I love getting out and working with clients, giving workshops and otherwise directly interacting with our customers and our product. Today was one of those great days where there are no monotonous meetings. Just an all day series of training sessions and workshops with various groups using ExAM to support inspections, operations and services for DC General Services. The Department of General Services (DGS) has a mission to elevate the quality of life for the District with superior construction, first-rate maintenance and expert real estate management, our job with ExAM is working to help them achieve this mission.

I spent the early part of this week working with our team to get in all of the last bits of configuration in order to support our pilot effort. We tweaked profiles, finished documentation and made last minute changes to meet user requirements. This included making a last round of cosmetic changes. I decided to personally make some changes to simplify the user interface after I had already finished my dry run. After completing everything I polished my slides and went to bed early.

The training and workshop went great, however I did have one small glitch. In my efforts to simplify the user interface I found I had removed the tab that provides inspectors and field services staff with access to their list of assignments. After sending everyone a log-on and issuing a training assignment. I had watched as everyone received the e-mail and went through performing their task. One after another hands went up and chatter broke out. Nobody could find their assignments.

As I walked around the room I realized – I’d slimmed one of the most important parts of our application right off the interface. Fortunately, I was saved by the power of the Salesforce platform and I assigned people the correct tab and we were able to go forth without much impact but despite all my preparations I’d broken one of my cardinal rules. Don’t make changes after you have done your dry run.

The net result was a live opportunity to demonstrate how easy it is to make changes in Salesforce, but it could have been bad. By making changes after the dry run I opened myself up to simple, dumb user error. I try to always start over – no matter how boring it is, or how trivial the change. If I make any change. I restart. Dry runs help you catch errors both big and small. Always do a dry run and always do it after you’ve made the very last change. To do otherwise invites problems or as I like to think of them: Opportunities to show your ability to think on your feet.

Thanks as always for reading my blog, I hope you will join the conversation by commenting on this post.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to this blog and following me on twitter @jmillsapps. I regularly give talks via webinar and speak at events and other engagements. If you are interested in finding out where to see me next please look at the my events page on this blog. If you would interested in having me speak at your event please contact me at events@joshmillsapps.com.

If you are interested in consulting services please go to MB&A Online to learn more.

Hopefully your organization isn’t on the naughty list…

I have a daughter who is missing all of her front teeth; however she has opted against asking for front teeth for Christmas and is pushing Santa Clause for a Princess Diary with Lock and Keys. I think many organizations are hoping Santa brings them more stable economic times, bigger budgets and some relief from the austerity of the last few years. I hate to be the Grinch but unfortunately, I just don’t see it ending up under the tree. The climate in both public and private sector is that IT has to do more with less. I don’t want to leave you feeling like Charlie Brown, I think there are three things every technology IT executive should put on their list in order to make 2014 a better year than 2013.

Troux-as-a-Service: Get a better understanding of your application portfolio and make better decisions in 2014: Getting results from Enterprise Architecture has been on many technology executives Christmas list for years.  Enterprise Portfolio Management and associated disciplines are becoming more mature. So is the software that supports them. Traditionally, software packages in this space that came with strong records of implementations ending in ROI also came with big price tags. Now many of these vendors have software as a service models available. I talk about Troux-as-a-Service in this video.

Salesforce: Despite the hype, most executives and organizations are not getting to the cloud or getting to the benefits of the cloud yet. 2014 may be the year as many factors including increased maturity from service providers, better understanding by internal IT folks and the business case come together to make cloud an inevitable part of the story for most organizations in 2014. I believe this charge will be led by vendors like Salesforce that have developed platforms that enable third parties to securely deliver specific capability to organizations “just like yours.” The appexchange model which iTunes and the AppStore have made so prevalent in the consumer market is fast taking hold in the public sector with 2,126,132 enterprise class installs to date (today).

Millsapps, Ballinger & Associates: Ok so getting some exciting new clients under the tree that are focused on making 2014 a year of change is actually on my list. I think we should be on yours because we are experts in the first two things on this list and more importantly because we really are “focused on outcomes.” One of the things I believe separates us from the pack is that we measure ourselves by our clients success. With both our Troux 90 day portfolio offer and our ExAM4Enterprise.com offerings our focus is always on getting you to value fast.

So that’s what I think should be on your Christmas list this year. What actually is on the list?

Thanks as always for reading my blog, I hope you will join the conversation by commenting on this post.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to this blog and following me on twitter @jmillsapps. I regularly give talks via webinar and speak at events and other engagements. If you are interested in finding out where to see me next please look at the my events page on this blog. If you would interested in having me speak at your event please contact me at events@joshmillsapps.com.

