Gold Pass Nonsense

Let your imagination follow me for while. You have worked in a company for many years. You have even worked hard and when you retire you get a send off, some presents and many fond memories. You look forward to your retirement knowing that air travel within the country will not cost you a cent until the day you die.

OK folks. Let’s get real. No organisation would do that for you and pay an uncapped amount for your travel when you are no longer in the employment of the company. So why do we, the population of Australia keep putting up with this kind of nonsense for retired politician. Every once in a while the press replays this theme and it looses steam after a while and then just goes away.

I suspect that politicians don’t even feel uncomfortable about it being covered in the press any more. I suspect also that there are some MPs who genuinely feel uncomfortable but they are a minority.

Let me say that Gold Pass travel is not, has not and will never be justifiable on any ground especially as there are no limits nor justification required for the traval. No matter which way you look at it, it is a junket and successive governments have continued to look the other way. And the cost by the way is increasing every year. Since when has any organisation give its past employees what is tantamount to company credit card for unlimited travel.

This week one MP was reported as saying that the travel is used to seek to further public interests in a wide variety of issues. Ok so why don’t we simply put on record what the travel is for and put in place a simple approval procedure. What is morally wrong is that this expenditure is allowed to continue while spending on health and schools are subject to the most detailed scrutiny.

Why “we the people” let politicians keep fleecing the public purse is completely beyond me. There must be a way for the people to speak and to have their voice heard.

Autumn

I love autumn and all the different colours that present themselves. Everything looks and feels so different and yet the same. This is a shot of foliage of a nature plant in a nearby park

And this one is a very common duck taken just before sunset in a nearby pond. I liked this particulare shot partly because it caught the drop of water just in front of duck hitting the surface of the water

Two quite different pictures taken on an autumn evening

[pictures taken with Pentax K20D and Sigma 18-125mm APO zoom]

Systems Opportunities For Small Businesses In A Recession (Part I)

You can hardly avoid talk about the recession in any conversation with a small business owner these days. In a almost perverse sense the slowdown in business activity provides small business owners the time to take stock. Let’s face it, during hectic times, systems and infrastructure is rarely a top priority until things break and are dealt with as a rectification matter.

If you have been running your business at this frenetic pace then it just may be time to use the breather to consider some of the important developments that you may have missed in the past couple of years.

Software-as-a-Service (Saas) or Software on Demand which companies like Saleforce.com and Netsuite helped to legitimise is now available at the small business end of the market. Small business owners really do not want to run IT shops and SaaS should have been a logic choice. But this has not happened and there are a number of contributory factors.

• Security ~ those involved with small businesses will know that small business owners are uncomfortable with loosing physical control of their assets and this includes the computers that host their business data. With growing experience and familiarity with the internet over the past few years, small business owners are coming to terms with the fact that externally hosted systems are in fact more secure and stable than systems housed internally.
• Cost ~ while vendors like Salesforce.com and Netsuite helped put Saas on the map, they are by no means cost effective for a small business owner. But this has change in the past two years. Fierce competition and entry of new vendors has meant that capable systems are now available at a fraction of the cost barely three years ago. Some vendors also offer free versions with a reduced set of functionality or number of users. Despite this the available functionality is still considerable.
• Types of available applications ~ the number and variety of solutions that are available today are can be bewildering. For every solution area there will be many offerings. Interestingly many of the newer offerings are from India which also helps from the cost point of view.
• Ease of Use ~ the newer crop of solutions have been developed straight out of the internet era. This means that they were designed with the intuitiveness of internet usage which significantly reduces the cost of adoption
• Online Collaboration ~ these are new capabilities that the newer solution offerings have incorporated. These capabilties have the potential not only to change the work practices within the business but also can significantly alter the way your business engages with your customers.

In the part II I will walk through an example of the how such a system could possibly be configured in a practical manner for a small business.

What People Really Use To Manage Projects

Every business has any number of projects all running at the same time. This can be anything from organising a company picnic to refurbishing a warehouse. 

The number of tools available today is mind boggling and there everyone will swear by their favourite tool. However the real problem is that the focus is on the tool rather than what the tool is expected to achieve. For as small business, there is rarely any interest in project governance, critical path or PERT. All they want to do is get the job done.

In really simple terms, it is all about identifying what needs to be done and making sure that someone is made responsible for ensuring that it gets done. Sure the scale and complexity can vary according to the number of people involved.

Most people, when pushed hard, are likely to admit that they use Excel to keep a list of activities with the dates and names of persons responsible for the activity. Lets face it. It works and work very well in many circumstances. So why bother with anything else. Well it works if only one person is running the whole show. If there are several people involved it starts to get messy. Sharing the excel spreadsheet as a means of communicating the plan is Ok up to a point but try maintaining it and the fun really begins.

There are well established and formalised project management methodologies and there are a whole crop of powerful scheduling tools that implement these methodologies. Microsoft Projects is probably the most well known of them. The issue here is not whether Microsoft Projects does a good job – it does. The problem is that it requires the user to be familiar with the underlying methodologies. This unfortunately is the problem for small organisations. Even if they had staff who were familiar with formal project management methodologies and with the tools, the organisation simply does not have the resources to implement and use the methodology.

