As many of our longtime readers know, our company uses the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gauge customer satisfaction. The NPS focuses on one simple question: “How likely are you to recommend MIPRO Consulting to a friend or colleague?” That’s it. That’s the central focus and the key metric with respect to how good a customer’s experience was with us.

The respondents answer this single question on a scale of 0 to 10 (0 being most unlikely to recommend again, 10 being most likely), and there is an optional comments option. Customers who score us a 9-10 are considered Promoters, Passives are customers who rank us 7-8, and customers who score us 0-6 are considered Detractors. The responses are taken in aggregate and compiled into a total organizational score of 0-100%. Anything over 50% is considered excellent. For some rough context, the best and most efficient companies running the NPS model are firms like Apple (72%), Costco (77%), Wegmans (78%), Trader Joe’s (82%) and USAA (87%). That’s the rarefied air.

(Incidentally, for more details on the Net Promoter Score, see here.)

MIPRO’s last score was an astounding 76% — falling somewhere in between Apple and Costco. We do a lot of talking on this blog about how our culture stresses doing what’s right, how a consulting company can actually be a valuable business partner, and why customer experience is at the crux of everything we do. When we see our customers give us a 76% aggregate NPS score, it’s amazing. It means we’re doing something right.

Along similar lines, in doing some research around the topic of customer surveys, I discovered an interesting article, The Six Laws of Customer Experience. It basically posits the following six axioms and their bottom line interpretations:

1. Every interaction creates a personal reaction.

Bottom Line: You need to understand your customers, personally.

2. People are instinctively self-centered.

Bottom Line: Make the shift from self-centeredness to customer-centeredness.

3. Customer familiarity breeds alignment.

Bottom Line: An external focus is an antidote to internal politics.

4. Unengaged employees don’t create engaged customers.

Bottom Line: Customer experience depends on employee experience.

5. Employees do what is measured, incented and celebrated.

Bottom Line: Don’t blame employees, fix the environment.

6. You can’t fake it.

Bottom Line: If you’re not committed to customer experience, you can only fool yourself.

MIPRO lives and and breathes many of the recommendations of the Six Laws: customer feedback is our key metric; employees are empowered; we don’t sell things, we help customers buy them; we gain a clear view of what our customers need, want and dislike to align decisions and actions; employees buy-in to what MIPRO is doing and are aligned with the efforts. The article is a quick read and I think it offers some really good insights into striving for and achieving positive customer experiences. The most striking quote in the article is this:

Profit and growth are stimulated primarily by customer loyalty. Loyalty is a direct result of customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is largely influenced by the value of services provided to customers. Value is created by satisfied, loyal and productive employees.

For many companies, especially in the consulting realm where there are so many horror stories, customer experience is something you read about in marketing material. For us, it’s in our DNA.

And our customers have noticed.

We couldn’t ask for anything more.

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In part one we identified some of the main reasons large PeopleSoft projects fail.  Now let’s discuss how we mitigate these risks and implement for our clients successfully.

Risk: The solution is not tied to the business objectives.

• As outlined in previous blogs, one of the first activities we conduct is the BluePrint Workshop. The workshop identifies all of the project objectives, classifies them as strategic or tactical, prioritizes all of the objectives, identifies how we are able to measure each objective (after all, if you can’t measure it, it is challenging to determine if it was met).  Finally we attach project success criteria to the objectives.  These objectives are a part of the project charter which is expected to be signed off by the executive sponsor.

Risk: Scope is not managed.

• Every project has a well defined scope change management plan with appropriate escalations and approvals.  Preferable is the approach that any change to scope once the fit/gap is completed requires a change order whether it is the smallest seemingly insignificant change or a very large change.  All changes have must be approved by project management and executive sponsorship to be fully approved for the project.

Risk: Organization is not prepared for change.

•  A full time organizational change management lead who is experienced with preparing organizations for change associated with PeopleSoft engagements should be deployed on the project.  Organizational change preparedness is so much more than simply communication in that is requires its own discipline, expertise and dedicated skillsets.

Risk: Project team skills are not appropriate and unavailable.

