Embracing Change

The Entrepreneurs Cheerleading Section - The 5/15 Report

2011-04-21T14:49:00.001-04:00

I First read about this in Paul Hawken's book, Growing a Business back in 1987 when we started the family bakery. (www.scotianisle.ca) I've been using it ever since. I have found, now that I'm with Britec (www.britec.com) and have people across the country and different time zones that it makes more sense than ever. I encourage you to read this article - (don't consider Cara Lumen the source on this, it was invented or named by Yvon Chouinard, CEO of Patagonia, and described in Growing a Business by Paul Hawken )

Article as written by Cara Lumen and published by ezine

As entrepreneurs we are often our own support staff and certainly are our own cheerleading team. That's one of the reasons I love using a 5:15 report.

The 5:15 report is a powerful tool for both support and acknowledgment. Whether you are facilitating a committee, an office full of people, or focusing on your own individual business, the 5:15 report will help you and the people you are working with to stay on target, shorten meeting times and allow space for everyone to acknowledge what they accomplished, what worked and what they would like to change.

If you are working with others a 5-15 report lets each team member know about what's going on with specific projects, people and processes. It helps to quickly identify what is working, and what is not. It provides a forum for celebrating success, asking for help when needed, smoothing potential pockets of disharmony, and passing along information of interest.

The 5:15 should take no more than 15 minutes to write and 5 minutes to read. The process has three parts:

A simple description of what you did during the week/month. (I do mine weekly).
An honest description of your state of mind and the climate you see around you.
One idea that will improve your job, department, or organization.

I use a table format in which I ask myself the following questions:

5-15 REPORT
for the (time frame, week or month)
For (your name)
Intentions for this week
What I accomplished
What's working?
What could be improved?
How am I feeling? What is the climate of the group?
Good Idea (what one thing will make the biggest improvement in my life, work or the organization?)
What concrete steps will I take to make this happen? By when?
Intentions for the next week. (If this is for a committee, this line could be "Add to the Agenda.")
Today's Date

Sometimes as I complete a task I add it to my 5:15 during the week. On Friday afternoon I take time to complete my 5:15 and acknowledge how much I accomplished during the past week. As I write my intentions for the following week it gives me an opportunity to rethink, reevaluate and refocus my goals and intentions.

Setting an intention moves me forward energetically.

The 5:15 acts as an acknowledgment for what you have accomplished, a reality check about how things are going, and a "do-next" reminder for yourself.
Enjoy.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/80518

Recession busting software strategy

2011-03-15T11:20:00.005-04:00

Business Construction Times
Executive Exchange, March 2010 Edition

- John McDonald

After 18 months of economic recession we’re finally coming out of it, at least, that’s what Ottawa is telling us. Down here on the street, we’re dealing with different business realities. With Government programs home renos boomed while the commercial sector, which is the real fuel behind a recovery, is still lagging. Most Ontarians, and that includes business owners, are suffering “job anxiety”.

Research states that those businesses that came out of the last recession on top cut the right costs and diverted resources into activities that actually created value. They also leveraged their unique IT systems to deliver the information needed to gain insight into their own key value drivers.

What does this mean? Doing nothing is not an option; doing nothing will likely result in becoming a victim instead of a winner.

How do you leverage your unique IT systems? We’re going to recommend that you identify problems you can solve and opportunities for improvement, model these solutions, roll them out and follow up on them to ensure success. We recommend following this four step process to provide you with a greater chance of IT success.

Starting with problem and opportunity identification, perform an investigation to quantify, qualify and prioritize the problems and opportunities in your business. If you are not used to looking at your business this way and need a little help then I suggest that you use the power of the internet to learn how to leverage the techniques for identifying and solving problems, go to www.mindtools.com, or enlist the help of an external consultant.

Once you have identified the problems and opportunities, it is vital that you look at a number of factors for each problem and opportunity. This is one of the most overlooked activities. However, by doing this, you’ll prioritize, and form the basis of a decision matrix providing you with the proof necessary to justify the investment in the next steps. Create a comparison chart that sums up everything you know about each of the problems and opportunities then prioritize them. Do your best to be candid and eliminate the majority of opportunities and problems, leaving you with a small and doable set of improvements.

Problem or opportunity	Cost of solving	Cost of not solving	Return on investment	Overall impact on customers	Overall impact on costs
Problem 1
Opportunity 1

Problem or opportunity Cost of solving Cost of not solving Return on investment Overall impact on customers Overall impact on costs.

Again, if you are unfamiliar with this type of thinking or processing then I recommend that you go back to the Internet. Microsoft has a great webpage that helps you understand ROI analysis. Go to http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA011999671033.aspx.

