When the operations runs, when the salesmen start going out, when the server hangs, when the Internet drops, when agents don’t show up, when money doesn’t come in on time, when new business just refuses to show its face, that is EXACTLY when you DON’T have time to plan. That is the time when you can not afford to be stepping on other people’s toes. When Murphy shows up, that is the time to act. That is the time when different people in the team play their part! They play the part they are supposed to play.

It is very easy to get into a situation where everyone on the team is contributing without them knowing what they are contributing towards. One must define the roles as soon as possible.

In crises, even when the captain of the ship calls out ‘all hands on deck’, the hands know EXACTLY why they are being called. I am sure you will see the analogy.

Imagine a General telling his group of soldiers, “I do not know who will lead you, who will act as a correspondent, who will command the gunners, the ordinance etc. We will only decide that when we start the operation. The one who dies the last can call himself the leader.” 

take-away story: There was a company that set a record for building a house (an American, wood-heavy house). They built the house in 11 hours flat, starting with the foundations ending with the ring on the front door. It had a front lawn, porch and all other features one expects in a well finished house. Normally, a house would take a few months. This company did it in less than 11 hours. What people may find more amusing is that it took them about 10 months of planning to get there.

Make sure you have the essentials listed down with job requirements as clearly jotted out as possible. 

There are a lot of IT tools that can help you along the way:

Basecamp by 37 Signals is the most famous project management tool out there.

I prefer to use a combination of Google Docs, Spreadsheets and email. It works for me. Again, always remember, the job of IT is to assist you, not teach you. No?

Only after a few days later, when the bidding time was over, I found out that I have sent just the ‘covering letter’ email without the attachment! The document was lying pretty on my desktop alright, but I had forgotten to attach it to the email that I had so carefully crafted. So I would understand the importance of this nifty little Gmail feature.

Click for larger image

The Forgotten Attachment Detector

The name of the feature is quite evident. And I don’t know about you, but any email that has an attachment, I have the word ‘attachment’ or ‘attached’ somewhere in that email. Gmail detects this and if there is no attachment, warns you of the same. I found this feature a month or so late but I am sure, it will be warning me of my mistake in the not-so-distant future.

How to Activate: This feature can be activated - for Gmail and Google Apps Gmail both - by clicking on Settings (top right corner of your Gmail window), then clicking on Labs. This feature is listed there.

How many times have you guys forgotten to attach documents in the email that is supposed to ‘bring the attachment’ ? This feature in Gmail is part of the whole Google experience where things get done with simplicity. (take a look at Gmail’s new features where you can treat emails as tasks and track accordingly, all right from your Gmail interface!)

But let’s start with the why!

Why outsource?

That should not even be a question. If you think you do not outsource, you are wrong, that is how common it is. Every time you buy any business service from anyone (a signboard to display ads, an ad agency to make your commercial, an import agent to get that container off the docks), you are essentially ‘outsourcing’ one part of your business process. Is that business process essential to your business? Yes of course. But it is not core! That is not why you are in business. If you sell shoes, for example, your core business is selling shoes, period. Everything else can and should be outsourced. Two reasons that should be enough justification to consider outsourcing everything except your core business:

1. lower costs
2. more focus on core business

Core business is the reason you are in business. It is the answer to the questions, “why am I in business?” A shoe seller is in business to sell shoes. Core business should be said as simply and in as few a words as possible - this helps in staying focused. No fancy visionary statements or mission objective or bouquets like that, not when we are talking core. And just so that we are clear, focusing on your core business does not neccessarily mean that you do it yourself, but it is what makes your business yours.

So where do we look to outsource your business processes?

The only place you’ll ever need is: Elance

Elance (http://elance.com/) is not only the biggest network of ‘people for hire’, they are also one of the most comprehensive. Given that they have over 130,000 professionals (including companies) listed with reviews, spread over eight categories including Web design, Admin Support, Legal, Sales & Marketing, you have to try to come up with processes that can’t be outsourced to some budding professional (or a team of professionals) over at Elance.  You want anything done, chances are very high that you will find someone competent to do it for you. And that is the beauty of it - competence is one thing that Elance helps you measure with great effect.

Selecting competent people for the job

Their ratings and reviews feature is one thing that you should pay close attention to while ’shopping’ for professionals.  After you have posted your project on Elance, pay attention the reviews and feedback of the  companies/indviduals who have placed bids on your project.

click for larger image

You should not only look at the the proposal submitted by the bidder but for highly critical project, try to find a bidder with an average feedback of 90% (there are bidders with more than 100% feedback based on 100’s of projects). Not only that, you should click on the feedback to go to a detailed version of the reviews. Many a times, a lot of the ‘little things’ are said in a review that may help you better decide on a prospective vendor.

If you have never used the Internet for outsourcing your work requirements, we’d say that it is high time that you do! Trillions of dollars worth of business is done on the Internet each year. Elance alone has helped people earn more than 130 Million Dollars since 2005! There are a lot of competent people on Elance, just waiting to just make your day!

Just to get an idea on the number of things you can outsource at Elance, read 100 Projects you can Elance at the Elance blog.

Put the two together and you have yourself a business phone running the top business applications to

• improve your productivity
• live a more mobile lifestyle (that work-from-anywhere thing)
• just be cool

I have a gripe or two with Blackberry. As an owner of a Blackberry 8800, I have long been frustrated with the absense of basic functionalities that are present in practically all other phones (like adding a recently recieved unknown phone number to an existing address - in RIM’s Blackberry, you have to follow a large number of steps to acheive this feat and it always gets to me!). BlackBerry does email the best when it comes to phones, where as Google does email the best when it comes to, well, when it comes to email itself.

Putting the two together

Using Google Sync, you can easily sync not only your emails (like I do with my Google Apps Gmail coming and going from my BlackBerry) but now you can keep your Google Calendar up-to-date right from BlackBerry.

