Ever heard of SMART Goals? I’ve seen several variations on the title, but it’s used something like this:

S - Specific
M - Measureable
A - Achievable
R - Relevant
T - Time dimensioned

Most people think of them as important for things like life goals or large projects, but you need to think about them even for small projects.

There are times when it seems that people just don’t realize how important goals like this are. If you have a project that you’re working on, take some time to develop SMART goals and you’ll find that everything goes smoother.

Let’s consider how we might want to apply this to a real situation. Suppose we need to build a presentation that’s important to get funding for a CFS project we REALLY want to do. Let’s see how each piece applies:

• Specific - What EXACTLY do you want to achieve in the presentation? What is success? What is failure? Be CONCRETE. Be EXACT.
• Measurable - How will I know I’ve been successful? How can I tell that my presentation has been successful? Are there questions I can ask that will give me an indication of the level of support?
• Achievable - Is the funding I need to get possible? Does it go beyond what the company has normally done? Is it realistic that the company will DO what I want it to do?
• Relevant - Does this REALLY matter to ME? Am I passionate about this or is this something that I’m expected to do for someone else? If it’s not personally important to me, then I’m probably not going to be as convincing as I might be.
• Time Dimensioned - What’s the deadline? You’ve got two here: FIRST for the presentation, everything has to be ready to present at the right time; SECOND for the project, even if you sell the project successfully, will you be able to meet the time constraints of the project itself?

Don’t take this as a need to build some sort of formal goal structure. That’s not necessary, but some goals, even informal ones, are important to success. As the size of the project grows and the size of your team grows from just yourself to dozens or hundreds of people, it will be important to bring more people into this process. When you’re growing your team, one of the first things you should do with each new person is sit down and go over the goals. Explain them. Let your passion show through. If you’ve never seen it happen, you’ll be surprised at how much energy this gives to new hires and how willingly they’ll jump in and contribute to your project’s success.

Once you can clearly see your goal and you know that you’re passionate about it, you know that it’s really achievable, then get to work and make it happen!

Categories: General, Project Management
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I’ll be moving in the next week, so there will likely be some interruption in my posting schedule. I’ll try to get some posts ready to go, but no promises.

Categories: General
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If you find this interesting, try these

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Categories: General
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Since I started this blog, I’ve been trapping spam and rejecting it before it gets posted. I’m amazed at how much there is targeting blogs like this one. There is no discrimination, no attempt to get it to any sort of right place. Further, there is no apparent concern that it doesn’t get posted, just that it gets submitted. It’s hard to believe someone pays for this stuff, but obviously they do.

I’ve got to ask myself WHY? Why would someone PAY to have someone do this?

The stuff they’re trying to post isn’t just ’spam’, it’s junk. There’s no relation to the topic, just get some links out there. The worst ones are the ones that are trying to social engineer by posting something that LOOKS OK superficially. They have embedded links to questionable locations that have nothing to do with the topic or the words in the post.

So why? It’s simple really. People are making money at it. In fact, people are making millions of dollars doing this.

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Customer Facing Systems need to be understood. That was the whole point of several of my recent postings. I wanted to share still another model which was part of a facilitated modeling session from years ago.

I’ve been rebuilding this model as an exercise to think about some of the influences again. Let me emphasize that this is a partial model built on a real situation (the company to remain anonymous). This about the influences here. What other connections could YOU find here? More importantly, how does this relate to your own situation? Does your operation look anything like this?

Categories: Customer Service, General
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I read with interest a post at the Wrapt in Web blog titled “Business Survival needs good IT People”. Certainly a very important point that businesses need to understand. The writer, Alistair Nicholson, makes some outstanding points which taken out of the context of his specific discussion are important for anyone making decisions about Customer Facing Systems (CFSs) in these times of economic downturn.

“One lesson that is common from all our previous experiences is that strategic shortcomings are punished hard in downturns.”

What a terrific insight and one that is all too often forgotten by decisions makers with their eyes on the immediate future. Customer Facing Systems fare badly because they’re seen as overhead with no return in and of themselves. Over and over again, decisions are made about CFS systems with a short-term horizon based solely on the immediate cost savings from cutting back on people engaged in providing direct customer services. In fact, I’m seeing it now in companies I’m speaking to. A moment’s thought about the strategic implications shows this is a bad move. Why? Because it throws sand in the gears that drive revenue.