Prioritization is very important. When IT is assessed there are often too many “priorities”. With many being really low on the priority scale and having little overall impact of the project. Using a guiding statement for each of the opportunities can help you set priorities. For example, “we promise to deliver our products next morning by 10:00.” Fedex, banks, and large corporations organize all of their thinking and all of their business processes around these simple statements. My most successful projects have been working with clients that think this way. Once again, go to the internet for some great advice on assessing impact at www.processimpact.com/articles/prioritizing.html

Decide how you are going to measure the success of your improvements. Deciding how you are going to measure the future success of your improvements will determine the success of your initiatives.

Decide what you are going to measure and how to measure it and you will soon find out whether you have made an effect on your people, customers and business. There are great resources for this type of learning on the Internet. I especially appreciate the insights available from New Economics. Go to this website http://www.proveandimprove.org/new/meaim/index.php to find out why.

Ok, you’ve identified problems and opportunities, evaluated them, prioritized them and figured out how you are going measure them. Now, you’ve got to model them.

Work with your team, documents and processes and work them through the solution. Do this with a 360° review for each solution, running through each document and reviewing results of all areas of the business: sales, finance, operations, HR, and executive suites. When you do this, you’ll be able to test your measurements, and you’ll be able to test the impact of your solution. Model it until it works, get agreement from others involved the processes, and use the documentation developed during this process to train your team.

Roll out the solution only when the entire process has passed your tests. The risk to the overall solution, when any part is not completed, is high. For example, if the sales aspect of a new system is not completely mapped it could cause a break down in the sales cycle. Operationally, a failure could mean an abandonment of new processes in favour of those used previously. Customer wise, the touted benefit of the solution may not be perceived by all parties. Invisibility to the Executive suite will create chaos with cross orders. Get the picture? Don’t roll out until it’s all modeled, documented, agreed to and tested.

Rollout your solution only after you have completed your documentation and identified your key performance metrics. Here are some tips that will help you succeed:

Include the executive team and their reports
Train everyone at once. This is going to get everyone thinking like a team and will demonstrate to them the critical nature of their part of the whole data puzzle.
Make sure that you have bail out plans along the way. You don’t want to get to the point of no return too early. If you need to bail because the system isn’t going to work, or the team is not ready, then you need to plan for that.
Finally, you need to follow through. Using your Key Performance Metrics and other measurements, ensure that the plan is working. Tweak and tune the system over the first 90 days to get the best results.

2010 IT Trends

2010-09-08T11:59:00.000-04:00

Business Construction Times - 2010 Trends
-- John McDonald
There is a new paradigm for the construction industry and the old ways of doing things are giving way to the most efficient and effective methods available.

Construction, which employs millions of Canadians and Americans, is the least efficient major industry in the economy as a whole. Every other industry has gotten more productive in the past half century – by about 22 percent on average. Construction has seen productivity fall by 25 percent. It's hard to believe that up to 50% of a construction workers time is spent idle.

Why? Because construction projects are complex and the bar for managing projects is set low. To compete, to survive we need to change it up; we need more efficiency. Here are some IT specific concepts that can help in gaining efficiency.

Building Information Modeling (BIM)BIM's been around for awhile and the technology standards are being adopted into CAD software, estimating software, etc... It takes quite a bit more work up front to develop these type of pre-construction type documents but the value to the entire process is definitely there. Clients buy into BIM as it allows them to break the cycle of busted budgets that are all too common in construction industry. What the heck is BIM anyway? Here's is how one of the leading experts in BIM standards describes it:

"BIM is the virtual representation of the physical and functional characteristics of a facility from inception onward. As such, it serves as a shared information repository for collaboration throughout a facilities life cycle." - Patrick Suermann, PE. NBIMS Testing Team Leader

In 2010 you will need to consider how your organization is going to work with BIM. Using BIM in planning, design, construction, operations, and maintenance will set you apart from the competition and it'll get you more efficient. Look for BIM solutions that leverage Cloud Computing's SaaS to drive the costs down, and encourage Collaboration/Convergence. This is truly forward thinking technology. Take a look at the BIMWiki @ http://bimwiki.com/ and learn more about BIM.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is about delivering hosted services over the Internet. In most businesses there are only two types of Cloud Computing to think about: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). The word cloud is used because a cloud has become the flow charting symbol that represents the Internet. Business is moving towards the cloud as software and infrastructure become commodities that can be purchased by the hour with little or no consideration for hard disk space. The big benefits are:

the only requirement of a consumer of Cloud Computing services is that they have a PC and an Internet connection
services can be accessed anywhere with a laptop and an Internet connection
the cost of internal IT departments are driven down
software deployment becomes significantly easier

There are many references to Cloud Computing on the Internet but it still seems like a fuzzy subject and very technical. Your best bet is to talk to your trusted advisors about Cloud Computing. On a case by case bases, it makes sense for some computing and for others not.