• During the BluePrint Workshop we identify the required resources required from both the client and MIPRO.  For each client resource we identify the very specific role and responsibilities along with the percentage of time they are required for the project.  This information again becomes part of the project charter.  Additionally, as outlined in the charter, these are the resources required to achieve the objectives of the project and be on time and on budget.  We conduct a sanity check of resources against project objectives.  We expect the executive sponsor to support the project and ensure the identified resources are available for the anticipated timeframe.

Risk: Executive Sponsorship is not strong and not visible.

• The role of the executive sponsor begins immediately with the BluePrint Workshop where the executive sponsor outlines why the project is important to the organization and identified corporate level objectives (that we then tie to the project objectives).  The executive sponsor signs off on the project charter along with his/her expected role.  We put the executive sponsor into the change process, issue escalation process and organizational change process.

Risk: The system is not sustainable by the client.

• Knowledge transfer is the cornerstone of our SD3 implementation methodology.  Not only do we staff with the best and brightest, but we align resources directly to the appropriate client counterparts.  Our design allows for the MIPRO team to understand the client business and for the client to understand PeopleSoft.  By the end of the project we expect our clients to know as much as we do about PeopleSoft so they can sustain the system.  Additionally we ensure shortcuts are not taken on testing and training.  This is achieved if we plan appropriately upfront and execute well.

Risk: End users are not trained

• There are multiple factors used to ensure end user training.  The first is a training strategy developed up front, early in the project.  We also recommend a training lead to develop and lead the training efforts. UPK is a very valuable tool to help ensure end users are trained.  We time end user training to coincide as close to go live as possible.  As noted prior, with the proper planning we do not find ourselves in situations where the timeline is crunched and the project is looking for ways to cut corners (which usually results in training being reduced).  Having the right staffing, dedication to training and planning allows us to ensure end users are trained appropriately.

When titling this post, I reminded myself of the ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”  Actually, what we strive for at MIPRO are uninteresting implementations and upgrades.  So, that said, before beginning a project, one should always review the following:

MURPHY’S LAWS OF COMPUTING

1. For every action, there is an equal and opposite malfunction.
2. To err is human… to blame your computer for your mistakes is even more human; in fact it is downright natural.
3. He who laughs last probably made a back-up.
4. If at first you don’t succeed, blame your computer.
5. A complex system that does not work is invariably found to have evolved from a simpler system that worked just fine.
6. The number one cause of computer problems is computer solutions.
7. A computer program will always do what you tell it to do, but rarely what you want it to do.
8. When computing, whatever happens, behave as though you meant it to happen.
9. When you get to the point where you really understand your computer, it’s probably obsolete.
10. The first place to look for information is in the section of the manual where you least expect to find it.
11. When the going gets tough, upgrade.
12. When you need to send an email quick, that’s when the modem wireless router won’t connect!

So, how does one avoid as many of these real – though humorous – problems and maximize success?  One word:  planning.  Throughout the rest of this post, you will see numerous examples of platitudes, conventional wisdom, and corny advice – all of it real and all of it worth emphasizing.

So, plan your work and work your plan.  Sound reasonable?  You’d be surprised how many projects fall into the ready, fire, aim category.  In fact, if you don’t have time to do it right, how are you going to find time to do it over?

Projects should be planned.  In fact, the planning phase of a project should consume 10-15% of the total cost and effort of the entire project.  I’m sure your momma once told you that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Or, as the Cheshire Cat told Alice, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

So plan already.  In fact, if you plan well enough, you can probably find someone else to do the work (just kidding!).  But, laying out the plan well, and then measuring how your project conforms to the plan, is the surest method to ensure success.  In fact, if you are serious about planning and measuring, this is one time that no good deed goes unpunished will probably not come to fruition.

For those of us with some engineering background, remembering the 2^nd law of thermodynamics is always critical:  increasing entropy, or while the quantity of something may remain the same, the quality of it deteriorates gradually over time.

Projects are like this, in spades.

Without a good plan (and good measurements against that plan), and serious scope control, projects tend to drift, slow down, get more expensive, take too long, and generally offend the sensitivities of the very stakeholders who are paying for – and should be receiving the benefits of – the project.  In fact, most projects end up living up to this maxim:  all’s well that ends.

So, if we know that everyone’s enthusiasm will wane (definitely a 2^nd law truism) and management will become impatient (you know that the frequency and severity of system crashes are in direct proportion to the importance of the audience), being able to demonstrate and document where the project is (and where it will be in X days) will mitigate against our bosses saying about our project, ‘After all is said and done, a heck of a lot more was said than done.’

