People, Not Tools

Just a few weeks ago I wrote: Hiring SME IT Leaders; Results or Skills?

Johanna Rothman wrote: People Are Not Tools and says it much better than I did.

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Photo Credit cloois via flickr

Hiring SME IT Leaders: Results Or Skills?

As small to medium business Owners or Managers, at some point you realize that the time has come to look for some leadership to take control of your IT  team.

Like most businesses, in your early stages of growth you probably hired your IT staff based on particular skill sets that you needed. Perhaps those skills were with certain Point of Sale systems, database software or email servers, etc.

While skills and experience are critically important when supporting and fixing your existing technology and software tools, that requirement for a particular skill level begins to change as you begin looking for higher levels of IT leadership. Those exact skill sets can become less relevant than business results.

That is not to say that there can be zero technology skills!

As SME managers, we need to wear many hats. That includes your IT managers. We need (‘we’ meaning  business technology leaders) to maintain our technical skills, but we also need to grow the more business results oriented strategic planning, relationship, and project skills.

Skills, Results: Let me paint an example

As a growing business lets imagine that you have reached the point where you have decided that you need to invest in a larger resource planning (ERP) or financial application.

This can be a huge investment, so after many discussions with your peers, and maybe a consultant or two from your local Chamber of Commerce, you think that a particular product will be perfect for you. Lets also assume that those same discussions convinced you that to support this type of technology initiative, you will need to go beyond your current break/fix  tech geeks to a true business technology leader who can be responsible for delivering the value you need for this investment.

Answer this question;

When you call the placement agency, or publish the advertisement, what importance do you think skill with the product you chose should carry in your hiring decision?

The answer is not necessarily much!

Next, lets assume you are now interviewing a few candidates for that IT leadership position.

One particular candidate looks excellent. She has great recommendations, and has successfully implemented ERP or financial software a few times already!

But! she has never used, or even seen that particular ERP or financial vendor’s product that you want to implement. Do you think that matters? Do you write her off the short list?

Here is a tip!

A strong business technology candidate will pick up different software skills easily. Example; I was once flown in to fix a problem with software environments I had never seen before, it was less than two days until I understood enough to fix the issue.

It is the skills to discuss, negotiate and implement the processes behind the software are the harder ones!

Your candidate can demonstrate that he or she has obtained the results that you are looking for several times, it is only because each time she was using products that are competitive to the product you have chosen that you are considering knocking her off the short list.

So in this example, the demonstrated results this candidate can show far outweighs their lack of skill with your chosen software package.

The SMB Takeaway

Skill and experience with a particular product can be critical when you are hiring someone to babysit a particular tool or product, but demonstrated results is the critical metric when you need leadership to provide business benefits from your IT investments.

Hire Well!

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Where Is Your Planning Horizon? (Part 2)

In part 1 of this post, I outlined how ‘C’ level executives and managers in the small to medium enterprise need to ensure that their senior IT leaders (internal or outsourced) are considering long and medium term planning horizons, not just short term planning, which is the specific, immediate actions required for particular results.

Often longer term planning can be difficult, because it will always be a moving target. (I have changed my own long term planning goals twice in the last 18 months or so) Despite being a moving target, get away from the what if.. or you will never get any planning goals off the ground.

Your IT planning has to balance the long term of where you want to be vs. the day by day steps that get you to that goal.

One Without The Other?

Does not work!

With no long term planning, short and medium term planning has no goal. No end game. No target that you are trying to aim for. And with only long term planning, you get stuck vague ideals about a perfect future – but with no immediate deliverables to begin setting you on that road. (like the old saying; if you do not know where you are going, any road will get you there)

And yes! your long term plans will probably change, be aware of it, and adjust as necessary.

In part 1 I promised to give a real world example, so here it is!

After joining my organization n the fall of 2007, I realized that our IT cost structure was way out of whack.

So easily enough my long term plan was to reduce our IT cost by at least 50%

The short term and medium term plans to get to that goal included multiple tasks, some of these were relatively easy to implement, and others that were more difficult. Examples include;

* Improving purchase approvals,processes and supplier agreements

* Improving IT costing

* Consolidating four database servers down to one

* Consolidating five application servers down to three

* Improving budget and trend analysis

You get the idea!

