Blog - Page 88 of 121

Prescription for a Healthy IT Project (Post 1 of 6)

Over $600 million! That’s how much the federal government has reported spending – so far – on information technology for the federal health insurance website HealthCare.gov. From errors to long waits, it’s been a debacle.

Lack of adequate testing by the IT vendor, CGI, also has been blamed for the site’s navigational difficulties and extremely slow load times. In case you’re not familiar with it, CGI is the world’s fifth-largest information technology services company and the largest IT company in Canada, where it is headquartered.

As of Oct. 25, 700,000 U.S. citizens had filed applications for health insurance. The nagging tech issues must be resolved, and soon, if the predicted seven million interested Americans are going to be able to sign up for coverage through the exchanges by the end of the six-month enrollment period on March 31, 2014.

As the owner of an IT consulting business, I feel for the folks at CGI. Managing a project of this scale involving the federal government no doubt was beyond challenging. Still, when I heard that complete end-to-end testing had not taken place until mid-September, I had to scratch my head. With so much on the line, comprehensive testing tied to established milestones should have been happening early and often throughout the development process.

How could such an obviously world-class IT vendor overlook such a basic software development principle? I’m not going to speculate since I was not on the team, but I do think this very public software development fiasco creates an opportunity to dust off some of the time-tested software development principles described in my book, “Building a Winning Business.” I will discuss those principles in my next five posts and hope that by the time I’m finished with this series of posts, the new federal health care website finally will be working efficiently!

Want to Live Longer? Smile!

A great seven minute TED talk on the power of smiling. A couple of the benefits including living longer and being perceived as competent.

Innovate, Not Just Automate

A recent article in The Economist’s Schumpeter column said, “(for) consumers, the digital age is often exhilarating. For companies, it is often frightening… In practice, many (IT) departments fear being overwhelmed.” This focus of the article is right in-line with an article I wrote for the Star Tribune this October “Cost-center thinking hobbles IT power”

In summary:

“Enterprises are going to have to shift from where IT was really just about automating undifferentiated back-office functions to using IT as the fundamental product of what they do.” To move forward, for all organizations, IT needs to move from automating to innovating.
The combination of mobile and the cloud creates a platform for creating solutions where IT can be a fundamental product of what an organization does
As I shared in an interview this year with Twin Cities Business magazine, consumerization is here… when it comes to the ideas for products and services that allow IT to be the fundamental product of an organization, everyone can innovate!

Make Time for the Work That Matters (Post 4 of 4)

In my previous three posts on “Making Time for Work that Matters” I have recapped an interesting article by the same name that appeared in the Harvard Business Review. I found it interesting that editors at HBR chose to place that article in the magazine’s regular, “managing yourself” section. At Intertech, figuring out what’s important and where we should placing our effort is definitely a management priority.

That’s why we use Key Results Areas (KRAs) with every employee. If you’ve read my book, “Building a Winning Business,” you already know I’m a passionate believer in KRAs! They are an effective tool for keeping everyone moving in the right direction. They provide a simple framework for regular “one-on-one” meetings between managers and staff. And they help us all remember that ongoing learning is essential to strong employee and company performances. Here’s an example of how they are identified, which happens as part of a dialogue between employees and managers:

#	KRA	Goal
1	Sales	$2.5M
2	Learning	Complete negotiation training course at local university, finish book on effective use of LinkedIn for sales
3	Special Projects	Complete the guideline for onboarding new sales team members—each step must be SMART (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound).

We also include narrative sections covering related duties/activities, performance evaluation standards and skills/knowledge required for each. If knowledge gaps exist, we include a plan for how they will be addressed.

KRAs are limited to five, but should include at least three, and they must be discussed regularly to be effective. We use them as the agenda for regular update meetings between managers and employees. This helps our people know what we value and gives them a valuable baseline against which to measure their day-to-day activities. It also gives them a regular way to let us know what’s happening and if they are bumping up against any barriers.

KRAs are not intended to be a Billy club. Rather, they are more like a spotlight that helps cut through the fog. We keep the KRA dialogues open, ongoing and positive. Besides increasing everyone’s likelihood of success, KRAs used in this way eliminate any unpleasant surprises (for anyone) at annual performance reviews. Using KRAs in combination with the self-assessment tool developed by Birkinshaw and Cohen could be a powerful one-two punch in your and your employees’ daily fight with the clock!

Keep It Simple Stupid

What do Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Tupperware have in common?

Based on a recent article in The Economist, simplicity.

According the magazine’s Schumpeter column (Schumpeter is the economist who coined the phrase creative destruction), “… Tupperware has three million freelance salespeople, working everywhere from plush Austrian suburbs to Indian slums. TCS employs almost 300,000 people to solve complex technological problems. (they both)… agreed that the only way to avoid being blinded by complexity is to concentrate on the few simple things that can give their businesses focus and their workers direction.”

The Economist goes on to share “most successful businesses thrive on simplicity of some sort. German Mittelstand companies are doing well by focusing on narrow niches. Built-to-last companies, such as Coca-Cola, are masters of distilling their corporate identity into a simple formula which employees can internalise and customers can easily recognise. McDonald’s is a global success because its business model is so simple and replicable.” (The Economist is a British publication so there are three words in this paragraph that a U.S. spell check will show as incorrect ;-).

I agree. At Intertech, we strive to keep it simple:

In overall guiding principles–For a over a decade we’ve had one mission, one purpose, three values, and three guiding principles. We repeat these every month at our all company meetings.
Goals–Every year, at our strategic planning meeting where we outline goals for the next year, we limit the number of goals to no more than three. This creates clarity. This also creates accountability (e.g. if the person in charge of 10 goals says s/he accomplished 3, it sounds good. If the person in charge of one goal says s/he didn’t accomplish anything, it sounds not so good)
When explaining things–the leadership team talks in plain terms (e.g. “what we sold last month” not stuff like “top line generation”)

KISS.