Hey look at how awesome we are! WEEEEEEEEHHHH!!!!!

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We are pleased to announce that RDM Communications is becoming part of Onward Communications. While the effects and the transition will play out over the next few weeks, we wanted to take this opportunity to say thanks for being part of the RDM Communications story for the last few years. Our commitment has always been to find the best possible solution for the lowest price and deliver stellar, outstanding support to our customers. As we transition to be part of the Onward Communications family, this commitment will not only continue, but flourish.

Onward Communications is a network consulting solutions company and has been around for 20 years. Given their history and track record, we will be able to bring even more expertise, solutions and support infrastructure as you consider how to leverage RDM Communications to solve all of your business communications and technology challenges.

We are honored to be serving you and look forward to serving you in the future to come. For now, everything will be operating as usual – although you may see some name and logo changes.

If you have any questions, please do no hesitate to contact us at 1.877.629.3373.

The post RDM Communications is Partnering with Onward Communications appeared first on RDM Communications Blog.

While building a company and building a skyscraper seem dissimilar at first glance, there are some undercurrents that they share. Architecture is an appropriate design philosophy for managers because the two disciplines face the same problems: uncertainty and complexity. Fortunately, you don’t need to take a class in architecture to apply the engineering principles in your organization.

As the title of the post implies, the core task of well-design organizations and processes is to reduce friction between competing environmental forces that occur around the thing you are building. These “points of friction” aren’t objectively bad, but they do help you know why some unclear things happen in your company.

The process for rooting out and resolving friction points is surprisingly easy and straight-forward. In fact, most of us probably do it intuitively. Ryan Singer, Designer at 37Signals, provides a great step by step process on identifying the forces that affect what you are building (a web page, a product, a service, a team, or even a large company) and resolving them with elegant solutions. Check out the video below and let us know in the comment how you can apply Design Thinking into your organization.

Ryan Singer, “Designing with Forces: How to Apply Christopher Alexander in Everyday Work ” from MFA Interaction Design on Vimeo.

The post Design for Managers: Reducing Organizational Friction appeared first on RDM Communications Blog.

First, let’s begin with a working definition of productivity. The best way to think about productivity is that it is simply a relationship between outputs and activities. For example, if it takes one of your sales people 4 phone calls (an activity) to get one sale (an output), you have a productivity ration of 1:4 (one output for four activities).

In order to increase productivity we can do two things:

1. Do it faster – This is usually the first obvious answer to the question of how one increases productivity. Unfortunately, it doesn’t change the overal relationship between activity and output. It just creates more of both.
2. Change the nature of the work – In order to have real breakthroughs in productivity you must be looking at WHAT you do, not just how fast you do it.

In order to accomplish #2 above, you must be engaged in work simplification. Not only once but proactively and regularly. Fortunately work simplification is very.. well.. simple. Below we outline some steps for improving your output to activity ratio:

1. Create workflow of the process as it exists.
2. Count the number of steps in the flow chart.
3. Set a rough target for reduction in steps.
4. Reduction = asking why each step is performed.
5. If it is unnecessary, drop it.
6. If it necessary but cumbersome, automate with technology.

Teams and organizations that go through these steps on their processes find in increase of 30-50% in productivity in just the first round.

If you need help looking at your communications productivity or would like to explore the use of coud storage and computing to automate some tasks, please contact us today for a free, no-obligation consultation.

The post How Get a 30-50% Increase in Productivity appeared first on RDM Communications Blog.

If you’re like us, you spent the holidays taking stock of your 2012 year, making some adjustments and looking forward to a renewed and refreshed business strategy for 2013. While it’s important to focus on enhancing your business’s core competencies and shifting away from strategies that didn’t bear fruit. Inevitably, there will be unforeseen problems in the year to come and attempting to predict every possible outcome is not a good use of your time as a manager.

However, you can set the environmental conditions that enable your company to be continuously adapting and learning. Executives at Etsy have been very intentional about cultivating these conditions into an ethos they call a “Just Culture”. Ensure a Just Culture (“just” as in “justice”), to them is predicated in large measure on conducting a Blameless Post Mortem when things diagnosing critical problems and mistakes. Here is why they believe a blameless post mortem matters when it comes to organizational learning:

“This cycle of name/blame/shame can be looked at like this:

1. Employee takes action and contributes to a failure or incident.
2. Employee is punished, shamed, blamed, or retrained.
3. Reduced trust between employees on the ground (the “sharp end”) and management (the “blunt end”) looking for someone to scapegoat
4. Employees become silent on details about actions/situations/observations, resulting in “Cover-Your-Ass” engineering (from fear of punishment)
5. Management becomes less aware and informed on how work is being performed day to day, and employees become less educated on lurking or latent conditions for failure due to silence mentioned in #4, above
6. Errors more likely, latent conditions can’t be identified due to #5, above
7. Repeat from step 1“

So how do we avoid this cycle from poisoning our companies? Here’s the main 3 pillars:

1. Incentivize your people to surface “bad news” - If your people know that you *genuinely* feel that surfacing bad news is in the best interest of the company, then they are likely to not only identify problems but also provide solutions.
2. Conduct a thorough root-cause analysis - Mistakes happen, failure occurs when companies keep making the same mistakes over and over. When your employees come to you with bad news, ensure that it is well documented for others in the organization to understand so that they don’t make the mistake.
3. Make the “problem-maker” a “solution-champion” - Just because it’s called a “Blameless Post Mortem” doesn’t mean that the person responsible is off the hook. Once they have thoroughyl documented the problem and the solution, place that person in charge of making sure that problem doesn’t happen in other teams. Empower them to roll out the solution to all areas of the organization and make sure the other employees and managers “get it”.

