Loading ...
It is very disturbing to watch what we do to our democracy as we pitch away our tolerance and respect for each other’s values, and dive into a type of brawl I used to observe in the years of my youth at the hockey rinks. The polarization of public opinions is becoming reminiscent of the era of religious wars. As the power and omnipresence of communication channels and “contributors” grow along with transparency of candidates voting records, both candidates look more and more unqualified to produce meaningful change as they seem to converge on less and lessof a distinguishable platform in the attempt to please everybody.
What do we really want from our next leader? We seem to give even less thought to our expectations of the next President, than we do for job requirements when we hire a new employee for a management position.
I am often puzzled by the very poor quality of job requirements found in wanted advertising of the on-line job boards. Many HR professionals often complain about this as well. It is very easy when you are looking for a developer to take part in a project with specified technology skills. However it gets increasingly difficult if the technology and the scope of the project is not yet defined. The challenge grows exponentially as you move up the organizational hierarchy with ambiguity and uncertainties escalating, but yet hiring managers are still focusing on less critical, but easier to list specific technical skills while totally ignoring more critical assets like ability to lead, ability to challenge creativity of your team, integrity of character, integrity of the thought process, etc.
It is mind boggling that we criticize political leaders for changing their minds on certain issues, which amounts to prohibition to learn and to be pragmatic. Steadfastness is not the same as intellectual inflexibility and denial of reality. If that is what we want from the next President how come the current one is so unpopular - he delivered most of things he promised. Too bad we didn’t want them anymore.
“…in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities:
integrity, intelligence and energy.
And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”
Warren Buffett
People capable to lead with integrity do not need to be experts in National Security or data base design. Look for the one who has verifiable experience of building talented teams and leading them to create constructive change. If change is what you really want. And that disqualifies both candidates, so let’s embrace for at least one more term of the sameness, regardless who wins.
Loading ...
In another excellent post Michael Krigsman interviews Jon Collins, Service Director at Freeform Dynamics, a UK-based analyst firm, and co-author of “The Technology Garden,”. In an interview, he described a few PPM success factors, one of each is:
Good program managers are hard to come by, but in my experience a high quality person at the helm can overcome poor organizational processes, whereas the best processes can fail if the person in charge doesn’t know how to steer the ship. One can become a slave to project metrics.
I could not agree more, but wonder why it is so rare these qualities are articulated in job requirements and advertisements. Even if HR starts by doing so, during interviews the conversation quickly slides to requirements for “hands-on” skills in technology du jour instead of leadership skills, thorough understanding of business process and economic values.
Loading ...
CRM Enterprise software initiatives are rightly considered to be the most challenging Enterprise Software undertaking by many people in business, yet many companies dip their proverbial ‘toes” into this dangerous “water”. The attraction is, that when these initiatives do succeed, the return on investment is very fast and spectacular. It is interesting to understand what the critical reasons for such volatility are. I will explore them in this post, based on my own experience as well as what I have learned from various discussions with other practitioners.
1. Clear definition of objectives. The objectives are often articulated in terms which are not specific or measurable - “Improve Customer satisfaction”, “Obtain 360 degree Customer visibility”, “Increase time available for Sales calls”, “Improve Sales efficiency by 13%” - are quite common and absolutely useless if not harmful.
First and foremost, we have to manage better communication….Project failure and success seem to depend on saying, “Are you able to accurately articulate and collect what the requirements are?” and “Are you able to express the right estimates?”…. Too many times, the collection process is weak, because the customer is not easily able to articulate [his needs] in language the people [on the project] understand. [S]oftware estimation is not a trivial exercise; it is still an art rather than a science.
JP Rangaswami is the Managing Director of Service Design at BT Design
There is either no measurable target or agreement on base line and measuring methodology. The agreement is the crucial word in this sentence because we deal with an open economic system which can be influenced by multiple market factors outside of the sphere and control of this initiative. So it is difficult to come up with clear metrics which would allow for measurement, i.e. accountability, and people are not often motivated to do difficult things without effective leadership. The result is a list of features and functions which are collected without asking a fundamental question - How this feature, function or process would affect the GOAL?
2. Effective leadership. The leadership is very often outsourced or delegated to IT after initial, very loud announcements:
In American culture, we tend to equate leadership with yapping. There is no correlation. Lead Well and Prosper, by Nick McCormick.
I would like to thank Michael Krigsman for posting these and some other excellent references and analysis in his ZDNet blog.
That is why effective leadership is critical - Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
Peter Drucker
It is much easier to be a critic, so I will try to be constructive for a change, ranting can get very tiresome. From my Best Practices notebook I can suggest the following targets as examples:
“Reduce selling cycle by 5% first year, and 7.5% during subsequent 2 years without decrease of average deal size, normalized to our industry market condition”;
“decrease deal discount rates by 10% from the current (pre-initiative go live) levels, normalized to industry market condition”.
These do not reflect the whole CRM footprint, but I found the SFA part is more challenging, that is why I have included these examples, but I hope it is illustrative enough to extrapolate to Marketing, Support, etc.
Oh, I would love to use this new SFA system!
It is business leadership which needs to step up to the plate and articulate WHAT do they want to achieve, and WHY these are the most critical targets to aim for. It is also very important that achieving agreed targets does not become an IT challenge, but remains a business challenge thru training, adoption, and compliance management. The IT is an enabler, not a deliverer of economic results.
I will continue later with the rest of the W’s
I have six honest serving men,
They taught me all I know.
Their names are Who and What and When,
Why and Where and How.
- Rudyard Kipling
It is very disturbing to watch what we do to our democracy as we pitch away our tolerance and respect for each other’s values, and dive into a type of brawl I used to observe in the years of my youth at the hockey rinks. The polarization of public opinions is becoming reminiscent of the era of religious wars. As the power and omnipresence of communication channels and “contributors” grow along with transparency of candidates voting records, both candidates look more and more unqualified to produce meaningful change as they seem to converge on less and lessof a distinguishable platform in the attempt to please everybody.
There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.