In recent years, the proliferation of new internet collaborative tools has opened up other simpler alternatives. These tools have driven the phenomenal growth of social networking sites such as mySpace and Facebook by making it easy for like minded individuals to share experiences

This has given rise to a crop of solutions that a a hybrid of project management and social networking capabilities and include the following:

• Basecamp
• Zoho Projects
• ProjectOffice

Developed with the internet as the delivery vehicle, these applications are easily accessible and much easier to deploy than the more traditional project scheduling software. This means that a small business could easily adopt it and provide a platform to manage its projects. These new applications incorporate the use of wikis, forums and chat to enable individuals to share information, risks and progress information about the project simply and easily.

So maybe it is about time to consider putting your excel spreadsheet aside and lake a look at the alternative options.

Focus and Concentration Span

I work for a company that was one of the earliest adopters of wireless networks. I remember the first meeting I attended where almost everyone had their laptops open and appeared to me to be continuously shifting between answering email and taking notes of the meeting. I remember at the time being mildly irritated at this behaviour.

But over the years, I have come to realise that something strange appears to be at play. Like most members of the older working generation, I was brought up in the tradition of paying attention on one thing at a time. Teachers at school constantly battling get me to hold my attention have conditioned me so. So why then am I thinking otherwise now.

When I sit back and take a good look at the content of meetings and the participants, it is clear that not every item is truly relevant to every single participant. So then what happens to all that time sitting in meetings trying to concentrate during when the meeting discusses something that has no relevance to me. If we are truly honest, we are thinking about other things that are presently occupying out mind. Hopefully things about work. So what's the difference when someone someone does the same thing by responding to email.

Many management gurus have continually argued that you simply cannot multi-task in this manner. I for one would tend to agree but then I did not grow up with Facebook, online chat and sms on mobile phones. What I really find fascinating is that the members of the younger generation do not "tune out" when they act in the multi-tasking mode. In fact I have found that the opposite happens, when we force them to turn their laptops and PDAs off I find that this is when they really tune out of the meeting.

Now don't get me wrong, a badly run meeting without an agenda and with no adherence to time constraints is still a bad meeting regardless of whether people are multi-tasking during the meeting. But let us not judge the actions of others so quickly just because it rubs us up the wrong way.

Effective Conference Calls for Small Businesses

What comes to your mind when you think of video conferencing. Possibly anything from complicated to gimmicky and unnecessary. Well you would not have been too far off the mark barely a few years ago. Video conferencing was peddled as the solution for "virtual meetings" and they were costly and complicated beasts.

Fast forward to today. Instant messaging (chat) is commonplace. Web based conferencing solutions are widespread and costs hardly anything to adopt and deploy with no complicated software to install and configure. Video conferencing can also be had for the cost of a web cam.

So why and what use would this be to small businesses? The real cost of travel, even before the recent increases in the cost of air travel is considerable. It is not just the direct cost of the airfares, taxi and other travel related costs but also the cost of lost time and productivity as the transit time is often greater than the actual meeting times.

Video conferencing was not actually the first attempt at virtual meetings. Teleconferencing was in fact the first and it was very effective. Video conferencing added the visual aspect that to virtual meetings. But is was expensive initially requiring specilaised equipment.

And for many years tele and video conferencing represented the only available tools. Today,  new enhanced capabilities and tools together with standardisation has given rise to a whole new breed of solutions which greatly facilitate what I term virtual discussions. What then are these capabilities and how would a small business make use of them. Apart from conference calls which is blindingly obvious, here are other uses of scenarios where such services could be put to use:

• Training
• Marketing
• Demonstrations
• Support and consulting

The key to getting a better understanding of how your business can benefit from the deployment of such solutions is appreciating that all these tools focus on sharing content for the purpose of effective communication.

One of the biggest steps forward is that these new capabilities are capable of being shared simultaneously.

Consider a typical scenario: The sales rep is in different location in another country which is 6 hours behind your location. The customer has dragged your local sales rep into their office and has complained of problems with the quality of your products. You operate a small plant but rely on external consultants to design some aspects of your product. Your consultants are actually located in a different city.

Given such a scenario, what would your communication method be. You would probably email or call everyone to organise a time for a telephone meeting. Emails exchanging details of the problem would be sent.

Now consider how this could be conducted using one of the availablee offerings today.

You would set up the meeting that sends out meeting invitations which appear in the receipients' calendars. This part is no different from what you do now. The major difference is how the meeting is conducted. You may choose to use the VOIP telephony capability contained in the solution instead. Video conferencing facilities can be switched on and off on demand.

This is where the collaborative (or sharing capabilities come into their own):

Desktop Sharing ~ this is where the person having control shares selected windows (applications) or their whole desktop with all the attendees this allowing him to walk through an application screen or a Powerpoint presentation of the problem or recommended course of action.

While all this is going on, the sales rep sends you a private message by chat informing you that you should cover the material issue which the production supervisor informed him about 10 minutes before the start of the meeting.

Sound far fetched ? think again ~ here are a just a few solutions that offer some if not all the capabilities described in the scenario and they can be implemented in a matter of hours not days or weeks.

• Vyew
• GotoMeeting
• Zoho Meeting
• Thinkature

Over the coming weeks we will take a closer look at each one of these alternative offerings