Some of these tasks took a lot of planning and time (eg, you can’t just pick up and move a database from one server to another – trust me on that – applications will break, software code needs to modified, etc etc)

In the interest of full disclosure, I cannot take credit for all cost reductions we achieved as our B2B customer base started feeling the pain of our current economic meltdown long before the press started talking about the recession word. When they closed their wallets, many growth and spending plans had to be shelved.

The Long Term Planning Change

OK, so my first long term plan was cutting IT costs. By middle to late 2008, the market that we call SaaS, (Software as a service)and  PaaS (platform as a service) had begun to mature.

For me? maintaining database servers and application servers are not our core competency.So my long term planning has evolved into identifying if we can successfully leverage those technologies.

The SMB Takeaway

Yes, the future is unknown, and unknowable. But that is not excuse to avoid planning for where you believe you need to be. You may modify, you may tweak, you may adjust.

In fact you may rip out and replace the whole plan.

Do it anyway!

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Photo credit coincoyote via flickr

Real SMB IT: The 2 Basic Building Blocks of Improving IT Service Reliability

As a C level executive, General Manager, or Owner of a small to medium business, too often we leave any talk (possibly even thought!) about our investments in technology assets and staff until the time something breaks.

And that is unfortunate!

Cambridge MA based Forrester Research identifies that 80% of businesses identify that their Information Technology (IT) is between “somewhat” and “critical” to business.

Yet still we often live with the mind set of; out of sight,out of mind. (at least until it breaks!)

Question: Have You experienced some of these symptoms?

Consistent and regular failure of your IT infrastructure? Maybe the Internet dies regularly, E-Mail seems to fail more often than it is working, people cannot log in to their workstations or cannot access the servers they need?

Or perhaps this one; You are paying IT staff or suppliers;

And yet…..

You are usually wondering what they do all day?

These are often symptoms of that out of sight,out of mind tendency that we all can have.

Fortunately it is relatively easy to begin changing this mind set without becoming a PhD in Computer Science!

You can change it simply by starting a regular conversation with your Information Technology Management team or supplier on the these two basics of IT service delivery blocking and tackling.

1) Is It Written Down?

If critical information exists only in the brain of one person, that person is a disaster waiting to happen. All IT assets and services must be documented.

That does not mean that you need 500 page manuals on each of your servers! Think of the assembly instructions for some piece of assemble it yourself furniture. As brief as can be while still maintaining all the critical information and relationships among the pieces.

Consider these documents a road map or cheat sheet of how each piece of your IT infrastructure supports and depends on other pieces. This documentation should remain fairly technical, the goal is not to have your grand mother be able to rebuild it (unless she was a computer expert of course!) but it should be explicit and clear enough that any individual with skills in that technology environment can use that documentation as a baseline to either rebuild,or keep moving forward.

As an example; if you are a manufacturing concern, I am quite confident that every time an operator for a particular machining tool leaves, that you are not going back to the machine vendor to re-train a new operator. You have the operating procedures and instructions both for training , and for operator substitution.

Why would you not do the same with your IT infrastructure?

2) Give Me The facts Please!

Our second tool in this basic blocking and tackling is maintaining records and reporting on all issues and requests that have affected your IT service delivery.

At it simplest, in your discussions with your IT Leadership; how many things broke last week? and most importantly, do we know why it broke? And how long did it take us to fix it?

You also want to know how many calls for help and service that your IT staff are dealing with. This should include everything from helping fix that corrupted Marketing presentation, to why that particular person is having trouble printing in landscape mode.

Using my same machine tool example, if that tool is failing regularly, you need to know why. And if regular operator issues are occurring, again, that can begin to point out trends or the requirement for improved training.

The SMB Takeaway

If you only talk to your IT staff or suppliers when things have broken, you will not be successful in monitoring or improving your IT service delivery and IT infrastructure reliability.

Without having to learn techno-speak, just beginning to ask these questions on a regular basis will begin to demonstrate what is happening within your IT organization.

