jbreazeale

Today's rant: Passivity, passing the buck, and picking up the phone

Ok, I tweeted about this earlier today, but apparently that wasn’t enough to fully vent my frustration since that was several hours ago and I’m still feeling a vague sense of annoyance and frustration over the whole issue. This has been my day so far (names changed to protect the innocent/guilty) —

Email from A to me, B, and C (cc’ing D):

Re: Account 9999999

Here’s an update on Account. These 4 items are needed.

Email from E to me (cc’ing F):

Re: paperwork

I spoke with G and we’re sending some paperwork to you.Tell me what else you need.

(Okay at this point, Account is out of my hands and has been out of my hands for about a week. I don’t even know what paperwork E is talking about and of course E didn’t tell me or attach a copy of the paperwork.)

Email from me to A and B:

Re: Account 9999999 paperwork (yes, more helpful if you refer to something in a way that has meaning to it’s audience, not just you!)

E has paperwork; which one of you should I send it to.

Email from B (no ccs) saying basically,send it to the person who needs it. (Helpful.)

Email from me to A and B:

Re: Account 9999999 paperwork

Ok, I’ll have E send it to A.

Email from A to me (cc’ing B, C, and D):

You can send a copy to me, but in the interest of time, just have E send it to XYZ directly.

(Um, you have E’s email address, I’ve copied you on the messages I’ve sent to E, but you couldn’t just tell E this? So, yes I told E.)

Email from F (who? yeah, apparently E had enough fun at this point to hand it off to someone else) to me with a question about how the paperwork should be completed.

I finally put an end to this ball of joy by making a couple of telephone calls and sending out the following:

Email to A, B, C, D, E, F, and G:

All -

We need these items:

1. Document - E is sending to XYZ directly.
2. Document - B/C will get this one. I will follow up tomorrow with a phone call to check status.
3. Document - E is sending to me, I will complete and send to A.
4. Document - E will get this and send to me.

Of course now I know that I should have picked up the phone much earlier in the game, but seriously, I had no idea it could go on this long. A whole day spent asking “Who’s on first?” And no one else willing to step in and own the decision. Geez.

Lessons learned:

• Pick up the phone. Early. Especially when you’re getting the pass the buck emails. (Actually, pass the buck is too active, look at the buck, maybe?)
• Let the back office talk to the front office. Big companies can (and probably have) over-siloed their workgroups. Maybe the front line shouldn’t have a hotline to the back office, but we all do work for the same company right? And we’re all trying to provide good service to the customer, right?
• Make a decision. Sometimes (often? most of the time?) people are more inclined to let responsibility pass them by and will do almost anything to avoid making a decision. Make a decision and others will start taking action.
  

A Business+Geek Success Story: Setting up a wiki for small business (Part 2)

Summary:

Here’s one example of how a small company selected, implemented, and used a wiki to manage its information.

Getting up to Speed:

We picked a wiki, installed and configured it, and setup the users. And in the back of our minds I think we were hearing Field of Dreams - “If you build it, they will come…”

Well, office workers certainly don’t hear the call of new technology as strongly as dead baseball fielders hear the call of fresh dirt and chalk in an Iowa cornfield, so we needed to drum up some interest.

I didn’t do anything too earth-shattering - I just talked to everyone in the company. I asked them about their needs (and listened), I explained how the wiki could help them (and whether it would be a significant or insignificant impact to their daily work), and finally, I gave them a mini-tutorial and overview of some basic functions.

There’s tons of information available about how to manage change, implement new technologies, etc. so if you need help or have questions about this process, I’d recommend searching online first. You can also check out my wiki links on del.icio.us. If you have a lot of newbies, start with this.

Who's in charge? Me?

I’ve been studying martial arts for almost ten years now and although I’m sure I have more knowledge and skill now than when I started, in the midst of it all, I tend to forget how far I’ve come and how few have made it this far with me.

It’s easy to become complacent when you can rely on five or ten training partners plus a handful of senior students to help you out. After a few more years and a couple of belt levels, you may look around and discover that you’re now one of the “senior students” and it’s up to you to:

• Take charge and run a class; find your rhythm, set the pace, balance fun with challenge.
  
• Answer questions, large and small; remember, someone took (or will take) the time to answer your questions, too.
  
• Set an example for new and experienced students; inspire them to continue their training, challenge them to (re)dedicate their efforts, show them what they have to look forward to.

It’s an honor and a privilege to have this responsibility and I hope I can serve my classmates well.

(I couldn’t find any “serious” kung fu photos of me. I seemed to be laughing in most of them. Probably a good sign…)

A Business+Geek Success Story: Setting up a wiki for a small business (Part 1)

Summary:

Here’s one example of how a small company selected, implemented, and used a wiki to manage its information.

