Blog - Page 103 of 121

A Good Cause. A Great Family. The Chicago Polar Bear Plunge.

The Chicago, IL Lakeview Polar Bear Club has chosen to support two great causes for the 2013 Polar Bear Plunge.

One of the two is my best friend Peter Quinn and his family. Here’s info from their website.

“Peter Quinn loved to run – including the Chicago Marathon in 2010. But on April 16th, 2011 Peter was out running when he started to cross the street. A speeding van ran a red light and struck Peter. He flew 30′ from the impact and suffered many injuries, such as: broken ribs, a collapsed lung, broken tibia and a major spinal cord injury. Peter spent 1 month in the hospital and was given a 2% chance to walk again.During the hospital say Peter had surgery to insert titanium rods in his spine and he underwent 3 surgeries on his lungs. He was then moved to rehab for 2.5 months before finally being healthy enough to move home. Since the accident, Peter’s life has been all about family, friends and rehabilitation. Peter rehabs 6 hours/day, 4 days per week. Another five days each week he travels to Rockford, IL for hyperbaric chamber treatments. Peter’s family and friends have sacrificed a lot of time, money and energy to ensure that Peter gets to all of his appointments so he reaches the ultimate goal – walking again.

The rehabilitation work is definitely hard, but the benefits are starting to show. After 9 months Peter was taking steps with the help of orthotics. Each day has victories and setbacks, but all of the physical therapy that he has completed, Peter is slowly making progress towards walking on his own.

Peter remains a strong individual and is not defined by this accident, as he is also a husband (wife is Rita) and a father of three beautiful children: Katherine (age 12), Henry (9), and Andrew (6). The family has additional responsibilities and expenses as the youngest child, Andrew, is autistic. His condition requires special care and the family is doing everything necessary to ensure that Andrew lives a normal and well-adjusted childhood. This is a wonderful family that has been dealt a serious and life altering change. With your donations, the LPBC is able to provide Peter with the necessary therapy sessions to have him walking & playing with this children in the near future. For videos of Peter’s progress, check out the website: http://petersplace2011.blogspot.com/”

If you want to help, you can support the Lakeview Polar Bear plunge or donate directly at Peter’s Place.

Post #3 in The Series: IT Cost and Performance

Dr. George Westerman of MIT writes:

Business says: “IT costs too much; we’re not getting the service we’re paying for.”

IT says: “Given our budget constraints, we’re doing really well.”

Who is right and who is wrong? Without a clear understanding of IT performance, there’s no way to know.

Here’s an example: The IT unit in a multibillion-dollar auto retail firm was considered “fat and happy” by those outside of IT. Was it too expensive? Perhaps. But happy? Not at all. IT people were trying to do a good job, but all they heard were complaints about costs and failures.

The first step in fixing the situation was to understand exactly what IT costs and performance really were, not just what they seemed to be. IT leaders started tracking downtime and problem-resolution time, as well as project and budget performance. They made the information available in ways that everyone could understand.

The informed verdict: IT wasn’t as good as the IT people thought and it wasn’t as bad as the business side thought. Most important, everyone now knew exactly where things stood and what needed to be done. Over the next few years, IT costs dropped while performance improved. Satisfaction increased for both business and IT people.

Business leaders started to trust the IT leaders more. Plus, the new clarity led to easier decisions during budget time. Before all this, when a major outage occurred, business executives called for the CIO’s head. When a similar outage happened five years later, business chiefs took it in stride, saying, “They’re doing a great job. Everyone has a hiccup from time to time.”

Tom’s Take:

When companies hire IT vendors such as ours, costs can be handled on either a fixed-bid or time-and-materials basis. We prefer working on a time-and-materials basis so we can work in a collaborative manner.

While responsible vendors must find ways to add value no matter what the billing arrangements, we’ve moved from the waterfall approach to an Agile/Scrum approach. The heart of Scrum is an iterative and incremental method for managing projects. A result is more frequent deliverables.

Clients appreciate this approach, which gets software into the hands of end-users much faster than waiting until an entire project is finished. Business managers who must manage expectations on a quarterly basis especially like how this approach yields tangible results quickly and efficiently.

Post #2 in The Series: IT is from Mars, Business is from Venus

“Any marriage counselor will tell you there are two sides to every story. And that can be OK—as long as each side understands the other. But marriages suffer when the two sides can’t find ways to communicate and resolve their misunderstandings.

In many companies, the relationship between IT and business leaders is a very troubled marriage indeed. Miscommunication is rife, leaving executives struggling to figure out what’s working for the company, what’s not, and how to improve the situation. Can a marriage like this be saved?

It can, when IT and business executives have a clearer understanding of the needs of both sides, how they work and the challenges they face. That means business leaders and IT executives talking with each other about their operations and about how IT can help the company fulfill its goals, instead of talking past each other about how one side or the other is preventing that from happening.”

The text above is from Dr. George Westerman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which first appeared in an April 2012 edition of The Wall Street Journal. It caught my eye because similar dynamics are at play between IT vendors, such as Intertech, and our business clients and their managers. The article went on to detail four areas where IT and non-IT executives often fail to understand each other clearly, and how transparency can help. My next four posts will explore those areas, leading with Dr. Westerman’s take and then providing my own from the vendor-client perspective.

Intertech Named One of the 50 Fastest Growing Firms in Minnesota

Intertech was named by The Business Journal as one of the 50 Fastest Growing Firms in Minnesota. My thanks to our wonderful customers and tremendous employees… this award, obviously, would not be possible without you.

Hope Floats… An Inspiring Story of My Niece

The Herald Journal printed a wonderful, inspirational article on my niece Hope.

The article starts out with “Her name is Hope. Not Hopeski or Hopey or Hopeinator; just Hope. For some people, their name just seems like a perfect fit. That can be said about Hope, whose full name is Hope Salonek…

Hope tried to walk away from swimming at the beginning of this season, but Charnstrom convinced her to join the team again using a simple strategy — by calling her Hope. He used to be the one who called her Hopeinator and the other nicknames. ‘Just call me Hope,’ she insists. So Charnstrom did, and she joined the team.”

The article goes on to say, “Anybody who has gone to a Watertown-Mayer/Delano (WMD) girls swimming meet during the last three fall seasons has probably noticed Hope. It’s difficult not to. Hope swims two junior varsity events — 50-yard freestyle and 200 freestyle relay — and tends to have all eyes on her at the end of both races. At the start of both swims, Hope enters the water with a sit-down dive off the pool deck instead of off the block, and she is always the last swimmer to the wall at the finish. But, nobody seems to care. Instead, her teammates seem to feed off Hope’s swims. ‘When you have 50 girls on the team, it is hard to have cohesion and it’s hard for all of them to cheer because they are all doing their own thing, but, when Hope is swimming, everyone stops what they are doing,’ said WMD coach Chuck Charnstrom.

‘The best description is reverse cheerleader, in that she is able to get everyone else to cheer and be a lot more cohesive, and is a rallying-point for the girls,’ said Charnstrom”

More cohesive. A rallying point. We all need a Hope on our team.

Proud of you Hope!