Understanding reports

Reports are a daily occurrence. A handy tool to keep track. That is... provided you understand what is behind the statistical figures. Simply a table with numbers may look very impressive, and many like to add a few colours and 3D-effects as well. Yet it might surprise you, how superficial they are being dealt with. Despite being too busy, this is absolutely no excuse, because a wrongly interpreted report can lead to fatal decisions.

In a real-life situation, a colleague came to me, complaining about a slow team member and hinting, to get rid of this employee. As it was my 3rd day on the new assignment, I promised to have a closer look. For the meantime, I didn't see any point in taking too drastic measures, especially since we didn't have an alternative person with similar skills. I sat down and both with what I received as feedback from the team-member and my own previous background, I started to design a report in order to measure what was really going on.

The first step - obviously - was a huge table of data, which needed some sorting. Thanks to the advanced possibility of xls-sheets, this was accomplished within a few mouse-clicks. It depends however, what you are looking for to finally come to the final report-output. Now comes the skill of give the appropriate interpretation of these figures to the reality; to erase any possible wrong assumptions or prejudices. The conclusion was a bit different from the conclusion of both the client and my colleague.

About a year ago, I was having a casual chat with a business analyst. We talked about various things and I cannot exactly recall how we ended up with this, but I started to elicit one of the assumptions about life in the Middle Ages. I like the example, since it nicely illustrates our remote knowledge of it, and underlines how preconceptions create a totally false image therefore. Beginning with the fact, that "mediaeval man had an average age of 35", makes us assume (in fact believe) that people of around 70 were practically non-existent. The numbers are a bit oversimplified, but they act only as an example. But the opposite is true. Despite dangerous or poor conditions, old people did exist. It was rather the high infant mortality rate (fatality at childbirth or hardly reaching the age of 3), which caused the average age to dramatically drop. His surprise to this revelation was in fact my surprise of why he doesn't know these pitfalls of statistics.

When using reporting data, it should be natural, that a manager takes time to know the context of the data. Know what you measure, know what lead to the given output and make sure that one does not use incomparable parameters. Equally, there is also - sometimes - the possibility to deliberately misinterpret the data. 

But at the end of the day, correct understanding - i.e. interpretation - is vital for your business (and your own professionalism). Thus, it needs more than just staring at colourful numbers.

Managing Projects - be practical

Some years ago I entered a project, which was already half-way. I travelled to my foreign assignment, expecting the promised briefing, and would proceed from there on. Seemed normal to me. But what I witnessed then, made my jawbone drop.

Instead of a briefing (although promised) - in fact just a 15 minutes chat - I immediately ended up in entering a video-conference with the highest chiefs and a medicine man, where the project leader delivered an assuring monologue to the headquarters. Not only was my proposed-by-them calendar of my trips around Europe a complete mess, some alarm-bells started to ring in my mind. This was my first day on my new assignment, so I didn't want to be a spoiler. Fully trying to be open minded, I felt increasingly getting uncomfortable. My intuition however proved right after all.

Ever had such kind of feeling? One might be surprised, how often similar scenarios might occur. And most surprising is, it is caused by people, who seem to have a long record of prestigious projects, yet the deliverables are dramatically below level. In order to be well prepared, regardless of your previous achievements, top-notch courses, or whatever; here are more or less six basics of Project Management.