We’re trained in business school, whether at the bachelor or master’s level, that products or marketing or something similar drive revenue. To some extent that’s true, but realistically, you have to realize that your customer facing system is what makes everything else possible, including revenue.

Cutting back your CFS is a short-sighted move to save money that has the potential to drive customers away and cut revenue even more than it already is.

“What has fundamentally changed is the way customers interact with businesses and each other. There’s good news in this because transforming technology gives us future growth. There’s bad news in this because managing by, and measuring the wrong things will kill a business stone dead.”

Customer Facing systems have taken on a new level of importance in business, but many decisions makers don’t see it yet and don’t understand the importance to their success. In good economic times, it’s easy to ignore the Customer Facing System. You can be successful even with a poor CFS. However, the habits you establish in good economic times will come back to bite you as the economy goes down hill as it’s doing now. A most important part of that is measuring the right things to show just what the connection is between your customer facing system and your success.

In a post several days ago, I talked about the importance of understanding your systems and what variables are important to measure. This is so important that it’s worth repeating. You’ve got to measure the things that are actually linked in some way to your success. When asked what you can do NOW to impact profit 3 months from now, you need to KNOW what variables are important.

“The toxic effects …” of poor measurement are felt during a downturn when you make the wrong decisions. “The toxic effects …” of poor learning cause us to see the wrong relationships and measure the wrong things and hence make the wrong decisions.

Too many businesses run by chance, decisions made by people who don’t understand, but who are lucky to make the right choice. Don’t let this kind of decision making affect your decisions about Customer Facing Systems. Learn how to identify and measure the important variables and make decisions based on facts and NOT on luck.

Categories: General, Web Sites
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Over and over again it’s been proved, but apparently the lesson is never learned, good decisions come from understanding. If you don’t understand, you’re gambling. I don’t know if anyone is following this, but you need to think about YOUR customer facing system (CFS) now and what you plan to do to respond to the economic crisis now underway.

During a down economy, one of the first things that gets dropped is the Customer Facing System. In Call Centers, the largest cost in the center is payroll. Cutting people saves money. Even on Web Sites and for automated system support, the people who care for the automated systems tend to get dropped. Is this a good idea? What will this cost your business now and in the future? You need to think about the fact that customers have options and they’ll not forgive those who make service difficult to get.

Whether you like it or not, your customer facing system is critical to the success of your company. How you deal with customers determines how willingly your customers pay your price and how willing they are to switch to someone else. Can you afford to lose customers? You’re already losing them because of the economy, but cutting back your customer facing systems will cause you to lose even more. Cutting back also makes you more vulnerable. Worse, if you cut back in the wrong way, you destroy morale inside the company and impact your customers, even your most loyal ones. If you’ve earned an MBA, you know the case histories. You’ve read about it happening in other companies. You need to translate those case histories to your own customer facing system.

All too often, the decision to down-size is made purely on the basis of cost without any thought to the impact on your success. Unfortunately, you really should have done that when you first created your system so you could make good decisions now. It’s never too late though. Take some time now, get some people together, and think carefully through the impact of your CFS as part of your overall success.

Do you understand the variables that are important to your success? As many people as I’ve interviewed from the front-line to the board room, I haven’t found many who really understood how to determine which variables were actually predictors of eventual success. They mistake numbers for understanding and an ability to quote thumb-rules with an ability to act wisely. In most cases, people making decisions to cut back have never really thought about critical relationships in a way that helps make decisions at critical times.

One interesting question I usually ask when interviewing people in a CFS is “what change could be made RIGHT NOW that would increase their performance bonus at the end of the current bonus period”. Most people with responsibility for a CFS don’t have an answer. In fact, they don’t even know what the important parameters are.

You ought to be thinking about the impact of one variable on another and eventually which of them impact your profit. Could you show how the different variables you can measure now affect your profit, your costs, and your bonus at some point in the future?

This is an overly simplified and incomplete model of just some of the variables that MIGHT be important in your Customer Facing System. If you were modeling your system, you would investigate whether these are even the appropriate variables whether each variable has a positive or negative effect on profit. If you are running a web based CFS, your diagram might start like this:

The diagram itself isn’t important. What’s important is the time you put into working it out. Any plan, any diagram of causes and effects, is not valuable because situations change and none of us has a crystal ball that accurately tells us about the future. The value lies in the thinking you put into the plan or causal diagram.