If you are interested in consulting services please go to MB&A Online to learn more.

I think one of the things that I’ve really noticed over the years is that no matter what you’re trying to accomplish, communication is key. I think a lot of times when you get into a large public sector project or an internally facing private sector project, people forget that you still have to sell your ideas to make them successful. Even if it’s just an internal project that’s supposed to make things run more efficiently, more effectively, or if it’s a public sector project that has been mandated that you have to do, sometimes people take that as they don’t have to sell this idea it just needs to get done. It would be nice if that was the case but it’s just not.  So I want to talk today a little bit about one of the mechanisms that I’ve found is really good at helping get buy-in and more importantly, it’s interesting enough that people will actually look at it and start to understand your project or your objectives a little bit better.

We’ve been using info graphics quite a bit as a way to tell a story about a project or whatever it is that we’re trying to accomplish. People find them interesting because it’s a combination of artistry and numerical backing that gets people wanting to take a look at it and understand things in a way that is different than just a written piece or something like that. I want to talk about kind of the three basic parts that we use most often to build an info graphic. We decide these things before we start putting ideas on paper and I’ll talk a little bit about the tools we use as well.

1. The first thing we do is try to put the whole thing in context. If it’s a private sector project we may look at the market and gather market statistics. If it’s a public sector project and we’re looking at technology portfolios we may look at size and complexity, anything that sort of gives you the big pictures view of what you’re looking for or what you’re trying to accomplish.
2. The second thing that we’ll do is highlight some of the details that are driving the action that we’re taking. The why of what we are trying to accomplish in this project. If you can sum that up statistically or with numbers, it becomes a lot easier for people to understand at a glance.
3. Then finally in our third section is most of the time focused on three broad groupings. We’ll have our call to action, what are we trying to get you to do, and we try to give a taste of what the world might be like if we accomplished whatever that project is that we’re trying to do. We try to put some statistics or numeric value behind what that is.

Pretty simple formula and it creates things that are very powerful and very compelling. The problem that most of us, myself included, is that we are not very artistically inclined. So the question is how do you get that really rich compelling feel that you want to have? Well we’ve used Piktochart which is a very reasonable priced, available online on the web, tool for building these. They’ve got a bunch of themes that you can choose from and make it really easy for you. A lot of times we’ll go in, use their base theme, and we’ll drop our information in. If we need to we’ll build components in illustrator or other tools to upload into the info graphic to make it ours so to speak. From there it is simple to download it and push it out to the client. (Here is an example of an info graphic created using these tools.)  That’s really all there is to it. So please take a look at Piktochart. It’s a cool spot to look at things and also take a look at Visual.ly, which is another great resource for info graphics.

Thanks as always for reading my blog, I hope you will join the conversation by commenting on this post.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to this blog and following me on twitter @jmillsapps. I regularly give talks via webinar and speak at events and other engagements. If you are interested in finding out where to see me next please look at the my events page on this blog. If you would interested in having me speak at your event please contact me at events@joshmillsapps.com.

If you are interested in consulting services please go to MB&A Online to learn more.

I was exchanging email with a friend recently and I’ve always been very impressed with his organization. They have just very consistently put out the same messaging and are really successful from the products its developing, services it provides, all the way through talking to the people that received those services.  I was asking him about what they do internally to support all that and his response kind of surprised me because of how much consistency there is. He said that one of the big things that they do is ensure that people have ownership of things. Whether it is a line of code, a territory that they manage, or some portion of the organization, they explicitly define what they are responsible for. They give you real ownership of it and responsibility for the good and the bad.

He also mentioned a phrase that I thought was really interesting and I’ve co-opted it a little bit for myself and our organization. He said that their CBO has this phrase that he uses all the time and its EA3. It stands for Engage, Adapt, Adapt, Adapt and I love that.  I think it applies to just about everything we do.  I think that one of the things that kills a lot of efforts is this huge prelude to engagement. Whether we do so much thinking and so much planning that when we get into the actual work and we have to adapt to a change, we’re not ready for it or we’ve already spent so many resources that we’re not able to support that adaptation, something like that spells the end for an effort. So this idea that you engage first and fast so you can get out there and fail quickly or fail, adapt, change, fail, adapt, change, as many times as it takes to be successful is a powerful one. It really resonates with me because I feel like so often some of the best work that we’ve done has been where we’ve jumped right in and started rowing and done course corrections along the way to ensure that we get to where we want to end up. By jumping right into the work you give yourself the time to take chances, make mistakes, and adapt until you find the right and best approach.  So I don’t want to do too deep of a dive into what is essentially a sort of high level slogan but at least for me it really resonated and really seemed like the right approach to a lot of things. So I’m curious what other people think of that idea and I look forward to hearing your feedback.