1. Do your research thoroughly: No matter how successful your previous job turned out, the new project is always a new planet. You're in a new environment (organisation), other colleagues, other customers, other hard- or software. Take it as a blank page. Find new materials - even by merely googling or dedicated websites you can obtain plenty of info on anything, and make sure your data is fairly up-to-date.
2. Find pitfalls from other projects and try to understand them: Mistakes occurred in the past, and by analysing them can make you anticipate possible dangers ahead, saving you from a lot of unnecessary headaches
3. Design a road map - Planning: Believe it or not, I did witness projects which came from down the sleeve. By designing a plan, you identify your goals and can systematically fill in the steps in between. Be aware, that many organisations often enough do not have sufficient documentation to support you. It is you, who must be prepared for that.
4. Adequately communicate with all involved: It cannot be overstated, but good communication will contribute to proper co-ordination. Understand the customer's expectations, liaise with your team(s) to align all chores and be updated on milestones. Ignoring these, you might find yourself suddenly being far off road, with considerable damages to the stakeholders (and yourself).
5. Plan your milestones realistically: creating estimates for certain steps in the process is not merely applying a mathematical addition, multiplication and division. Two people do not necessarily half your project time, and it is best to allow more time to avoid missing sufficient testing or other necessary requirements. It's better to work extra time and deliver quality rather than impress with speed and fail in the end.
6. Test: Whatever you design, you need to test it - and not just once - in order be assured of its quality. Be thorough and any change, no matter how minute, needs repetitive exposure to pass the check.

Like a good wine, a project needs full attention and time to mature. In all, whichever assignment you take, these practical rules should not be overseen; so just be practical, and it will make you and your customer happier, when you sign off the job after implementation.

Interim Management - a new chance

Despite a few decades of globalisation, still a regional diversity can always be found. While on the one hand, Interim Management may be fully known to some people, it was quite surprising, that when arriving in Central Europe (including Austria) it was far from common. Companies needing urgent advise would address perhaps external consultancy giants. The advice was perhaps not only costly, whether it would be correctly and adequately implemented was still to be seen. And as experienced, a certain level of conservatism in many companies is quite rampant, sometimes even leading to reversal of advice.

Interim Management adds a certain dimension, when the concerned professional is not merely an external advisor, bringing in just extra expertise (whichever field that may be), (s)he is part of the decision-making hierarchy in an organisation - albeit for only a definite period of time, yet perhaps long enough to make a difference.

And it is perhaps because of this far reaching impact, that could be interesting to companies, especially in times of crisis. The crisis brought us the necessary confrontation, whether our management-styles, or business in general was efficient enough, and perhaps we realised having ignored or ousted (cost-saving?) certain too essential areas.

Interim Management offers many benefits as the scope and duration can be absolutely tailor-made and without the constraints of a traditional employment of senior positions, and therefore in this region is having a potential of becoming a boom shortly.

Ignoring your customer

A few days ago, I found a discussion on LinkedIn, whether it has become an acceptable habit not to respond to mails or phone calls; companies become unappreciative or disrespectful. Unfortunately, this is not the first time I read this rhetorical question (and I really hope, that most of you would agree, that there is only one answer possible) Such outcries are fairly common these days, and even when speaking to people, it is perhaps one of the most heard complaint nowadays. 

Doing business is all about trust. Seems an open door, but fully true. Unless there are indeed pressing reasons (like the person is ill, the network is down) responding to communication is the most important basic a business should stick to. And even I myself am often quite shocked how disrespectfully companies behave these days. And one always asks; for what reason? 

Remembering a phrase from a British comedy "Keeping up Appearances", where one of the protagonists frequently utters "it doesn't cost anything to be a bit polite"  - in various different wordings, it is clearly a true statement. When thinking of it, last week only, I had about 4 such instances. I am not talking of an e-mail which remains after one day unanswered, but rather a third or so attempt to get feedback, while getting read receipts, but no other reaction follows.

I can find some interesting tips for candidates on the internet, to write a 'thank-you' note after an interview in order to remain visible and creating a good imago (aha, so it is important!). But,  from experience, do I sense that this is not applicable for the businesses at all??? To be honest, a company, which ignores me is definitively not interesting to me - whether an e-shop, client, a bank, or whatever. Sadly enough, we have improved our communication lines - just imagine how business looked like 30 years ago. And what I hear most often as an excuse; high workload. Come on, be realistic!

By making the whole world more better accessible has indeed also complicated communication in a way. Yet a basic politeness is essential and vital to your business, and it really does not slow your business down. I rather get a quick mail, telling me "sorry, we are busy, but try to find out" (even if they forget afterwards) rather than having the feeling of being treated like garbage. So the benefit will always be yours. It's not rocket science, but it will positively reflect your attitude on basic ethics.