It’s worth the time right now to think through how things relate to your success, whether you measure it in profit for a company or in some other measure for a non-profit organization. Get some people together and set up a facilitated modeling exercise. Get someone who understands the process and who knows how to guide you through thinking about systemic effects which lead to your objectives.

• What affects profit?
• What affects cost & sales?
• When the number of employees goes down, how does that impact both Sales and Cost?
• How delayed are these effects?
• Are there any loops created by the impact of one thing on another?
• How does morale impact service effectiveness and sales?
• What is the impact on morale of a staff cutback?
• How does the morale of your service staff affect the number of returning customers?
  How does the morale of your sales staff affect new business?

You won’t predict exact numbers. That’s not the point. What you’ll be doing is thinking about how different changes relate to your profit. Just thinking about how things relate creates insight into how things really work.

When you have some idea of the cause-effect relationships, try them out using scenarios. Think about a specific situation and come up with strategies for handling it. Think through how your response to the situation would impact your company and your profit. Thinking through concrete scenarios helps you learn how the situation develops dynamically and how you can or cannot have an impact on the direction of events. You’ll probably change your cause-effect diagram to incorporate new insights. If you have a skilled facilitator with good modeling software, you can even run a simulation showing how things will change over time as a result of different decisions.

Try out different scenarios and different responses to build a set of strategies covering both expected and unexpected events. Real life will go different from any scenario you choose to examine, but the process of examining them will get you ready to handle whatever does occur.

A great example I’ve played through with clients is known as the Beer Game. A very simple setup involves a brewer, a distributor, and customers. This deceptively simple setup involving orders and delivery timing can be remarkably difficult to do well because most of us don’t really understand the system well enough to predict how it will react when changes are made. Does your business have similar delay loops that can cause non-intuitive changes in your operation? Taking the time to work through these effects will help you see them.

Responding to simple situations like the beer game can be remarkably like handling a big ship like an aircraft carrier. When a command is given to turn, there are delays in the reaction of the ship that you need to take into account. If you give the command to stop, it may take miles to come to a stop no matter what you do to try to stop the ship. There are also side effects that must be considered. For example, if you turn too hard, you’ll tilt the flight deck and cause planes to roll off the ship. How does that relate to your knowing what to do? Very simply, any system is complicated by delays and side effects. In some cases, the side effects (airplanes rolling off the ship in a tight turn) can be more important than the reason you took action in the first place.

Each and every business or organization is different and what works for one company will destroy another. Some things can be done within your organization and some things can’t be. For example, you want to cut costs, so you plan to eliminate employees. However, your shop is unionized, so the union will fight it. This can lead to worsening relationships, more fighting, strikes, and even worse times than if you’d done nothing.

If you’re running a consulting firm, you might find that your system generates loops of interactions like this one where delay times in contracting impact when clients become active and marketing and billable effort all have to be dealt with within the total available hours of effort.

This diagram like is an example from the Vensim system modeling software. It’s a starting point, not a complete model of the system, but using the software, you can assign values to the variables and run a simulation to see how the business evolves over time.

No matter what else you have to do, you need to understand how what you can measure relates to what you want to achieve (profit, people helped, whatever) in order to make good decisions. If you don’t understand, than any decision you make is no better than gambling. You ‘pays ur money ‘nd takes ur chances’. You may like the risk, but winning is always better. How do you win? By understanding. We’ll talk more later.

Categories: Customer Service, General
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Whether you’re running a Call Center, a Web Store, or just talking to customers across a counter, efficiency needs to be an important part of what you’re doing. The problem is, very few advisers give you the full story about efficiency when proposing changes to processes, technology, or anything else.

Efficiency is often looked down on by some and worshipped by others. Both go too far. Efficiency needs to be part of your planning and it needs to be part of your system, but not all efficiency is good. What could NOT be good about efficiency? The most obvious is when you can’t afford it.

Efficiency has to be cost effective and has to have the right sort of impact. If I could save you a penny per transaction at a cost of a Million Dollars, would that be good efficiency? Maybe, maybe not. If you do a million transactions a day and have a billion dollar business, that’s probably good efficiency. If you do one transaction a day and have a business that nets fifty-thousand dollars a year, it’s bad.

Even the first case where it looks like you can afford it and would have a quick payback on your investment, it could still be bad if that 1-penny change alienated customers or caused other problems that wound up either causing problems for your business or costing more than the penny per transaction you saved.

