Inside ASI-AP

Andrew Kennedy officially joined us back in June but had a month's holiday already scheduled before he accepted the ASI job, so for most of July he has been away overseas. But he is back this coming week and ready for work. In the few weeks he had with us before going on leave he came to Melbourne for the standard ASI induction program - the week long bootcamp. I took this photo while he was here.

As a full time project manager Andrew becomes part of the global Project Management Office (PMO) for ASI Consulting. Being a part of the global team of project managers means that we should be able to improve the consistency in our professional services - from methodologies, to status reporting and to quality standards - across all regions. Andrew is located in Sydney.

I have seen a few issues of late with some data conversions so I thought this article that appeared in AIM's Management Today June 2008 edition would be timely reading for everyone. The article is called "Moving Critical Data" and it outlines 4 golden rules of successful migrations:

#1 - Data migration is a business issue
#2 - The business knows best
#3 - No one needs perfect data
#4 - If you can't count it, it doesn't count.

The full article is attached here: moving_critical_data_08.pdf

Peter Foley the CTO and co-founder of Artez was back in Australia for a 3 week visit - taking in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. He visited all of the new iMIS Friendraising customers including Cancer Council Vic, National Breast Cancer Foundation and Leukaemia Foundation. I spent an afternoon and dinner with him on Monday, and then joined him at Cancer Council Vic for a meeting on Tuesday.

They key thing for ASI and Artez to work on as a result of our meetings is to get our project and consulting teams working closely together on implementations. To date we have been working almost as independent teams rather than a combined unit. Work to be done but something we will take care of pretty quickly.

The open project manager position has now been filled and we are very excited to be welcoming Andrew Kennedy into the ASI Consulting team. Andrew will be based in Sydney; he will be starting the week of June 2nd. Andrew comes to ASI with strong project management experience including at Optus, a national law firm and most recently a software company specialising in customer data integrity solutions. Like myself and some of the other ASIer's, Andrew is engineering educated; and his interests are soccer, rock climbing and teaching spanish.

The annual consulting satisfaction survey is underway again with email invitations to complete the survey being sent to all ASI direct customers globally. Note that we are using Informz for iMIS for both the email and the online survey.

A total of 3,200 email invitations were sent with almost 800 opened as of Friday. Over 100 surveys have been completed in full (that is a direct customer who has actually used ASI Consulting recently), and half of those have been from AP. The average time to complete the survey so far has been 4.5 minutes. If you are talking to customers please encourage them to complete the survey to help us understand how we can continue to improve our consulting services and performance.

Two interviews were held today with Jason, Alan (US) and Lara (US) representing the ASI panel. I sat in on the first interview which was for a Melbourne based candidate; for the second interview the candidate was in Sydney. A third candidate will interview next week.

One of the things I noticed during the interview is just how much we take for granted the facilities we have at ASI to make global meetings a "1-click" reality. It certainly was a little overwhelming for the first candidate - to have Jason in Sydney on the screen, Alan in Virginia on the screen, Lara in Texas on the phone, and me in person sitting across the desk from him. Wow!

Jason M travelled to Kuala Lumpur last weekend to spend 2 weeks onsite implementing our newest Malaysian customer - the Malaysian Nature Society (MNS - www.mns.org.my). MNS are starting with a basic iMIS membership system with plans to grow into a full iMIS web solution over time. The team at MNS have been great hosts for Jason as it is first time in KL - introducing him to local food and the local cinema. Jason will be finished the implementation later this week and then he takes a couple of extra weeks to tour around KL and Malaysia.

After almost 3 years of being in Australia, Marilyn flys back home to the USA tomorrow morning. We had drinks for her on Friday night, and a morning tea and small presentation today.

Since arriving in Melbourne in June 2005, Marilyn has project managed many successful iMIS implementations, in fact over 8,000 hours of projects which have contract values to ASI AP of over $3m. Some of the projects were smooth, some challenging, but in every case Marilyn helped drive each customer to achieve great things. Along the way, Marilyn got her PMP certification from the Project Management Institute - also a great achievement.

Congratulations to Stuart who earlier this month was promoted to Senior Consultant!

Stuart has had an outstanding year in 2007 and continues to rate highly in project surveys completed by our customers. Jason recently adjusted his work schedule so that in addition to assuming responsibility for more projects, he is also allocated time each week to provide general customer care activities for Perth customers.