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Photo Credit Leo Reynolds via flickr

Real SMB IT: Consulting Services And Scope

Lets try this little story on for size!

You want to hire a plumber to replace your kitchen sink. So out you go and you get a couple of quotations, here they are;

Vendor number one’s quote states; Replace sink

Vendor number two’s quote states; Replace sink, Re-install existing faucet hardware, modify plumbing to fit new sink

Now which of those above quotations make you feel most comfortable that all contingencies are met?

Which one makes you comfortable that there will not be surprises on the scope of work or billing?

Maybe Number Two??

Unless you have a long history of service and trust with the vendor of quote number one, you can understand that that quotation number two covers the bases in a lot more detail.

Now, How About IT?

For smaller businesses it can be fairly common to use outside contractors and suppliers to perform installation or maintenance of your IT assets. Maybe you don’t have full time IT staff, or perhaps you just have a small IT staff that needs outside help in performing a larger task.

But like the example above, don’t forget that there can be a problem here!

It is a natural, but often invisible problem that exists because your contractor, supplier or VAR (Value Added Reseller) and yourself can be looking at the same event or work, but through different lenses.

Freebies vs. Being Nickled & Dimed

For yourself as a manager in the small business space, you are thinking;  “Well since they are here installing that server anyway, I am sure that they can take a few minutes and do this upgrade to our MS Office applications while they are here….”

But for the Management of that vendor or contractor, they need to have their staff into, and then out of your office in the time frame that they quoted you to install that server, and adding what could be an hour or more of time to upgrade those MS Office installations was not part of their plan.

This type of disconnect can lead to frustration and distrust on both sides.

Your supplier feels that you are trying to drive them out of business supporting you with freebies, while you think that they are being unreasonable and doing a nickle and dime routine because you think that the little thing should only take a couple of minutes.

Get Rid of the Disconnect With Proper Scope

To remove this disconnect when sourcing IT contract work, ensure that your vendor and yourself have an itemized list, or breakdown  of each and every task that are to be performed for any particular contract. This will be the scope of your contract engagement.

This point is also the time to discuss those little extra’s.

You think that a few minutes will upgrade your MS Office applications, and they can respond that with 17 workstations at 10 minutes per workstation (assuming nothing goes wrong!) you are looking at almost another three hours of labor.

The SMB Takeaway

When dealing with IT service providers of any kind, ensure that you have an itemized list of the work that is being contracted for. And ensure that it is broken down to as granular a level as is possible.

It takes a bit more time up front, but it is time well spent.

Because both parties can develop the trust that what was contracted for is reasonable, and mutually beneficial.

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Photo Credit using neighbo.com via flickr

Real SMB IT: Dishonest PC Repair

Venus Flytrap

Every couple of years somebody publishes an exposé on some class or type of service business that is fishing for honesty and integrity.

Disappointing as it is, it had to happen. The August 10 2009 print edition of Business Week (I could not find it on-line) had a brief note by Arik Hesseldahl titled; Shifty PC Repair.

Same idea, set up a basic sting operation where a machine has a known minor defect (in this case just a loose memory chip) and take the machine to various service outlets.

In this UK example, only one of six sting targets actually just fixed the problem. While some over charged for non-existent problems, some actually copied data off the machine. If that is a business machine with possibly confidential information, you see where that can go.

The SMB Takeaway

That behavior is deplorable. Period.

But to reduce that risk, as I have written before, planning for the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) when purchasing IT assets is critical in the small to medium enterprise. That means planning for the fact that sooner or later something will need to be repaired.

So here are two ways to reduce that risk;

1) When purchasing desktops or notebook computers, spend the extra few dollars for the vendors on-site extended warranty service

2) On out-of warranty older equipment, have a trusted local vendor that will do the work on your site, and have the repairs watched.

The key point here, they may be able to squeak in a little padding on the bill, but when they are sitting in your facility they sure can’t use a USB stick & grab your entire Quick Books database.

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Photo Credit Wikipedia

Who Is Closest To The Server?

This is for Managers in smaller businesses.