It’s interesting that in my legal world, we are ethically bound when taking a case that we must (a) be knowledgeable about the subject matter, or (b) study up to become knowledgeable fast enough not to prejudice our client, or (c) associate in some other lawyer who is knowledgeable.

How does this apply to our enterprise IT projects?

Well, how often does your organization actually do a project like this?  If it’s an upgrade, when was the last time you successfully performed the upgrade on your own?  If it’s a new system – financials, human resources, payroll, maintenance management, etc. – when was the last time you successfully implemented a complex software system that affected all or a large portion of your organization?  Are you knowledgeable enough about the subject matter?  Can you do the project with OJT fast enough?  Or will you require assistance from someone who is knowledgeable?

It first comes down to planning:  what you want to do, when you want to do it, what resources it will take, how long will it take, and, last but certainly not least, how much will it cost.  For sure, unless you have both the plan and the expertise to work that plan, you should re-read the Murphy’s Laws at the beginning of this post.  Remember, if there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.  And the corollary adds the word “first” to the end of the sentence.

In conclusion, plan, measure, plan, measure, and make sure you took plenty of time to plan.  I planned for this article to run two pages as I draft it here in Word.  Ahh, I can change the font size to ensure that it’s two pages:  if I declare “success” loud enough, my project is a success!  With proper preparation, YOUR project can also be a success.  Remember, Murphy was an optimist….

Questions, comments or feedback about this? Don’t be afraid to email me.

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MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

About this blog.

I heard a radio ad a few days ago that has been bugging me, so I’m going to riff on it here. Sorry, no links or cat stories this week.

In the radio spot, the voiceover guy says in closing, “We do what’s right for the customer, not what’s right for the company.”

The second I heard that I bristled. I thought, what a myopic approach not only to running a business, but also communicating with your customers.

What bugs me is the notion that these two ideas are separate, living in two different ideological silos, one completely unaware of the other. Silo one says, “Let’s do what’s best for the customer, screw the company.” Silo two says the opposite: “Let’s take care of the company, but nevermind the customer.”

Look at Apple, Amazon, Zappos: do we not have enough modern-day examples of how the radio ad’s thinking is totally wrong?

Let’s put our Steve Jobs hats on for a second: if you take care of your customers — build a great product,  provide a great service, create relationships and not just transactions — the company’s going to be just fine. Actually, way more than fine. It will thrive.

This idea is something that you hear a lot of companies espouse, but dig a bit deeper and it’s not always put into practice. Why? Gotta watch out for the company. Someone in some meeting realizes that taking care of the customer means looking at your products or services and maybe totally revamping them, because they’re not the best for the customer. And when that happens, the idea gets resistance and often dies on the vine. It gets relegated to a nice marketing tagline at best.

To us, it’s always been this: you watch out for your customers and clients, and the rest will come. There are the normal constraints of reason, of course — a smart company isn’t going to satisfy irrational, opportunistic customers — but for most cases, there’s little need to think that taking care of the customer and the business are different things.

I can’t tell you how many times we have told clients that they don’t need implement module X, or they really don’t need custom interface Y, or that idea Z would wind up stressing their internal teams despite netting us a nice engagement contract. Each time, the customer has come back to thank us for shooting straight with them, even when the money/deal/project was ours for the taking.

It’s about doing the right thing, all the time, without exception. The money we have lost by walking away from those projects has come back to us threefold when our customers refer us to other opportunities with colleagues or partners. Every time, it’s, “You guys shot me straight, and I was blown away by that. I want to introduce you to a colleague of mine who has a big PeopleSoft project in the hopper but is sick of being burned by other consulting companies.”

You take care of your customers, and you take care of the business. Same time, same thing. No difference.

As for me personally, I’d be wary of any company whose advertising talks of it being an either/or proposition. It’s crazy enough to think it, but it’s another level of crazy altogether to articulate it.

Anyway, there’s my riff. Have a great weekend, everyone.

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A Clear And Present Danger

How often does it happen that an organization moves from an old legacy ERP type system to a new, up-to-date ERP system and it fails to meet expectations and to improve system and business process efficiency?