Background:

Sometimes even a small company has problems communicating with its own people - sales doesn’t talk to engineering, engineering doesn’t talk to marketing, no one talks to customer service - so getting everyone on the same page is no small challenge.

In this case, the company agreed to implement a wiki to capture/organize/manage information from all stakeholders in an effort to encourage development of a product that was functional, usable, and sellable.

The wiki would also be used as a broader corporate intranet, containing general announcements, phone lists, and other miscellaneous office chatter.

Picking a Wiki:

Picking a wiki can be is a daunting task for a few reasons:

• Apparently coding a wiki isn’t a terribly complex process for a reasonably skilled software developer - at it’s core, a wiki is just a database displayed as an editable webpage - so lots of developers can write (and are writing) wiki applications. See the 51 wikis on Wikipedia’s web comparison chart, for example.
  
• With so many wikis out there, how can you separate the wheat from the chaff? Many times the comparison criteria is gibberish to anyone but a hardcore developer and even they are typically biased towards tools they’ve used before. Trying to argue for or against a wiki based on the fact it’s written in PHP/Java/Python/Ruby on Rails/etc. or that the back-end is MySQL/SQL Server/etc. is brain-numbing to me (and ultimately irrelevant for most small wikis, but that’s a different article).
• While most people in your office may be reasonably savvy about using standard office applications; the thought of editing a wiki (which they’ve probably never heard of before) can seem incredibly daunting. So, you’ll also need to balance the technical arguments for a specific wiki (see above) with the more practical arguments about usability.
• Unless you have a wiki-savvy and/or highly technical group, you’ll need to think about support. Not only the “plugging in the boxes and installing the software” questions, but also the basic “how to I add or edit an entry.
• And finally, you’ll face the common/standard/routine “business” objections of cost (some wikis are free, some are not - this is no indicator or guarantee of quality) and security (do you rely on your firewall or a host’s to keep your information safe).

Based on all of these considerations, the company picked MediaWiki. And then the real fun began…

A Business+Geek's perspective on workplace technology: CRM simplification

Unless you happen to be a business owner who’s passionate (and informed) about technology or a technologist who’s passionate (and informed) about business, it’s likely that the technology in your business is not fulfilling it’s promise. Here’s one example of good intentions + faulty execution = flawed results.

Technology

Customer relationship management (CRM) software

Purpose

Tracking sales opportunities from initial lead through closure

Issue

Too many stages (13!) in the sales process makes it more complicated and makes the data collected less accurate.

What I Think

13 stages? Really? With so many steps, I’ve found that users will either:

• ignore most of the stages (using only the ones they consider important or the ones that someone tells them they “have to” use) or
• waste time and energy (that could be directed towards selling efforts, mind you) trying to put the opportunity in the “correct” stage and then keep it there.

Either way, whatever data you were trying to capture originally (and you did have a reason for including all of those steps, didn’t you?) is pretty much worthless. Although you might be able to make a reasonable stab at measuring sales efficiency from start to finish, you can’t measure it between stages or across sales teams. A better alternative, and my suggestion would be to shrink the process to five stages:

1. Identify prospects.
2. Qualify them.
3. Have a meeting (or two).
4. Make a proposal.
5. Close the deal.

Depending on the nature of your business, you might need to add a step or two to handle internal gateways for the process such as deal review and approval, but even six or seven steps can be managed more easily than thirteen. What do you think?

Top 5 Wiki Tips

I created this presentation for a small company planning to implement a wiki to use for their corporate intranet. There are endless tips and tricks for using wikis, especially with the (seemingly endless) proliferation of wikis out there, but these top five tips are universal.

Identify a wiki resource.

• Find the right person for your department to take on the initial wiki content development and maintenance. This resource may also determine what information should go on the wiki.
• It’s always easier to edit / fill out existing content than create it all from scratch.
• Provide additional training / information available to these resources.

Search first, then create.

• Search for existing content before adding a new entry. This helps to prevent duplicate and multiple fragmented entries: “New product A”, “Product A – New”, “Product A”.

Categorize.

• Regardless of the technical method the wiki software uses to group content (tags, categories, etc.), the important point is for you to have a consistent method of organizing.
• Organization makes it easier to find content and can prevent the creation of duplicate content.
• Tagging/categorization is an art and a science, but as a general rule, less is more. Instead of trying to add all possibly relevant tags/categories to an item, pick the most important ones. Remember, the first stop for many users will be the wiki’s search engine, not a browse through categories/tags.

Add comments.

• Keeps track of the history of the page.
• Comments can highlight significant changes without forcing the user/reviewer to perform a side by side version comparison for multiple versions.
• Indicate whether the change was major or minor. Major changes may require a review process; minor changes typically fall into the “wiki-gardening” category and should not require review.

Do a little wiki-gardening each week.

• Cleanup outdated or incomplete information.
• The information is only as good as the community maintaining it.

See the presentation here…