I know that Steve or Jane is sitting closest to the spot that you want to put your first real server.

But as you use that server to collect your critical financial information, customer information and invoicing, Are Steve or Jane the the appropriate person to automatically take the server Administrator Job? The new IT Guy or Gal?

I know, it seems easy; stick a tape in every night and assume the best.

But the number of things that can go wrong are endless.

And can Steve or Jane be empowered & accountable for support of that machine? in good times and in bad?

Because if they don’t have those skills, in bad times trying to make them accountable is a different word, it is just the fall guy.

Were You Voted Closest To The Server?

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Photo Credit Manuel W. via flickr

Hands On ITIL Helpdesk

I have written many high level overviews of ITIL on this blog, and to this day it is the most searched for information.

Unfortunately for me, very few of those visitors have left questions on other info they would like to see.

However, if you are someone who stumbled on the ITIL stuff here, Mary Weilage has an excellent post at Techreplublic titled; Implementing help desk software: IT exec offers a firsthand account about Jay Rollins’ search for and implementation of ITIL aligned help desk processes.

It provides an excellent summary of the questions, requirements and trade offs made along the way.

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Canadian SME ‘C’ Level Execs, Call for New IT Manager Interview Questions

I have been invited to submit a freelance article to a Canadian print publication on SME Owners and Executives that have decided that they need to interview and hire that first IT Leader that goes beyond being a caretaker of PC’s and into contributing to the strategic delivery of services that support a growing businesses goals, these could include;

- boosting sales
- maximizing profits
- improving collaboration, both internal and external
- effective knowledge sharing
- improving internal processes
- Developing new products and services
- etc

This article is then to outline sample interview questions that non-technology oriented general managers can ask to tease out some of those desired skill sets.

I will be including questions on budgeting and financial controls, process and people management frameworks, as well as roles and objectives, (among other ideas.)

If you as a General Manager in the Canadian SME space have a questions that you have used (or found out later that you wish you had used!) and would like to be quoted, please feel free to leave a comment here with contact information or email me at elliotross@sympatico.ca

Please include the the why of desired skills or behaviour of your question.

Please note

“invited” equals not 100% guarantee of publishing!

Regards

Elliot Ross

Dynamic Pricing – A Real World Example

In this post titled; Everybody Knows, Right? I referenced a Financial Post column by Rick Spence, on dynamic pricing.

My thanks to Rick, he posted a comment on that post that he had received some negative comments on that original Financial Post article.

That is unfortunate, and here is why.

Time Vs. Availability

One common axis that can be hinged on dynamic pricing is availability. That is one that we are familiar with  from the airline industry. As available seat numbers go down, price goes up.

In many small to medium enterprises, this axis of availability can be one that really generates negative reactions and bias. If you sell ski boots, I don’t want to pay twice the price because you are down to the last two pairs!

Another Axis; Time

For managers in the small to medium business space, one resource we can’t save, earn or buy is time. And dynamically pricing using time as an axis does not generate the same resentment. The value of time can often be justified.

In a simple example, an invoice that gives you a discount on a pay-before date? Dynamic Pricing.

My dry-cleaner? overnight is more expensive than next week. Again, Dynamic Pricing.

In both of these cases you pay less than the other guy for the same good or service based on the axis of Time

Another case – Because it can go both ways!

I know a former manager (now retired) at an automotive dealership service department.

On days when his service bays were not fully booked, he still had union service techs on the clock.

His solution?

He would hover around the parts desk where the Do-It-Yourself crowd bought parts to fix or upgrade on their own cars. He then simply offered them on the spot to do the work for them immediately, at a fraction of the standard bill rate.

Even if the margin was only a fraction of the regular, it was still margin, and kept the tech’s working.

So here is time from two angles, One; keeping paid techs working, and second, offering value to the customer. Sure, the DIY person could do that job on the weekend, but presenting the value of having it done in 40 minutes?

The SMB Takeaway

So in your business – when time is in the equation,there is value there. Is there a time element that could be of value for your customer base?

If there is, don’t automatically assume that they won’t pay for that value.

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