Too often!

One of the primary reasons is that the project is way underfunded for the scope and somehow management has decided that there is no need for the costs to be what other successful companies have spent and they set forth to “do it on the cheap.”  Major strategic projects, such as a new ERP implementation or major ERP upgrade, which are underfunded, under staffed, and given an unrealistic time frame to complete, almost never work out.

Cutting corners and saving money on such strategic projects, which are a foundation for the company to support how they manage the business,  may not be the best idea.  The ROI is to be realized after a powerful system is implemented successfully and everyone’s expectations are met.  Doing it right means:

• More cost upfront on the project, but also a maximized ROI for the long term, as in 10 to 15 years, every year.
• Significantly higher system performance and business process efficiency realized, every year.
• Smooth transition from the old to the new system.
• Easier Business User buy-in and happier end users from the get-go.
• Much less maintenance and support costs, every year.
• Minimizing the need for customizations and making future upgrades easier and cheaper.

Given that most organizations do have to deal with finite budget limits on such projects, the best strategy is to plan what scope you can do, within the limits, while “doing it right.”

A Best Practice would be not to take or introduce unnecessary risks, which seldom work out.  Most often one cannot do all of the scope that one would like to do in Phase 1 due to the budget and time available.  What you can do to is develop a long-term, phased-in roadmap, based on business priorities, where the key stakeholders will be able to see when their needs will be taken care of.  OK, they may not get the new system functionality this year, but they will be happier to see that it is at least on the list to be done next year, or the year after.

With new technology, it is often said that “You don’t know what you don’t know.”  If you choose to do it on the cheap, you are most likely going to find out what you don’t know the hard way — and sooner, rather than later. What you may save on the front end, you will likely pay the piper for many years to come.

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Say what you want about Cuban, but I love his no-BS approach. Here are his 12 rules for startups, and it’s hard to argue with any of them. He comes out of the gate with two I find to be the cornerstone of every successful business:

1. Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love.

2. If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession.

Read the whole thing over at Entrepreneur.com.

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Happy new year, everyone.  Glad to be back.

Today’s post is about pursuit, and how it applies to leadership. What is pursuit? How does it relate to leadership?  Good question.

Mike Myatt over at Forbes.com says that great leaders aren’t content with the status quo, static thinking or conventional wisdom. Instead, they purse excellence, truth, reason, intelligent change, improved relationships. Great leaders know that in order to achieve great things, often current mechanisms don’t work. They can’t. But here’s the crux of the idea of pursuit:

Here’s the thing – pursuit leads to attainment. What you pursue will determine the paths you travel, the people you associate with, the character you develop, and ultimately, what you do or don’t achieve. Having a mindset focused on pursuit is so critical to leadership that lacking this one quality can sentence you to mediocrity or even obsolescence. The manner, method, and motivation behind any pursuit is what sets truly great leaders apart from the masses. If you want to become a great leader, become a great pursuer.

A failure to embrace pursuit is to cede opportunity to others. A leader’s failure to pursue clarity leaves them amidst the fog. Their failure to pursue creativity relegates them to the routine and mundane. Their failure to pursue talent sentences them to a world of isolation.  Their failure to pursue change approves apathy. Their failure to pursue wisdom and discernment subjects them to distraction and folly. Their failure to pursue character leaves a question mark on their integrity. Let me put this as simply as I can – you cannot attain what you do not pursue.

It’s more nuanced than simply that, though. For example: great leaders need to know what to pursue and not just rabidly chase everything that hits their to-do lists. It’s about being smart and knowing what to say no to.

Through the no’s you’ll see your yes’s with much more clarity.

Read Myatt’s entire piece here.

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Got some downtime this week? Bob Sutton wants to help you fill it. Here’s his list of the 11 books every leader should read, and it’s a good one. I have Made to Stick already downloaded as a sample on my Kindle, and I’m going to download Thinking, Fast and Slow too (I’m a bit of a brain science nerd). If I had to pick a third, it would probably be The Progress Principle, based on other reviews I have read.

More to read here than you can possibly handle. At the very least, give the list a look and flag a few that might help you in the coming year.

Remember, personal and professional development is all about investment and effort.

Have other books you consider a must-read? What are they?