Figuring out what efficiencies are good or bad is not just a question of immediate effects, it also involves systemic effects. Unforeseen 2nd tier effects often cause problems. Anyone who has ever studied business strategy will have read cases where something that the business organization SHOULD have seen but didn’t, eventually came back to cause problems.

So this leads to the obvious question. How well do YOU understand YOUR Customer Facing System?

Categories: Call/Contact Centers, Customer Service, General
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No matter what you’re writing or speaking about, if it’s more than a few lines, it deserves some attention and some planning. That’s basic emphasis of my whole approach. it doesn’t require Microsoft Project or similar software and doesn’t require full-blown project management or a specialist like a certified PMP. You need something that I call ‘Everyday Project Management’

What is Everyday Project Management? It’s an approach between time management and project management that uses tools and techniques of both to deal with projects too big for a todo list, but too small for project management tools. I’ve discussed many of the principles in my paper Notes on Time and Project Management. You can also find some applicable information in my introduction to Project Management ‘Project Management 101′

Let’s consider an example.

Assume you need to make a presentation to the executive committee in your company to provide technical justification for a project that you believe in. There’s a business manager who will handle the financial justification, but you need to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the project. You’ve got to make the presentation in a week, so how will you use your time to be ready when your turn comes up to speak?
When I’m going to make a presentation, I start by doing some simple things:

1. I open a tab in my day planner for the presentation and put related notes there.
2. I make a list of everything I know that I’ll have to do to get ready, working through what are generally called planning and visualization
3. I assign dates to the items in the list and put them on the appropriate task list in my day planner. If I have an automated calendar that I’m using for a group collaboration, I’ll enter the items there and set alarms.
4. I open my day planner to the day of the presentation and start a list of last minute things (charge my laptop battery), things I want to make sure are ready, and things to bring (water, power cord, handouts, etc.).

Planning and Visualization are two parts of almost any project, but for Everyday Projects, we do an abbreviated version. For myself, I like to get the goal sorted out and written down. I find it helps me to define the goal in writing. To define the goal, I use the old SMART thumbrule:

• Specific
• Measureable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Timed

These are really thinking points to make sure I haven’t left something without thinking about it. My goal is my end point, so I’ll start with the end, my presentation, and what I want it to me like.

My most important list is what I need to do to get this done, my task list. For an everyday project, I set it up in the back of my dayplanner behind a colored tab.

I try break tasks out so that no single task takes too long. I usually use a mind map to build the list because my thinking is non-linear. I’ll translate it into a linear plan later. In building the list, I’ll ask myself some basic questions:

• What things do I need to DO to get ready? My tasks
• What will interfere with getting things done? My constraints
• Are there any sensitive issues I need to be aware of and handle carefully?
• Are there any logical groupings of tasks that I can use to make what I need to do easier?
• Is there one sequence that makes more sense than any other?
• Is there anyone else I can delegate some of the responsibility to or anyone whose help I need?
• What is my time limit for preparation? Not for delivery, but for preparation. I may need to leave time to review my material with my boss or get copies made, or even get approval before the presentation.
• Are there any costs associated with what I need to do? Is the money allocated to do it?

Once I have my task list in hand, I set aside a box or folder to put things in like reports, books, or anything that I might need to refer to during preparation. I’ll also setup a folder on my computer to hold files that I’ll need to refer to.

All of that is a pretty good start, but there’s more to consider. I’m writing a White Paper which I’ll post to tie it all together.

Categories: General
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Customer Facing Systems are important to any business, no matter how large or small. Unfortunately, they are often poorly implemented even by large companies with enormous resources. Why?

The answer is simple, interactions with customers APPEAR simple, but when you wrap up many interactions in many forms over a long period of time and you involve many people in doing it, then even a small mistake can have large consequences. My services are available to assist in reviewing, designing, or analyzing customer facing systems. If you like what you’re reading here, then you know I can help achieve what you want.

I’ve added a link to my Services on the blog menu at the right side. I’ve summarized what I can do for you there. To get a start, I offer a free phone interview where we can map out the problems you’re facing and discuss how I can help. We can extend that with an online meeting where we can share overviews of systems, plans, and designs if that will help. Write to me with your contact information to setup a meeting

Contact me now for a free consultation by phone or online

Fill out the form with your contact information. Include a phone number and I’ll contact you within the next several business days.

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