Thanks as always for reading my blog, I hope you will join the conversation by commenting on this post.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to this blog and following me on twitter @jmillsapps. I regularly give talks via webinar and speak at events and other engagements. If you are interested in finding out where to see me next please look at the my events page on this blog. If you would interested in having me speak at your event please contact me at events@joshmillsapps.com.

If you are interested in consulting services please go to MB&A Online to learn more.

Today’s Salesforce event in DC got me thinking a little bit about the reasons why people should be interested in Salesforce. Whether they’re public sector or private sector there are a lot of reasons why people are moving to the cloud. I know that I am certainly not at the front of the hype cycle with regard to moving things to the cloud but I think there are 3 really basic reasons that people should be interested and excited about using Salesforce for their organizations.

1. Save money-The scale that Salesforce purchases equipment on and everything that they’re doing enables them to have massive economies of scale and pass those savings on to customers.  There’s just no way that most organizations can achieve the kind of buying power that Salesforce has with their vendors.
2. Time to value -One of the amazing things about Salesforce is it’s hardware infrastructure, the application infrastructure, the security model and all the things that they’ve put in place that enable you to focus on just writing the code that you need to do the piece that you need.  It’s a little different from the standard collaborations tools, document management, workflows. All these pieces that come standard in Salesforce allow you to quickly knit together capabilities that allows you to drive value for your organization really quickly.
3.  Path to value-One of the things that’s amazing about the Salesforce community is their momentum.  When you look at platforms like Apple and you see how many apps are out there, there’s literally an app for everything.  Well Salesforce is sort of the enterprise version of that and they’re getting to a point where they have an app for everything as well with more than 100,00 apps available and they have more than 70% of the Fortune 500 engaged. There’s so much that’s being done on top of the platform that you can acquire it to meet a particular need that you have right now, but understand that that acquisition is probably going to enable you to do other things over time. So you’re able to come in, transform the organization a little bit, then you can incrementally continue to change on the basis of being able to add functionality. You can do this either by acquiring additional applications that sit on top of the Salesforce platform or customize the platform itself to meet your requirements.

So it’s a really cool way for organizations to manage transformation across a broad area of capability. Again those are just three basic reasons to be excited about Salesforce for your organization. I know I’m excited to go to the event today and I’ll probably post some type of wrap up in the next few days.  Hope to see some of you there!

Thanks as always for reading my blog, I hope you will join the conversation by commenting on this post.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to this blog and following me on twitter @jmillsapps. I regularly give talks via webinar and speak at events and other engagements. If you are interested in finding out where to see me next please look at the my events page on this blog. If you would interested in having me speak at your event please contact me at events@joshmillsapps.com.

If you are interested in consulting services please go to MB&A Online to learn more.

I spend a lot of time talking about all the things you should do as part of a team, part of an organization, as an executive, or as a leader and almost all deal with the idea that there’s a path to value. The idea that you’re trying to get somewhere and that you want to get there as quickly as possible with the most value possible. So today what I wanted to do was talk about 6 potholes people hit on the path to value.