We’ll never be able to predict every single problem. In fact, most problems don’t look like problems when they are happening. It’s only after-the-fact that we realize that something is “wrong”. It is at this crucial moment that your decisions as a leader will affect the rest of the culture of your company. Adopting these lightweight frameworks, is a big first step in creating a rock solid culture and enabling breakthrough performance in 2013.

The post The Most Important Business Strategy of 2013 appeared first on RDM Communications Blog.

Given the high business failure rate, we must wonder what lies at the core of entrepreneurial activity. Entrepreneurs in all industries have no small task in front of them: they face resource scarcity and absolute uncertainty about how the market will respond to their idea. So while the failure rate is understandable, is it acceptable? Is there anything that can be done to help the process of getting an idea off the ground?

There is a school of thought that all entrepreneurs (yes, all of them) share a common process in attempting to validate their ideas. Though this conversation has been happening in the halls of academia and research labs for decades, it has recently been popularized by Eric Ries. Ries, who uses the term “Lean Startup”, advocates that all entrepreneurs share a common process in discovering whether the market values their product or service – and thus, they could benefit from a shared methodology for validating ideas.

Lean Startup methodologies promote a few simple practices to help entrepreneurs increase success for good ideas, or kill off a bad idea before committed too many resources to it. Overall, it encourages managers to formulate their thinking as testable “business hypotheses” and promotes the use of cheap, iterative experiments to find real customer demand and product-market fit.

Here is a video of Ries, speaking at Stanford Business School, making the case for entrepreneurship as management science. (Begin at 3:17)

So if entrepreneurship is really just management science? What are managers supposed to managing and testing? Find out here.

The post Entrepreneurship is Management Science appeared first on RDM Communications Blog.

We are proud to announce that we are now offering industry-leading Conferencing Products. To celebrate this addition to our product line, we are offering cash-back to customers who use RDM Communications to design custom-tailored conferencing solutions for their businesses. Read on to find out how we are giving you cash to save money for your business!

TeleConferencing: Driving 21st Century Business Communication

Conferencing solutions are emerging from an exciting set of technologies to bring businesses together. We are proud to be offering the following conferencing products in the following categories:

• Video - Need to have an authentic virtual meeting with a prospective client? Video conferencing brings you the best of in-person meetings without the travel costs.
• Audio - Launching a critical new initiative and you need to communicate with all of your stakeholders at once? Audio conferencing allows you to have clear, crisp dialogues with all your key people, regardless of where they are.
• Web - Troubleshooting a technical issue with an employee who is out in the field? Web conferencing allows to share desktops and collaborate in real time over the internet.

Designing the Perfect Solution for Your Business: A Money-Saving Assessment

As with all of our solutions, our Conferencing products are designed with the customer in mind. Whether you need top of the line communications technology or something to fit your budget, we make sure that our solutions fit within your existing workflows and begin producing results immediately. To accomplish this, we offer a no-cost audit of your businesses communication needs and find the solution that best fits you. With access to all the best conferencing providers, you can rest easy knowing you’ve locked in the best possible solution for your business.

November Cash Back Promotion Code

In addition to all the money-saving benefits of using conferencing and a no-cost audit to find the best solution for you, we are offering $100 cash back for customers that secure conferencing contracts through RDM Communications.

Here’s how the promotion works:

1. Call RDM Communications at (877) 629-3373 for a money-saving assessment of your business.
2. Make sure to mention the following promotion code: RDMCONF
3. Secure a contract for state-of-the-art conferencing technology (minimum $200/mo).
4. Let us know where to send you the $100!

That’s it! Call today to show you how we can save you money for your business with best-in-class conferencing technology AND give you $100 cash in the process. This promotion is only available for the months of November/December (2012) so call us today: (877) 629-3373.

The post Cash Back for New Conferencing Products appeared first on RDM Communications Blog.

You may have heard about data-driven management. A management principle advocated by large consulting firms such as McKinsey & Co and Bain Consulting, data-driven management takes a no-nonsense approach to guiding the direction of enterprises. Data-driven management requires 3 simple steps in order to start making an immediate impact on the business direction and bottom line: collecting and measuring data, selecting the right metrics and understanding the relationship between your metrics. Doing so will enable you to find the dials that make your business work and turn them at will.

