. At the same time that enterprise architects were looking to create massive universal guidelines, developers were moving to Xtreme programming, becoming Agile and sitting side by side wth their customers.
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With the shift to a services mentality, the need for enteprise architects is stronger than ever, but only if they learn some lessons from the Agile approach.
Enterprise architects should not be looking at how they can design and dictate global, universal frameworks, but should use their deep technical knowledge and ability to abstract to patch some of the biggest gaps in the services lifecycle for most companies. Here are the top opportunities for enterprise architects to make a difference in the business bottom line:
1) IT Departments struggle to translate Business Services into technical requirements. This impacts cost, value and risk for the business and creates lots of unhappy phone calls to the CIO. Enterprise Architects wondering what their role is in all of this “service stuff” should be working with the service owners to design and build small frameworks and tools that translate business demand into IT requirements.
2) Someone with an Enterprise Architecture background and training is perfect for the vendor evaluation process. Using their translational skills, they can easily help the business talk with vendors and understand if the product being pitched actually meets business requirements while meeting corporate security restrictions.
3) Working for a large corporation with large purchasing power?  Now is the perfect time to partneer with a service owner, help them abstract out the critical business features missing in the market place and work with vendors to shape the future to your company’s advantage.
The new Enterprise Architecture group is agile and focused on services and service owners. These architects use their powers of abstraction and design to make IT services better for the business.
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Events Opinion

Taking time to smell the roses….

​”a rose by any other name…”

Shakespeare worked hard to convince us that no matter the name, a rose always smells sweet. The problem is that you have  to get close to the flower to tell that it has a sweet smell. If you walked past a red flower and someone told you to “look at that aphid feast”, you are less likely to walk over, stick your nose deep in and sniff to discover the sweet smell.

Getting someone to pause and take time to understand what your software does is a common roadblock for new software.   You may be a rose, but you need them to stop long enough to sniff. After spending some time at HP Discover this week, it became apparent that they have an unrecognized rose.

Around 2 years ago, HP released their new Executive Scorecard software. There was a big sales promotion, lots of customers bought it, but only a fraction have implemented it fully- mostly because apparently no one was certain what the value add was.  Some of the folks I talked to called it “HP’s best kept Software Secret”, others told me it was Shelfware, but seemed eager to learn how to leverage it.

Considering only the name, you may think to yourself  “scorecard=high level metric dashboard”. While there is a reporting level with hundreds of built in KPIs, when I paused and took a closer look it was apparent that HP has a gem of a tool buried under mis-naming and marketing pains.

Executive scorecard is more of analytics/modeling platform than a scorecard. While it does have a nice reporting surface with infrastructure easily wired to tie objectives to KPIs, underneath it is a data consolidation/ modeling platform with a capability to build and test scenarios.  It comes with Cloud Analytics and ITFM (IT Financial Management) modules out of the box (although they can be customized to fit your particular processes/infrastructure), but you could model and report on almost any scenario that your business needs to solve.

If you are in the market for Cloud Analytics or a Corporate ITFM solution, you should add it to the list of applications you evaluate. Thavron is also planning on adding it into our toolset of solutions for many of the Service Lifecycle projects we tackle, giving our customers the power to model alternate solutions and adding to their power to make Data Driven Decisions.