Virtualization

This has become wildly popular in the past couple of years and it's likely that you will encounter this with your next server purchase, providing you don't get into cloud computing. Now, there is a difference between Cloud computing and Virtualization; with Virtualization you actually physically possess and host your own servers. Traditionally you may have had a multiple server environment.

A primary domain controller, database server, email server, BlackBerry server, etc... you get the picture. Your next server should likely be a single Virtual Server. Inside of this single server you will still have a primary domain controller, database server, email server, BlackBerry server, etc... but you are going to be using less energy, spending less time, and less money.

Overall Virtual Server technology only has one flaw for a small business person; everything is on one machine and if it fails you’re going to be stopped dead in your tracks. However, as long as you have your systems backed up and protected with UPS you should experience years of trouble free service.

Go virtual in 2010 but buy big server hardware. Intel has a Virtual Server that is cost effective and incredibly powerful. It provides the same amount of computing power as 16 servers and it's all in one box.

This is a ripe market and most IT professionals are installing and maintaining Virtual Machines right now. You can make the short hop to virtualization at a pretty low entrance cost and get a lot of value very fast.

Convergence

This is all about helping all of your applications talk to each other, the Universal Translator. The first type of convergence is internal. Using your vendors, programmers and IT staff you can implement convergent solutions and create bridges between phones, CRM systems, Accounting, Project Management, WebPortals; getting them all working together to create an efficient business environment. The second type of convergence is external. Here we start working with our suppliers, partners and customers to build a single transparent network where all are involved.

Convergence can be a big ticket item. Some systems tote a complete system however; what you will find that a best of breed approach will likely fit your business needs better. You'll need to have a pretty sharp consultant on your side that can do software programming. They will help you select the right software and then build the bridges between your applications.

LEED Credit Tracking

In 2010 you may find that becoming a LEED certified organization will drive you ahead of your competitors. Just as LEED certification has grown in popularity; so too has the need to track the detailed documentation requirements related to earning LEED credits. At their core, projects seeking LEED certification need document control and efficient communication. This is the key functionality that project management software (e.g. EADOC, Procore, e-Builder) offers.

Consequently, Software Advice (http://www.softwareadvice.com/) has noticed an increase in adoption of software for LEED projects. Additionally, a number of software companies are now building specific LEED credit tracking modules right into their systems. Here in Canada you can get more information on LEED Certification from The Canadian Green Building Council.

http://www.cagbc.org/leed/what/index.php

Sources:

Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets, Barry LePatner

BIMWiki.com

thwink.com

softwareadvice.com

cagbc.org

Murray Shaw Roofing Achieve Success with Business Software

2009-11-15T11:03:00.003-05:00

Business Construction Times
Executive Exchange, November 2009 Edition

- John McDonald

In 2005 Murray Shaw Roofing transitioned their business model from a single service roofing company to a multi-service home improvement company. To make this goal a reality, President Murray Shaw personally headed up the project. He decided to use Customer Relationship Management software and accounting software to track high volumes of sales activities, installations, warranty issues and business activities like invoicing, credits, etc...

Shaw determined up-front that their CRM software needed to be web based, customizable, compatible with accounting, eliminate duplication and allow multi-user remote access. He wanted a complete history of every client touch, from sales, customer service, and deliver team coordination. The accounting system needed to be flexible enough for multiple companies while performing consolidations, divisional accounting and audit trail documentation.

Dated ‘off-the-shelf’ sales automation systems like GoldMine and ACT! Were non-starters and QuickBooks and Business Visions didn’t make the grade. Their final choice was Sage ERP Accpac with Sage CRM. It met all the requirements and provided features they hadn’t even though possible:

Customizable
Fully integrated with accounting
Web based
Lead management
Client management
Service management
MS Outlook integration

“Over a period of one year we just used the Sage CRM Calendar as we got used to the product during our busy season,” says Shaw. “We then customized it to fully address our needs. Today it’s the key to our business’s success and we can’t operate without it. We re-evaluate our software package every six months and tweak the system for continuous improvement.”

With Sage ERP Accpac and Sage CRM Shaw can evaluate staff performance, encourage the development of company information, and reward staff for the right kind of behaviour. This alone has resulted in constant improvement, less staff, more work per person and more deals.

CRM software may also be used for promotion, and surveys such as those polling customer satisfaction. “Our business is all about happy customers,” says Shaw, “and now we can more accurately measure customer happiness.”