Best Practices... really?

Every walk in life undergoes developments, and man is usually inventive enough to optimise anything around him. This includes even every day's business processes. Recent attempts in the past few decades, have somehow systematically bundled improvement ideas into nowadays acknowledged philosophies. Labelled with BPIs, Best Practices or whether with more specific names like Six Sigma, even Lean Six Sigma, Kaizen, A3, all are focused on eliminating a certain redundancy to increase measurable output - quality-wise, but equally quantity - while decreasing the costs.

The most important understanding is that it serves not so much the very own reputation, but should be beneficial to the customer. No matter, what so-called internal KPIs are being regarded as, the content of the customer is ultimately what matters. Poor quality, high price will make the customer to go to the competition, and you will be out of business. 

A big misunderstanding on this concept I once came across, when dealing with a partner, who approached me for a service. We agreed to a price and signed a contract, until.... the company stopped communicating. After attempted to address the issue, I received an e-mail, where I was bluntly told, that due to internal regulations for each external contract a tender is to be required. Assuming, that it was perhaps a misunderstanding, since the deal has been signed already, the response was the same: "Sorry, forget about the whole signed contract". Maybe a common practice in Slovakia, it is a behaviour, which to a westerner is a bit unusual. At least, from where I come from. Despite a few meetings, to come to an agreement, the opposite party was not willing to give in.

Deducing the whole development, it was quite apparent, that an over-eagerly Best Practices Manager of the said company, found some ways to figure out additional savings. Perhaps a job evaluation was pending, or whatever, but it seemed a fairly inexperienced attempt to squeeze out some lousy euros.

Best Practices, in my humble understanding, is a way to do the 'best'. But provoking breaches of contract to impress management seems far from a best practice. Ironically enough, it was one of my acquaintances, who conducted a best practices project with this company. Knowing him, I cannot imagine, that this was what he taught them.

New thoughts / business philosophies can easily be misused and thus becoming utterly counter-productive. The company in my view lost a considerable credibility and such tiny mishaps can result in creating a bad reputation to the outside world. News usually travels very fast, especially in our global virtual world. Such practice, and especially such incompetence to compensate for it, can be a huge business risk. New areas could perhaps be an interesting specialisation for young(er) generation managers. But never take this task too lightly. It takes more to manage portfolios than just superficial enthusiasm.

Web 2.0 and Business

Web 2.0 has almost completely penetrated out daily lives. The very mere fact, that I am an active blogger, demonstrates this more than enough. At the same time, I must also admit, that I do have acquaintances, who perhaps are not even aware of this and maintain a certain distance. For those, who are not fully informed; Web 2.0 is not a software update - it is basically the same conventional internet but instead of just surfing for information, booking a ticket, order a book, it has some additional platforms, which offer a more dynamic networking possibility: To directly and real time interact with anyone, no matter where both parties may be. Communication by only e-mail has been extended to another level - the social platforms.

While many people utilise environments like Facebook only to post party photographs from the last weekend, or holiday, perhaps to get in touch with lost friends from the past, companies have obviously discovered this medium as a new way to promoting and propelling new business opportunity. Although the former is actively being used by businesses as well, it is more platforms like LinkedIn, Xing, or and others, which offer a more serious environments to induce networking.

In a dynamic age - in which we are - we have quickly absorbed this new tool into our lives. Whether we have done so effectively enough remains to be questioned. Lately, I noticed an urgent request from one of my LinkedIn contacts. As I could provide a solution, I immediately responded - not just via LinkedIn, but I anticipated the probability, that the said person would maybe not visit LinkedIn within a few hours, therefore I also forwarded an e-mail as well. There was indeed a prompt reaction. Some weeks passed by, however, and I inquired on the status. The response was more or less disappointing: "Hasn't received anything".

