Inside ASI-AP

A number of you have asked me recently how come my blog here is not getting updated as often as it used to.

The main reason is that I have moved to a new tool called Yammer (www.yammer.com) which is like Twitter but it is internal to ASI. Which means I can talk about confidential goings-on at customers and it stays confidential within ASI staff. We have been using Yammer for about 3 months now.

I like Yammer because you can post short snippets, like Twitter, and post often. It requires a lot less thinking than putting together a blog entry.

Of course the downside is that outside of ASI you can't see what is going on, which was the whole point of this blog in the first place ....

To further strengthen the iMIS community through the independent user group - NiUG International (www.niug.org) - ASI is subsidising membership for new and existing customers. We believe NiUG membership is a positive influence on iMIS customers and we have announced the subsidy program to support that idea - for both new customers and existing customers.

The details are as follows:

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 been doing interviews at a rate of 2-3 per week over the last few weeks for the open sales positions. This is in addition to interviews Jason has been doing for the open consulting positions. Jason has had some success and will be announcing a new consultant joining our team in the next few days.

We made an offer to a strong sales candidate but unfortunately he received a better offer from his existing employer and he subsequently rejected our offer. So we continue the search and the interviews.

I have met some great people during the interviews - enthusiastic and talented people - that really give me some enthusiasm about work generally and growing our business. It also makes me appreciate how good our current team is when I get to compare our team against the market.

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.

I have been pretty occupied over the past couple of weeks helping out the consulting team with their current workload spike so have not had a chance until now to write up the week that Bob visited. Bob arrived on the Monday morning and after checking into the hotel came over to the Melbourne office to join the 1pm pizza lunch and listened to the CEO quarterly briefing. The rest of Monday and into the evening was spent on rehearsals for the exec round table event.

Tuesday and Wednesday was down at the Sofitel at Weribee Mansions for the 2008 Executive Round Table Briefing. I will post about that event separately, but suffice to say Bob believed it was the best round table event yet.

ASI was pleased to host the very first meeting of 3 REI's (Real Estate Institute's) - Qld, SA and Vic (all iMIS customers) - in the Melbourne office last week, and I joined the team of REI's and ASI'ers for lunch. While both REISA and REIV have been long time users of iMIS, REIQ only recently joined the list of REI users and between the 3 organisations they agreed to meet up and share iMIS experiences. And they will be meeting up ongoing on a more regular basis as a result of the success of this last meeting. It was great for me to be able to meet with the key exec's from each and share stories over lunch. At lunch was David and Jason (SA), Ivars and Neelu (Vic), Greg (Qld) and Shearne, Colin and myself from ASI.

The interviews for the initial round of candidates for our third Business Development Manager get underway this week to take advantage of David, Bob and Julie all being here in person. The current plan is to have one interview in Melbourne and two in Sydney. The new BDM will be joining Amanda and Martin in the new business group which is dedicated to bringing in new customers to iMIS. Both Amanda and Martin exceeded quota last year, and that along with a continued confidence in the new business market is a trigger to hire to ensure we capitalise on all of the right opportunities (with an emphasis here on the word 'right' - where the potential customer and ASI are aligned in strategies and values). At the same time we are continuing to work on our sales process cycle optimisation although it is harder than expected - but are committed to an outcome that will see higher quota's for both Amanda and Martin.

It was just Lap joining me for lunch today from Melbourne office for our first quarter recognition luncheon. Lap was awarded the core value award of "respect" in the first quarter of 2008 - congratulations Lap! After a year of going to Rockpool each quarter I thought we would try a new restaurant this year, so it was back to Crown again and to the new restaurant right next door to Rockpool - Bistro Guillaume (www.bistroguillaume.com.au).

While promoted as french bistro style the prices were high-end restaurant but luckily the food was outstanding, and I would certainly go back. Lap enjoyed for the first time ever snails for entree and a souffle for dessert !

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).

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.

I hosted our first boardroom lunch of the year yesterday - 30th April - and we had an invited audience of finance managers and finance executives. We had a slightly smaller crowd than expected with a few same day cancellations but overall I was very happy with who was in attendance.

Last year we used the theme of "what keeps you awake at night" as a means of getting feedback and prompting discussion. This year I am adopting a new theme based on the 7 business drivers of high-performance non-profits and the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF). The 2 business drivers I used for this luncheon were "automation" and "process".

I always look forward to a busy schedule of events in the office as it means more and more people get to come in and visit us and hear our message. I am not completely convinced a message needs to be heard "8 times, 8 ways" before it sinks in, but I am convinced that the message needs to be communicated a number of times from different people. And for me the events we run are a key part of that communication.

This week we have the iMIS Friendraising seminar in Melbourne and Sydney (see here for event info), we have the MD Boardroom luncheon in Melbourne and we have some customers coming in for training.

As previously advised, ASI AP is a member of VECCI’s Grow Me the Money Program which encourages businesses to be environmentally aware. The following tip is from their latest Forum:

Most computers in Australia incorporate ENERGY STAR technology, the international standard for energy efficient electronic equipment. When enabled ENERGY STAR reduces the amount of energy consumed by a computer by automatically switching it into a 'sleep' mode when it's not being used. ENERGY STAR settings on your home or office computer are accessed via the Control Panel.

On a desktop computer running Microsoft Windows:

I apologise that some of you were not aware of the current job positions open in AP. Open positions are always on our corporate website, plus depending on how we are recruiting may also be up on Seek (search on iMIS or ASI). The current positions are: