Risk Management

My company is not really selling a set of skills, it is selling risk management. Hire us and we will help you manage the high risk of IT projects, is the message. The issues are as much behavioral as they are technical. We can help quantify the risk, but to be successful our recommendations have to be adopted.

Thinking of our offering as a risk management offering allows us to draw lessons from other disciplines. The financial markets, for example, are another area where risk was not managed properly. David Brooks offers that the whole discipline of risk management is undergoing a revolution. Are there lessons here for my consulting practice? I don’t know but I’ll find out and look for innovative thoughts on risk management — perhaps recast the business that way?

Would risk management be a better way to position the company? Here is an easy way to gauge it: the survey results are ready to be rolled out.  Two messages will be crafted, one a risk management message and the other a more traditional message. I am planning a freebie training for the right team(s) if they qualify. Their applications will provide a chance to evaluate the respondents and further gauge the level of interest in the offering. It will also provide valuable insight into whether one message “sells” better than the other.

An Anxious Time

Starting a business requires (for me, anyway) a level of inner calm that has been in short supply lately. It’s been a perfect storm instead, three anxieties blending and reinforcing each other.

While the survey was open, the urge to monitor responses as they came in was strong — it was difficult not to look every so often and try to think of ways of increasing the response rate. It turned out not to be the straight forward set-it-and-forget-it project that I expected. Also strong was the urge to monitor events on the Presidential campaign trail. The interplay of the stock market and the hurling of political brickbats. Living in a non-swing state, there isn’t much to do other than wait to vote but the brickbats can make it hard to focus. Finally, health issues with an elderly family member, visits to hospitals and medical management have perhaps been the largest contributor to this anxiety.

The survey is done, and the results have been published. What remains is rollout of the results — thoughtfully, to be followed by more things that require calm and deliberate action. The election will be over in 9 days, replaced by a new spectacle of celebration, recriminations and transitions. The medical issues? They will likely continue as well.

In other words, the distractions will continue. The more we try to ignore them, the more insistent they will be, like our dog when he wants attention. Best to treat them not as distractions but as part of life!

The calm comes from the vessel, not from the raging seas.

Empirical Living

I am happy to report that there is hope yet! If you clicked on the article and read it, you might have concluded that I aspire to walk in Cezanne’s footsteps, or at least Ben Fountain’s. No.

I’m drawing inspiration from the fact that it appears possible to be creative even in the twilight of one’s working life. Furthermore, the creative process for late bloomers parallels my creative process: that of trying things, observing what happens, changing course, and trying again.

Not for me ideas that emerge fully formed, only to be executed. I had my share of those in my twenties. This is a time for Empirical Living, enjoying the journey and all that.

What’s your rate?

Someone — a consulting firm that was considering using me for some of their assignments — asked me this question last week and I’m afraid I didn’t answer it as well as I could have. I told him what clients pay for this type of service, what I myself paid a consulting firm last year. From this number, the firm would get a cut and I would get the remainder. We didn’t discuss what their cut would be — we both felt it was a little premature. A better response would have been to ask what he thought clients would pay, since this firm is a lot closer to the marketplace than am I. No harm done, we are supposed to talk again next week, but a good lesson for the future.

I am not inclined to lower the rate but considering freebies as a way to prime the business, but first a little detour:

Since the elevator pitch was refined, it made more sense to have it be the first thing visitors encounter. It is now the landing page of the web site. The elevator pitch begs the question what does Full Service really mean, so I thought it would help to answer it with a new page on the web site.

The aforementioned page lists the offering in one neat list and it’s a good place to look at in deciding what could prime the pump. Training (#2) will be one of our offerings. There will be 2 versions, one for senior management and one for project managers, analysts, developers and testers. I’m inclined to make the management training free. Another idea is to offer an “Early Adopter discount” in exchange for references.

1. Your thoughts?
2. Any others that might help bring in business?

One last thing: I don’t expect to put the training material on-line but will gladly share draft versions in exchange for feedback.

Traffic!

In the interest of casting a wide net, the survey was sent out last week. In addition to just the CIO group, I ended up sending it to 3 other groups. The survey code was modified slightly to help keep track of answers by mailing list.

From looking at web site usage logs, I can tell that people are spending some time at the web site after they fill out the survey. This is exactly what was intended! It is hard to cite how much traffic to the web site has multiplied by — it was zero before.

The survey closes in a week, then I will be compiling the results and sending them out. Hopefully that will generate a bit more traffic.

Asking (rather than telling) is clearly a more effective form of communication, one that appears to have promise in terms of getting the word out.

Food Acquisition Strategies

Mankind has developed myriad strategies for acquiring food. I think each has an equivalent in marketing. It’s an old Mathematician’s trick: if you can convert an unsolved problem to a previously solved problem, you will get a solution to the unsolved problem. So here’s a list of all the ways we acquire food…

The Supermarket

Isn’t that where food really comes from? It was Michael Pollan’s article that turned me into a vegetarian six years ago. No single piece of writing has ever had a more direct and lasting impact on my lifestyle. Michael has a new book out, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. According to a friend, (I haven’t read the book myself) it talks about the process of growing, transporation and distribution of food all the way to the supermarket.

Working in a large company is sort of like going to the Supermarket for your food. Or worse, McDonalds.

I’ll have Happy Meal #6, please. That square piece of fish? It has the exact same mix of proteins a fish would have, that’s why we call it fish. What’s your Myers-Briggs type? We have a job that fits you perfectly, provides for all your needs. Your title will be Big Fish.

Farming

I have zero talent for farming or growing things. I was good at killing the hardiest of plants. If a seed didn’t sprout in 24 hours flat, I was known to drown it with my impatience! The last time I owned a plant was that begonia in Grad School. And yet…

A seed I had planted a month ago and given up for dead showed a little sprout today. Whether it ever becomes a bonafide tree remains to be seen but at least I didn’t flood it to death!

That’s what a referral strategy is: spreading seeds, watering the ground, trusting, patiently waiting for sprouts, removing weeds, keeping wild animals away and eventually, hopefully, harvesting.

Fishing

First rule of fishing: go where the fish are. How do you know where that is? Look for the crowd of boats on the open water. Or ask someone who recently caught one. After a while, you won’t need to ask any more, you will develop and intuition for this.

Until then, it is best to go to networking meetings, possibly even hire a fishing guide to help you find the fish.

If you can’t see anyone fishing and can’t find a guide, cast a wide net and hope for the best.

Hunting / Gathering

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Summary

One of the reviewers of Michael Pollan’s book had this to say:

Michael Pollan’s beautifully written, eye-opening new book already has me thinking about everything I put into my mouth. Clearly, this is an important, even a ground-breaking book. The Omnivore’s Dilemma is much more than just an indictment of industrial food systems, or our treatment of animals, though. That’s what other reviewers are concentrating on, and they’re right. What I took away from this book, though, was just how thoughtless we have become about what we feed ourselves. More than anything else, Pollan’s book is a plea for us to stop and think for a moment about our whole process of eating. Just as we get the political leaders we deserve, we also get the food we deserve. Pay attention! 

That’s also the message for marketing this business. It’s not enough to be able to get business. We have to pay attention to whether the process of getting the business builds relationships or destroys them, whether it takes advantage of people, and whether the net result (a sale) will result in value added.

Of course, I write this at a time when I’m not starving!

Casting a Wide Net

The goal of marketing to the Financial Services industry has been chewed up and spit out by global financial events. My next move is to cast a wide net and see if the notions behind this company are still valid.

Dan Ariely in his book Predictably Irrational has a lot of interesting ideas. One of them is the value of “free”. I wanted to reach out to the 3000+ members of the LinkedIn CIO group and, taking a leaf from Dan’s book, I have come up with a strategy:

1. Instead of doing a mass mailing telling them what Quantitecture is about, I will survey the members and promise to provide them with the results of the survey. Knowing how many of them are even interested in the subject will be a revealing metric.
2. The survey will be hosted on the company web site. They will see only a small part of the web site while they are filling out the survey; they will see the whole site once they have completed the survey — I’m hoping they will linger.
3. They will have the option of receiving the results by e-mail or bookmarking the site.

The survey is ready at a beta site. I’m hoping some of the readers of this blog will take it through its paces and give me a little feedback before it gets inflicted on members of that mailing list.  Thanks in advance.

Self-imposed Limitations

One of the Venture Groups I belong to suggested this format for an elevator pitch:

1. What does your company do?
2. Who do you do it for?
3. What is the benefit to the buyer?
4. How big is the market?
5. Why should the investor be interested?
6. Why are you the ones to do it?
7. How much money do you need?
8. How are you going to use the funds?

Are we limiting ourselves by choosing to stay small and going without venture funding? What could we do with money if we had it? This will remain a back burner question until it can be confirmed that this is a useful service that people would pay for.

I was always known for the people I hired and the teams I built. Even my critics acknowledged that I knew how to get things done, and how my teams were much greater than the sum of the individuals, how independent they were of me, and how damn competent!

Are we limiting ourselves by choosing to stay small and leaving my team building talents untapped? This too will remain a back burner question until it can be confirmed that this is a useful service that people would pay for.

The Elevator Pitch

Every start-up business should have an “elevator pitch”, what you say to someone you meet in the elevator who wants to know what your company does. Here is ours:

We are a full service consulting practice dedicated to performance, availability and scalability of computer applications. Do you know that 84% of all software projects don’t meet their goals? That’s 1 success out of 6 projects.

• Quite often it is because of performance problems.  They come to light after the development gets done and then people discover that the solution doesn’t perform or doesn’t scale; doesn’t meet the service level requirements for one reason or another.
• We don’t do development or project management, only performance, scalability and availability.

We work with the technology and business management teams to keep a tight focus on these requirements throughout the life cycle.

Our value add is in bringing early visibility to performance and service levels. A lot of companies out there do load testing for you after the system has been built. By then it is often too late to make changes. You still want to do load testing for validation but for project success, you want continuous focus on performance. We start that focus in the requirements phase, model performance through the architecture/design/development phases, measure and validate in the integration phase and verify post-install.

Optional add on (for long elevator rides)

Early on in the process, we might help a client specify performance and SLA requirements.  Soon after, we build a spreadsheet model of the system, not very precise, but it can show the areas to watch for. Then, as the system comes together, we measure and refine the model. The main advantage of our approach is that people start to think about performance very early in the process and drastically improve the client’s chances for a successful project.