Inside ASI-AP

We held the June boardroom luncheon in the Melbourne office today Tuesday 23 June. For the last 2 years these have been called the "Managing Director's Boardroom Luncheon Series" and they ran only in Melbourne. For 2009, we have refined the format and renamed them to the "iMIS Business Excellence Luncheon Series"; and for the format, we are introducing other speakers besides just me, and will be running them in both Melbourne and Sydney, with the first Sydney lunch coming up later this week.

For today's lunch Mick Varga was the featured speaker, and the audience was marketing and development managers / executives from both customers and prospective customers. I spoke for the first 10 minutes to provide the introduction and overview, then Mick spoke for 10 minutes between main course and dessert, and again for 10 minutes after dessert.

The first week of June marked the beginning of Customer Briefings - the topic: iMIS 15.1 Maximise your Potential. So far we have presented in Perth and Wellington. Other capitals are being scheduled for the coming month.

The purpose of the briefing is to show a lot of the great new features of 15.1. Customers will see a lot of benefit in Site Designer, Content Designer, IQA Improvements and also SSRS support (SQL Server Reporting Services). There is real potential in 15.1 for every customer.

As part of the briefing we also recommend every customer review their iMIS usage regularly - get back to basics and make sure you are making the most of your current investment. We provide each attendee with a personalised iMIS Value Cycle profile for their organisation to help them have meaningful discussions with their Customer Sales Executive or other ASI Staff.

We held the first boardroom luncheon in Melbourne office last week on Thursday 21 May. For the last 2 years these have been called the "Managing Director's Boardroom Luncheon Series" and they ran only in Melbourne. For 2009, we have refined the format and renamed them to the "iMIS Business Excellence Luncheon Series"; and for the format, we are introducing other speakers besides just me, and will be running them in both Melbourne and Sydney.

For the lunch last week Mick Varga was the featured speaker, and the audience was IT managers and IT executives from both customers and prospective customers. We also changed the format and made the presentation style a little more hard hitting, less high level and giving more practical advice that can be put into action right away. I spoke for the first 10 minutes to provide the introduction and overview, then Mick spoke for 10 minutes between main course and dessert, and again for 10 minutes after dessert.

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.

Further to my post a few weeks ago on how blogs can improve the shared communication process in place of email, I read some other posts today which share other useful ideas. The original post was from Tantek Celik on how email is not working for him, and this was picked up by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders on email insanity. 43 Folders is a great website full of useful ideas for improving personal productivity and provides coverage on the book Getting Things Done (or GTD).

I haven't touched on trying to reduce our email and IM clutter recently but just wanted to give everyone a heads up that I am going to be putting more effort into this year than ever before!

Why?

We have so much knowledge in our email – questions, answers, tips, tricks, who’s doing what, etc etc – but it is all private! For example - I can send an email to Colin on clarifying some pricing policies that may be of use to everyone in the sales and consulting teams, yet no-one but Colin gets to see it. That is a big problem because it is a missed opportunity to not just share useful information, but also to get feedback or clarification.

Julie distributed via email last week the nine month (3rd quarter) results of our SMART STEP internal training for 2007. We made some changes to the training program for this year that can be summarised by this saying: "planning to execute, and then executing to plan". I wrote more detail about the changes in the half year results.

The spreadsheet distributed by Julie shows your quarterly actuals against your quarterly plan. I want to recognise in particular the following people who are either ahead of their plan, or within 10% of making their plan, as of the three-quarter way mark (September 30):

This ASI only posting has attached below a copy of my presentation given to REIQ staff and management on Tuesday 2nd October. I posted separately about the REIQ visit here.

REIQ Presentation - 2 Oct 07.ppt

One of the take aways from Jeff De Cagna's sessions at the Association Forum conference last week (my conference summary blogs day 1 and day 2) was the concept of "small safe tests" or "disciplined experimentation". Jeff posted this article late last year on innovation in associations:

"Creating what’s next is about putting ideas that emerge from insight and foresight into practice through disciplined experimentation. The careful development of prototypes, service tests, proofs of concept and other well-designed experiments makes it possible for associations to safely attempt a wider portfolio of new activities to advance both strategy and innovation efforts. Naturally, association leaders must play close attention to the learning derived from its experimental portfolio and act quickly to integrate that new knowledge into on-going strategic thinking and dialogue."

Beau posted a link to a nice article in the latest consulting newsletter. It is to a blog called "Change This" changethis.com and compiled by a deputy editor of the New York Times.

This particular article is called "When You Absolutely, Positively Should Not Use Email" - you can get the full PDF here.

It follows on some previous posts of mine about getting off email.

I listened to a great podcast yesterday from Merlin Mann of 43folders.com

If you don't podcast then there is a video you can watch: http://www.43folders.com/izero/

This has really helped me in setting a plan for managing my inbox. If you are struggling to get through the noise then he has 5 simple ways you can manage emails. Worth listening to/watching.

On the side, his website http://43folders.com, has all sorts of information for doing things a little more productively and is worth a look.

With the voice over IP system now rolled out in all regions, including the UK, we are really starting to see the call charges drop from our traditional office lines. All calls to the US are now essentially free, and between all staff with an IP phone. Our total phone bills for the 30 plus lines we have out of Sydney and Melbourne offices is now less than $1,500 per month. Before the IP phones it was over $3,000 per month.

Next, we need to get to work on mobiles. The monthly cost for mobiles is around $1,800 per month, now more than our fixed lines. Changing our mobile plans to give free calls from mobile to mobile did not have quite the cost-saving impact we had expected, so we need to take another look at our calling behaviours and look for cost reductions on mobiles. We are also going to be reviewing our policy on who actually needs mobiles once we get the teleworker IP phones installed for those working from home. In the meantime, please be conscious of time you spend on mobiles.

The schedule for Product Training for the entire sales and marketing teams has been set for the remainder of 2007.

We have changed the format of this training from being quarterly, on-site training in Melbourne (which we did last year every quarter when David Riffle was visiting), to a more regular, shorter session delivered via Sonnexis. Some of these have been recorded and you are required to watch in your own time, others - including those set for the remainder of the year - are scheduled 1-2 hour interactive sessions delivered via Sonnexis. We decided to change the format this year for a number of reasons: to have more frequent sessions to more quickly address questions and other matters relating to the iMIS 15 release this year; to make better use of David's time when he is here doing sales calls instead of being a trainer; and to save travel/accomm costs.

Julie just distributed via email the six month results of our SMART STEP internal training for 2007. We made some changes to the training program for this year that can be summarised by this saying: "planning to execute, and then executing to plan".

In 2006, the SMART STEP program was about each team member achieving 60 points of internal training. Since 1 point = 1 hour of approved training, this meant 60 hours of training a year per ASI'er. New team members needed slightly more at 75 hours to ensure extra training time was allocated for induction training.

In 2007, we became more focused. Just doing 60 hours of any old training was not going to be good enough. Instead, you have to do at least 60 hours of training, and the actual training you do has to be as agreed with your manager and documented on your SMART STEP Training Plan. This plan outlines the classes and training you will do, quarter by quarter. The training should reflect closing gaps in your skills matrices and other training relevant to your job responsibility.