I seem to notice an unfortunate trend, where individuals sign up (for whatever reason), and assume that the crutch of the whole thing is to accumulate connections. And there it stops. The person from my previous example, was indeed priding herself with a 2000+ status. Impressive, but what did it bring? Apparently, from further correspondence it transpired, that she had a complete chaos in her work. Perhaps the fanatic acquisition of links prevented her to keep focused on her initial work. Her waste of time, and in the end, my waste of time as well.


Another example is of somebody, who frequently (perhaps over-frequently) feeds twitter-like messages, which seem fully out of context, posting video messages that rather show a certain over-enthusiasm but hardly any profound added value, and instead of getting useful info, it became rather an irritating bubble. Perhaps better presentation skills and improving the language would somewhat help to overcome this problem, but in all, the strategy was fairly unprofessional.

Social networks can have a very useful role, when utilised in a sensible way the impact can be amazing. Promoting your business there can be very effective - after all, the basic "word of mouth" advertisement is far more powerful than any prestigious marketing campaign. And social platforms serve as a kind of real-time electronic word of mouth medium. No more, no less. And as in real life, the users are just people. Those who find a proper way to get to business, and those who will not. I am fully convinced of the benefits of Web 2.0, and I shall be using it optimally. Yet, remaining critical at all times is perhaps the best approach. 
PS.: I deleted the contacts from my list...

Outsourcing Risks

Business has two contradictory interests; profit and a happy customer. While in the old days, the to-be captains of industry would start somewhere in a shed and sweated for years to reach a success, nowadays business seems to focus on short-term profits. All the involved, from your banker up to your CEO, you need to deliver a business case with impressive multi-coloured graphs to demonstrate an even more impressive return on investment as soon as possible. But, is this really what it is all about?

As business has gone global, and thanks to computers and internet the world has truly become a smaller place, regional distances play hardly any significant role any longer. In contrast, the mere fact that regionally labour costs do vary considerably, has created a trend in outsourcing. Not so much talking of outsourcing your catering or cleaning services to a specialised service supplier, rather talking about specialised processes, like HR, IT and even Finance & Accounting.

Whether such a trend is indeed justified, depends on certain preconditions, which are not in all instances correctly understood, properly defined, resulting in unexpected higher operating costs - contrary to the projected saving. Especially, when dealing with the certain "offshore outsourcing" the risks are relatively high. Technical constraints - provided the hard- and software are compatible to the customer's - are hardly an issue, as even an in-house department can equally be affected by a technical failure. 

When building a business case for outsourcing, the driver is a lower price tag, usually represented by lower labour costs more or less in combination of other lesser costs like office space. The more customers get on board, the cheaper the service. Yet this may in some cases, as I witnessed in the past with two customers, a merely theoretical model, which when put into practice, proved to be far less profitable, even incurring a loss.

My first encounter in an outsourcing project was back in 1998, when the concept was rather new. The second was in 2006, where one could have had multiple reports from prestigious audit companies, delving in detail with possible pitfalls. Yet, the project has equally been grossly underestimated, resulting in a poorly structured project, where the individual customers felt far from being content. The former company could absorb the kind of set-back, the latter, a Brussels controlled but Finnish company was less fortunate.

Some basics have been overlooked; statistical data were badly interpreted, which negatively influenced the decision-making. The low price tag, became almost an obsession, which delivered at the onset enthusiastic staff, but poorly equipped to execute their tasks in line with the customers' expectations. This dramatically changes the success of the whole endeavour, where the saving is guaranteeing only poor output. Proper training come at a cost, but it only ensures that teams are comfortable with the tasks given. Otherwise, the quality will sway and a risk of personnel outflow is hanging in the air.

Coming back to my introduction; the main interest of any service provider should be a happy customer and from there trying to be cost effective. Fully understanding the customer's needs is a skill, which comes first, and fully realising, that setting up a new service centre is an investment, which will pay itself back after some years - and not from the onset.

Keeping in mind this, to properly invest in your people and ensure that the service deliverables are acceptable to the client, then moving towards excellence and process improvement can take place, which makes the whole business profitable. If not, it will become a costly prestigious project that is doomed to fail from the very beginning. And believe me, an unhappy customer is almost no customer and without him you make hardly any profit at all.