So without further ado, let’s get into the three steps you need to take to become a data driven manager:

1. Collecting and Measuring Data – In this modern economy there is more raw data available than we humans no what to do with. The important things to pay attention about at this stage is to ensure that the data has integrity. By integrity, we mean that you want to make sure it reflects the real world when you go to create your metrics in the next step. There are plenty of great tools that can capture and report data on nearly everything that happens in your company, you want to make sure that it is the right data. But how do you know what is the “right” data? How do you know you are collecting and measuring the right things? We’ll answer that right now.
2. Selecting the right metrics – At some level of abstraction, every business needs to worry about the same two metrics: cash inflows and cash outflows. Managers, however, should primarily focus on cash flows from operating activities. This means any category of data – or calculation of two or more data categories – that contributes to revenue, variable costs and fixed costs should put at the priority list.
3. Understand the relationships between metrics - Metrics should never be evaluated within a vacuum. Businesses are complex organisms and should be looking keeping a keen eye on how changing just one metric up or down (like turning a dial) affects the others. This will make sure that your decisions don’t create an unbalanced organization and gravely affect the course of the enterprise.

It may seem overwhelming at first, but then the mind begins to see patterns and relationships. In no time, you’ll be a principled, data-driven manager. To explore how you can take the first steps in measuring and collecting data to build your metrics, contact us to discover the many ways our cloud-based systems can benefit you.

The post Managing your Business: Inputs and Outputs appeared first on RDM Communications Blog.

Ensuring that you are well positioned to address the needs of the market, your customers, is a key element of business that your company to should continuously focusing on. Like it or not, technology is accelerating the continuous shift of customer preferences and expectations – even if you aren’t in a technology-based industry.

With the fast paced nature of today’s business world, how can you make sure that your team is aligned with the market? Thankfully, there are some basic fundamentals that can be easily implemented to ensure that you are always staying current with your customers’ demands.

List your assumptions - The best startups from Silicon Valley often list their biggest assumptions about the market to ensure that everyone is one the same page. These assumptions can be about the size of the market, potential customer segments, the nature of the problem that they are solving for these customers and how they can best reach them. It is important to get your team together regularly for straight-forward dialogues to surface and discuss the assumptions that your company as a whole holds about the customers you are serving.

Test your assumptions - Once you have listed your assumptions it is important to test them with real customers. While the tests do not have to be applied to the entire customer base of your company, take a statistically significant sample (usually 30 or more) and begin to verify whether or not your assumptions are tractable. The point is to find areas of adjustment in product offering or business processes to better serve your customers and keep an edge over your competition.

Create cheap experiments - Remember the scientific method from grade school? Your tests above should be following that outline to ensure an assumption can be verified as true or false. The point of testing assumptions with real customers is to create feedback loops about how the market behaves. Specifically, how it reacts to your brand and the solutions that you offer.

As mentioned before, the market is always shifting and if a company gets stuck in its ways for too long, it may find itself losing ground to new competitors. We recommend that you work with your team to engage in these types of activities regularly (monthly) to ensure that your “normal” business processes are actually making an impact for your bottom line.

The post What Startups Know That Managers Don’t appeared first on RDM Communications Blog.

Cloud computing is a popular alternative to owning and self-managing servers that support your business’s computer network. While there are many benefits to having your data stored in the cloud, there are a number of things to consider when comparing different options.

The great thing about cloud computing is that there are so many different features that can be combined that the options are endless. But knowing how to weigh the benefits against each other requires that you take a look at your own business. Below we’ve outlined a number of questions that we’ve asked clients in the past so that we can better understand what type of cloud solution will work best for them.

Price - Obviously, you want to make sure that moving to the cloud is going to be a cost-saver. The most important thing to remember is to compare total costs of your current data strategy versus being on the cloud. While cloud solutions providers simply charge you a monthly fee, calculating your self-managed costs are a little more involved. When tallying the final costs, make sure that you include hardware, software, and administrative IT salaries. These are things that you will not have to pay for when you move to the cloud because it is built into your monthly fee by the cloud provider.

Service - How are problems resolved? Is data transfer assistance provided? What are the responsibilities and Terms of Service? In the normal course of business, there will always be hiccups. Thankfully you don’t have to own them but you will have to work with a customer service representative. On this one, do your homework. Check forums and blogs for reviews of the service. Additionally, look at the how they handle customer inquiries and problems on their social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter.

Features - As we mentioned before there are a plethora of different combinations and applications that can be employed in conjunction with getting your cloud service. The best starting place is to look at how your company currently interacts with its business applications. Make a list of known pain points and areas of opportunity to improve workflows and efficiency. Look to see if you can resolve some of those problems with new features/feature combinations from your cloud provider.

Security - Security is on the top of everyone’s mind today. Especially if you must keep secure records of your customers’ information, ensuring that your data is safe is a big consideration to make. While the physical storage of your data is often held under close lock and key by the cloud providers, the real concern lies in the transfer of data from servers to your computer. Ensure that the data transfer is encrypted and that your internet configuration is also built around a secure connection.

Cloud technology and data storage are a very viable option compared to self-managed servers for running your business’s computer systems and application. However, there are a number of preliminary questions to consider before signing up for a cloud service solution.

If you would like to explore how cloud services could benefit your company, give us a call at 1.877.629.3373.

The post 4 Things to Consider When Moving Your Business to the Cloud appeared first on RDM Communications Blog.