1. Over-planned an under-implemented– I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been part of an exercise where the planning has so dominated the total implementation that by the time It got around to actually doing the doing, there wasn’t enough resources left to really get it done. So much time and effort had been spent planning things, developing an incredible level of detail, or simply tracking around between different ideas that there wasn’t time left to actually do what you had set out to do.
2. Bought but not sold– A lot of times as an organization you spend a lot of effort to make complicated decisions, weigh a bunch of different tradeoffs, and finally choose a technology or approach that a small group within the organization believes is the right approach. Oftentimes they’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and it probably is the right approach. The problem is that they don’t ever spend any time marketing that approach to the rest of the organization. So the effort fails not because it wasn’t a good idea but because they didn’t sell it.
3. Right idea, wrong people– Oftentimes you find yourself with a group  of people who have a really good idea but, especially when you’re talking transformational sorts of projects, you are lacking depth in previous experiences which can prove to a major roadblock. If you don’t have people that maybe have experience in what you’re trying to do or have a lot of insight in to it, you set yourself up to go down this path to failure because you’re having to reinvent the wheel all the time. You don’t have anyone that you can lean on, that’s been through this type of project or process and can draw on past experience to lead you toward the future. So I think it’s important to a project’s success to have the right people engaged.
4. If some of this is a good thing then a lot of it is even better– This is a problem when you have one of these great projects going and you start to be successful. You then decide to scale it up on the basis of that success prematurely. This is where you run into problems because you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, maybe you weren’t resourced to scale it as quickly as you are, and you run into those types of problems.
5. Forgetting or never defining what success looks like– Too many times you get engaged in a project and you’re pushing really hard and as you get closer and closer to the end of your resources, you’re not sure how well you did. A lot of times that’s because you didn’t figure out at the very beginning what success was going to look like so you knew when you had achieved all that you wanted to achieve. Defining that in advance gives you some rails to guide your journey and lets you know when you’ve arrived.
6. Failure to capitalize on your success— This is one that people forget all the time because it’s not necessarily intuitive. When you’ve got a great project and you’ve put in a lot of hard work to achieve something, one of the things that organizations, executives, and mangers fail to do all the time is to take that success and use it to build forward into something else. You need to take the momentum that you’ve achieved and use it to go even further.  It’s something that I’m a huge believer in because it’s oftentimes so hard to get things going.  This could be for many reasons such as maybe you don’t have the credibility or the organization just doesn’t have a record of succeeding and executing on transformational projects. Whatever it is, once you get a success use it to build forward so that you can continue to achieve and perform.

Those are my six potholes on the path to value.  I’m sure there are things out there that I’ve missed. Hopefully next year when I do this it’ll be the 12 potholes due to people having chimed in with things that absolutely have to be on here.

Thanks as always for reading my blog, I hope you will join the conversation by commenting on this post.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to this blog and following me on twitter @jmillsapps. I regularly give talks via webinar and speak at events and other engagements. If you are interested in finding out where to see me next please look at the my events page on this blog. If you would interested in having me speak at your event please contact me at events@joshmillsapps.com.

If you are interested in consulting services please go to MB&A Online to learn more.

I’ve had some things happen the past few day that has made me think about why I wanted to get into the IT business for myself and the type of company I wanted to have;  so I thought I’d share.  Basically, ten years ago I started wanting to get into work for myself and thinking about what that might look like. I decided that I should put down my ideas about what my goals are for this future endeavor.  I ended up with three high level goals. In retrospect now I’d maybe make them a little different but for the most part in their essence they still stand. They were:

1. I wanted to work with cool people and really be a part of a great team.
2. I wanted to solve interesting problems, work with cutting edge technologies, and work with great clients.
3. Lastly, I wanted to make a lot of money.

As you can see these were pretty simple. I think I’d probably do a little bit more expanded version of that today but I think at the core, it’s still pretty relevant.  I think the first one about wanting to be a part of a team really comes from growing up playing sports and being on a team. There’s nothing more exciting than getting a chance to identify something that you want to achieve with a group of folks and working really hard to achieve it together. I find it more satisfying than just something that you could do yourself. It’s the shared aspect of it that for a lot of people, is just hard to replace.  You listen to guys that have retired from professional sports careers and a lot of them don’t talk as much about the money. They talk about missing the relationships and the sense of working together to achieve something and I wanted to try to recreate that.  It’s pretty rare in the traditional work environment to get something like that.

I got the chance to work at a company called Thaumaturgix that had a lot of people with kind of a unique set of circumstances in New York. We had people from all over and we really came together. We enjoyed working together and we worked hard, played hard. It was the first time I kind of had that same type of experience that I had on a sports team in the working world and I wanted to have something like that again.

The second one was working to solve big problems, work with cutting edge technologies, and help cool clients. Now while I mentioned the part about the greatness of achieving something as a team, I’ve also always been somebody who likes the feeling of being appreciated. I like the feeling of delivering something and of helping somebody out, almost from a selfish standpoint. There’s just something that feels good about somebody coming in and knowing they’ve chosen you to fix their problem. When you’re able to do it and complete the task, it feels really good.  On to the other part of my 2^nd goal, I’ve always had an interest in technologies and being able to do something a little bit smarter, a little bit better, and tying that together with the great feeling you get when you’re able to solve a problem for somebody. It’s just a great feeling.