From the Official Gmail blog:

Google Sync for BlackBerry synchronizes your device’s native calendar with Google. You can access your Google Calendar even when you don’t have network coverage and get alerts for upcoming appointments with sound or vibration. It automatically runs in the background, so you can attend to other tasks and still be reminded of your appointments.

(LINK to full post)

It is purely amazing how technology has come so far in so short a time frame, and with companies like BlackBerry and Google leading the way, there is hope for more integration and less proprietory mismatch to get in the way of a happy consumer and an ever happier bottom line.

Do you use a BlackBerry? Facing any ‘frustrations’ lately? What about Google on BlackBerry, is that working out for you in terms of increasing productivity or is it just making you look cool?

First, the email I got:

edited screenshot of the email I got

Upon following the link, I get the following:

Click for larger view

Clicking on Save File woke up AVG. Thankfully enough!

Click image for larger view

Scams like these are not as common as you’d think and they hit when you of course, do not expect anything! Look out for suspicious web addresses (this one had an IP address for a web address - that should be reason enough to be highly suspicious), and if anything does not look right, it probably is not (The video site was/is called YuoTube!!). For more details on what this virus does and a brief history, check this out.

The take away

• Whenever you end up leaving ‘any’ website that is trusted by you and others (Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Youtube etc), that website, first of all, should warn and remind you that now you are in ‘alien territory’. You, for your part, should be careful in visiting these alien sites; without virus protection, you don’t even have to click anything to get infected.
• I really do not know how many worms and viri are residing in your computer, but if you do not have an anti virus software, you are way, way behind the game, friend. Download the FREE AVG software to save yourself against the most common threats.

Happy browsing and stay safe

Forget the fact that Google Apps will improve your business productivity.

Forget that it is by Google. Forget that Google themselves use Google Apps (that includes Google Documents, Presentations and Slideshows - also online forms etc) to run themselves.

Forget that Google Apps standard edition is essentially free (no usage cost, no license fees, no nothing!).

Forget that you can easily ’slide’ into using Google Apps from your more traditional application services such as email, document creation, spreadsheets and presentation. You can and rather should slowly integrate your current apps while moving to Google Apps e.g. start by using Google Apps Gmail instead of you Express, shift your email accounts from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps in batches. Then you can warm up the company employees into using Google Docs to put together manuals or memos or anything that you use Microsoft Word for. Then you can move onto making Google presentations, putting them online, presenting using Google templates etc. You do not use Google Apps as a one-time, use-all package, it is a highly modular system that you can adapt at your own speed and choosing. You would consider all of this if you manage or work in a company of say 100 or more people that use email, MS Word or Powerpoint on a regular enough basis to get ‘used to it’. If not, you are losing out on a lot of savings by using ‘anything’ other than Google Apps. But like I said, forget that!

You can consider the stability that Google Apps offer. Let the graphs do that talking here.

Google used to offer 99.9 uptime guarantee for Gmail to its Premier members (which comes at a cost). Now, Google is offering the same SLA (Service Level Agreement) to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk.

Also, from Google’s enterprise blog:

…results suggest Gmail is twice as reliable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more reliable than a Microsoft Exchange-based solution that companies must maintain themselves. And higher reliability translates to higher employee productivity. Gmail’s reliability jumps to more than four times as reliable as a GroupWise solution and 10 times more reliable than an Exchange-based solution if you factor in the planned outages inherent in on-premises messaging platforms. But this isn’t the only way Google Apps helps businesses do more with their resources. Compared to the costs of Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus or Novell GroupWise — including software licensing, server expenses and the labor associated with deploying, maintaining and upgrading them on a regular basis — Google Apps leaves companies with much more time and money to focus on their real business.

Read complete post/announcement here

Now it is the same with blogging. Companies in Pakistan are not blogging. Why blog? Or more relevant, what the hell is blogging anyways? These questions are not new to me, of course. I have heard these types of questions regarding simple websites. History, as usual, is repeating itself. There will always be people who are far sighted and those who have a vision.

If you are reading this and your company does not have a website, you should have one. If your company’s website does not have a blog, you should get one. For more reasons than one, a lot more.

Ask Treetech.com.pk and we will provide you a handy little e-book on why you should have a blog on your company’s website.

God bless & good luck.

It is getting easier for businesses to put up ads, that is for sure. Geographically set ads appear on Facebook, localized ads now appear at places where ads are served by Google Adwords, for example. A sufficently localized advertising experience by all means. This is excellent for companies that are relevant only to the Pakistani market; companies like Telenor, Mobilink etc.

But here is the hard part. Once you click on the ad, what happens?

A disappointment, that is what happens.

There is no concept of any landing page at all! Some companies, believe it or not, do not have a website, yet they are advertising online; you click on the link and it goes to the eternal ‘website coming soon’ page.

That is just laziness. I have discussed olpers on numerous occasions on this very blog before that how they are not using the Internet properly. They now do have a website (I think) but the problem remains; olpers is still not using the Internet to its advantage; Last time I checked (about two months ago), the website was still celebrating Ramdhaan from years ago. Companies like these are better off without a website for obvious reasons. Putting up an ad all across the Internet may be a simple act of letting the ad companies go on a rampage with your credit card, but handling a successful marketing campaign online is as old fashioned as my laptop.

Better believe that.

Ask yourself: what did you in the last one week to market distribute your website? It sounds circular to market the marketing material itself. But we do it for every other medium. Have you done that for your website?

P.S. Taking the brochure analogy further (hopefully not way too further) is that distributing this remarkable medium of advertising is the last mile. There are a lot miles before that. The creative content that goes into the brochure, the layout, the design are all essentials and require the most amount of creative talent.