Before heading up to Singapore on Tuesday evening, I spent the whole day of the 2nd October with Marilyn at REIQ in Brisbane. REIQ are now in the user acceptance testing phase of their implementation project – which has been going well in all areas except the education department. So part of my time was meeting with the senior team – including Dan the CEO – to remove the roadblock holding up the education testing.

My other job was to do a presentation to the majority of the REIQ office staff – split into 2 sessions – on what to expect after going live, particularly looking ahead the next 2 years. It was timely to remind people – especially as they are caught up in the grind of testing – why they bought iMIS and where the project is going.

A big week of iMIS training last week in the Melbourne office. Brian Lindsey was visiting us all week from Texas to teach the classes. On Monday afternoon, he trained the ASI consulting team on advanced IQA. Then Tuesday to Friday were 2 separate iMIS 15 boot camp classes (with each class running for 2 days). All up, 20 people attended the boot camp, including all ASI consultants, ASI tech support, ASI product management, and authorised iMIS partners from Melbourne (iServices), Sydney (ARMS) and Canberra (Millpost).

The photos above and below are of the second boot camp class (Thursday/Friday), which was 11 people. This class took over the main boardroom as our new training room is only able to seat 8.

With all the consultants in town this week for iMIS 15 bootcamp training and IQA training, Jason took the opportunity to run a team meeting on the Monday morning, and also a team dinner on Monday night. I attended the latter part of the team meeting, and also was invited to the dinner. The agenda for the team meeting was broad, and Nola even managed to teach me something about the new SQL 2005 syntax for joins! Dinner was held at the Meat and Wine Company, just over the river from the office - photos below.

I was involved in a customer issue this last week at CSA that was about a new design for their existing iMIS Content Manager website. The ASI part of the project was to take the new design for home and inside pages and build new CM. Of course, one of the real advantages of using a template based content manager, like the iMIS Content Manager, is that you can get a whole new website for just the cost of a new design and updating the templates. A few years ago (or even now if you don't use a content management system) this exercise of redesigning a website would have been very expensive.

But all that advantage was lost in confusion around the design and how it would be implemented. Normally we work interactively with the design company (if they hadn't worked with iMIS before) so that they didn't design something that couldn't be coded into the templates. For some reason, we did not do this. So we got to the kick off meeting and there was confusion about whether we could or could not implement the design in CM. Added to the confusion, was that the design company was promoting XHTML standards, and when we said we couldn't support one of the design features in CM, they offered to build it in XHTML, which we couldn't really support anyway in these particular templates. So the project was put on hold and escalated to me.

Although I am sure many of you wondered why we needed more sales product training on additional windows and activities in iMIS, I did ask Jay and Kevin to include this in the schedule for a couple of reasons:

1. We sometimes forget the simple stuff that actually makes iMIS very powerful, and

2. "Data management" is the #1 issue customers are telling us that keeps them awake at night.

My interest in this posting is really about point 2. The fact that iMIS makes it so easy to add a new field, add a new activity type, is that sometimes we may actually be exasperating the problem of data management because we make it so easy to track more data. We also tend to move quickly into a solution design mode - "well Mr Customer, we can either add a new demographic field, we could add a new activity type, we could add a multi-instance tab, or we could even add a new product for you". When really maybe we need to ask first "why?".

It's been a busy week so I am catching up on my postings following lots of functions and some travel. Last Thursday I sat in on a session with Jay and Mike Sorrel (Mike is doing the session on MS Reporting Services at the NiUG Discovery conference this year), where Jay was giving Mike an introduction to iMIS 15 and the various .NET services already available.

One of these, which I saw for the first time, was the IQA web service. This web service allows you to take any IQA query, call it via a web service, and it will return the results in an XML data string. This is very cool.

Why? Let's say you want to display a list of Board committee members on your website. You can create the query in IQA that returns the appropriate columns. Once you have the query working correctly in IQA, you can then goto your website, create a new page to display the committee, and all that web page needs to do is call the IQA web service using the name of the query you already created, and then format the results. The formatting could be as simple as showing a table grid (traditional row/column results), or you can apply formatting using XLST style sheets for something a bit fancier.