Finally, I wanted to make a lot of money. Now I won’t say that it’s the most high minded of goals but it’s accurate.  I think most businesses are in business to make a profit. Secondary to that, I didn’t want to have a straight services business because what makes a services business go is that it’s basically the difference between what you can get from a client and what you can hold your employees to. That just was not the model that I wanted to have.  It puts you in an adversarial role with your employees and a lot of times, it puts you in an adversarial role with your clients because you’re pushing so hard to keep that margin there. So one of the things that we’ve tried really hard to do at Millsapps, Ballinger & Associates is develop solutions and find unique ways of doing things that are turnkey solutions for our clients. That way you’re not paying me to work a daily wage as much as you are to solve a problem. I think everybody feels better about that sort of scenario and as a company, I don’t think many businesses feel too badly about paying for something that they know is going to solve their problem. So I’m curious what other people think, what gets other people up in the morning, and why they’ve chosen to do what they do and I just thought I’d share why I got into this thing.

Thanks as always for reading my blog, I hope you will join the conversation by commenting on this post.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to this blog and following me on twitter @jmillsapps. I regularly give talks via webinar and speak at events and other engagements. If you are interested in finding out where to see me next please look at the my events page on this blog. If you would interested in having me speak at your event please contact me at events@joshmillsapps.com.

If you are interested in consulting services please go to MB&A Online to learn more.

I’m going to contradict myself today and talk a little bit about the importance of consistency.  I know that I’ve had quite a few posts on here talking about the importance of agility and recruiting for people that can be agile. While I think the ability to respond quickly to a change in environment is incredibly important, I think as an executive or a manger it’s important not to not to overuse that. I know that the temptation is to reshuffle, to reorganize, to reconfigure, and to be ready to take on the next challenge. For organizations large and small, the challenge changes every day so there’s an enormous temptation to take in the new data points that you have and begin to tinker around to find that optimal mix that s going to enable you to achieve your goal. There’s a temptation there to over transform and I think sometimes that’s exacerbated by having really great people that are capable of that type of change.

I know that for myself as a consulting firm you’re constantly faced with new and unique client side challenges and you’re tempted to throw your best people at it all the time. The upside to that is that oftentimes you’re able to win that business, succeed for that client, and really achieve.  The downside is that sometimes you’re yanking people out of an existing assignment, a natural fit, or something that they’ve just begun to gain expertise in to do it.  While they may be very capable of achieving and as I just said they may help you reach a successful conclusion on many occasions, you need to be a little bit careful of how many times you stretch the rubber band.  I just think that people get fatigued from all the overhead associated with this constant maneuvering.  Not only are they doing all the things that normally do at a high level but if you’re constantly being forced to go at 120% to adjust to your change in circumstance, you get worn out.

When you’ve found somebody who can maneuver quickly between projects successfully, you need to be careful about how often you ask them to do those types of things. There’s a fine line between the excitement of learning something new and being reinvigorated by a new challenge, and becoming overwhelmed by an environment that never stops evolving, never stops changing, and never allows you to become very competent in any one thing.  Its something that really needs to be guarded against and I believe is a management issue. It’s something that you, as a manager and executive, need to be conscious of on a daily basis and make sure that the amount of change that you’re asking people to undertake is something that they can handle and sometimes it can be really difficult.  I know that for us, we’ve had periods where we’ve had to ask people to move across projects to bring specific insight and input into them, rely on things that they’re really good,  and also force them to really dig deep to learn either a new skill or to get up to speed on that particular client in a hurry. So you just have to be careful about asking people to go the extra mile all the time.

I think a lot of people, particularly in the business we’re in, agility is part of the reason they got into consulting services. A lot of the folks that we have got into it this because they enjoy new challenges, working with new people, and change is just really part of the allure.  So in our case, I think we can be a little bit more progressive with how any challenges we throw at somebody. Although I still think, even in that circumstance where somebody has signed up to work with a lot of different organizations and evolve their skills rapidly by virtue of the job they’ve taken, you still need to manage how much you throw at somebody.  It can be overwhelming even for really smart people who want that sort of challenge on a regular basis.  I’m curious what other people think as always.  I’d love to hear if you have a story about being overwhelmed, being asked to be all things to all people, or being stretched too thin, and how you felt about that.

Thanks as always for reading my blog, I hope you will join the conversation by commenting on this post.

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to this blog and following me on twitter @jmillsapps. I regularly give talks via webinar and speak at events and other engagements. If you are interested in finding out where to see me next please look at the my events page on this blog. If you would interested in having me speak at your event please contact me at events@joshmillsapps.com.

If you are interested in consulting services please go to MB&A Online to learn more.