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You read that right: RIM, as a company, is now worth less than Apple’s App Store, a fragment of a company, alone.

An analysis from Trefis places the value of the App Store at 2 percent of Apple’s market cap. AAPL stock has a market cap of $354 billion, or more than 50 times greater than RIMM, and 2 percent of that means the App Store contributes $7.08 billion to Apple’s market cap.

“The App Store is probably worth more than BlackBerry,” Hall wrote. “All of BlackBerry. Just the App Store. Nothing else. Not the iPhone or iPod. Not Mac. Just the App Store.”

This makes me both sad and angry. I mean, I’m sitting here shaking my head.

I’m sad because BlackBerry was my real introduction to smartphones. (We won’t count my fling with a Kyocera 7135, which was awful.) It was the first device that brought mobile messaging and email to the masses, and it gave us the ability to check the web, however awkwardly, on the go. BlackBerry was the leader: everyone had one, and they worked.

You would think RIM would have been able to parlay that early momentum into a broader vision, one that took the platform well beyond messaging. But you’d be wrong.

That’s why I’m angry. Through either sheer, bald-faced laziness or incompetence, RIM did essentially nothing notable for the past five years. Bombarded by Apple and Android — who now own the mobile space — RIM released reheated versions of their QWERTY devices, a few models of touchscreen devices that were universally decried as garbage, and then built a rushed, half-baked tablet to try and react to the iPad. As of this writing, they still have no next-gen OS that will appear before late 2012. The PlayBook tablet, especially, illustrated the company’s lack of vision and strategy: not only did the device get met with poor reviews and even poorer customer demand, but RIM went and built 2.65 million units of the things and later had to eat the losses as a $485M writeoff. Finally, as icing on the cake, a couple of RIM executives hopped on planes and began drunkenly chewing through restraints, which they found themselves in after some pretty horrific behavior.

And now, today, RIM is a shell of what it used to be. And certainly an even thinner shell of what it could have become.

If Apple’s Phoenix story is the tech world’s yin, RIM’s foibles might very well be the yang.

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The backstory: there’s some sentiment (especially from Information week editors/contributors) surrounding this past Oracle OpenWorld that suggests Mark Hurd and other Oracle executives didn’t demonstrate enough vision. In such a wake, Oracle’s Mark Hurd granted InjformationWeek’s Rob Preston another interview to relay a message that’s refreshing clear and to-the-point: Oracle knows CIOs.  Here are the key quips that caught my eye from the interview:

He started by recapping the four prongs of Oracle’s strategy. First, it’s focusing on being best of breed in every layer of the stack: hardware, operating system, database, horizontal and vertical applications. “We want all of those capabilities to be open and work well in heterogeneous environments,” Hurd said, “and we’re lined up from engineering through sales to make that happen.”

and

Second, he said, Oracle wants to vertically integrate those pieces to deliver “extremely attractive performance, cost, and, in the end, TCO for customers.” The first manifestation of that strategy was its Exadata database appliance, then its Exalogic middleware machine, and most recently its Exalytics in-memory business intelligence machine and Big Data Appliance. Hurd reiterated Oracle’s claim that the highly tuned Exadata hardware-software combo yields 70x performance improvements–reports that took 70 minutes now take one minute, Hurd said. And those gains can be “dialed in as cost savings for our customers,” he said. “The customer who says it cost me $7 million to do that job before, you can literally take 70x off that and it costs him $100,000.”

and

Third, it’s building out its vertical industry expertise, hiring sales and technical support people to help customers in healthcare, retail, financial services, utilities, and other sectors solve their “most strategic and difficult business problems,” Hurd said.

and finally

Fourth, it will deliver applications and infrastructure “any way the customer wants it,” he said. That includes the public cloud–note its recent launch of the Oracle Public Cloud, infrastructure as a service for customers looking to develop Java apps or deploy Oracle Fusion apps in the public cloud. That strategy also includes software as a service, punctuated this week by Oracle’s $1.5 billion deal to acquire RightNow, a leader in customer service SaaS. Oracle will help customers build out private and hybrid clouds as well, or, of course, it will work with them on premises. “You can use the same code base no matter which delivery vehicle you choose,” he said.

Don’t take my word for it. Read the whole thing over at IW GlobalCIO. Very good interview by Preston.

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