newyorkscot

Short Term Profits, A Business Does Not Make. May 15, 2006

One of the things that I am looking for in my next company is a strong and well-founded philosophy in the treatment of clients and employees.

I have always said that you need to look after your current clients first (ahead of future clients). There is no point in burning any bridges with a client just to make a fast buck somewhere else. The long term profitability will suffer.

The way in which the company treats its employees is equally as important. In a professional services firm, your people is all you have. They are the assets of the firm. Therefore, there needs to be the appropriate level of care and investment in the people that includes personal and professional development activities (tech/business training, soft skills training, collaborative environment, etc.) It also must include a package that is fair in monetary terms and provides some sense of comfort and satisfaction. Additionally, you need to invest in the softer side (social and cultural) of the business.

At the end of the day, client and employees must come before short term profits. If you don't have the former you don't have a business. The approach should always be to look at the mid-long term and invest in your relationships with your clients and employees. You will make more money in the long term…..

Trust May 15, 2006

Many of us have tried to create a better workplace for everyone and to optimize the organization for success.

Having the appropriate functional sets of role and responsibilities and providing people with autonomy and accountability, are very important to people and their general happiness in their jobs. However, if you don't trust your people and feel you need to either micro-manage or devalue their contribution, you should not be runnng a company.

Management needs to provide strategic direction and benchmarks for measuring success. After that, it should be up to your trusted employees to execute the plan making them both accountable and responsible. Additionally, don't just set the demands and check in with them 3 minutes before delivery date: there should be more transparency and visibility into progress based on an acceptable level of bi-directional conversation.

One thing that Scrum does is define the roles of the Product Owner, Scrum Master and Scrum Team whereby the Product owner gets to say *what* should be done, and the team gets to decide *how* it should be done. Th Scrum Master ensures that the team follows the process and helps to take down barrier, impediments and to solve issues as they arise. It would be nice to see companies adopt this approach from a business management perspective.

Culture and Collaboration May 15, 2006

Creating and fostering a culture that is truly energetic, interesting, collaborative and social is no easy task. Doing that within a consulting firm where 80% of the employees are on client site is even tougher. As Matt referenced in his blog, a culture cannot be manufactured… 

One of things I have been told by many of the employees at my previous employer (remember these are really solid engineers) is that they want to:

• Have an interesting variety of technical work, where they can learn new techniques and technologies
• Learn more about the Financial Services domain
• Work with like-minded people with whom they can collaborate on projects, learn about what others are doing & learning
• Have continuous exposure to the ongoing success of the company and to understand where they fit in
• Have access to personal and professional development activities
• Have fun !!

I am not saying you can just set this up, flip a switch and off we go. But it is very clear that there needs to be the willingness from the top-down to support and drive many of these facets from a financial, principal and energy perspective.

The company owners/management need to provide a framework to facilitate these things, drive and embrace employee ideas and provide a lot of energy and focus in showing their committment to following these ideas through. Techies know techies the best, so why not ask them what they want to do and incent them to build and keep the momentum.

Some obvious ideas include:

• Company wiki to provide cross-functional transparency within the firm. This includes who is doing what on projects, who are the clients, what are the technical challenges, what's the status of marketing, sales, corporate initiaitves, social events, training programs, etc. Everyone must have access to most of it.
• Regular (meaning EVERY WEEK) open (brown-bag, etc) meetings or forums for people to talk about what they are doing. Mix it up a bit: sales one week, an client project another, etc.
• Social events, both formally organized by company as well as informally with groups of employees. Use the email / wiki to collaborate.

and above all, get rid of the politics, micro-management and closed doors !

Whatever the approach or execution, the management of the company needs to embrace and foster this as one of THE most important things it does with its money. A consulting firm is its people. No happy people, no long term prospects for company.

Corporate Taxonomy June 30, 2005

Not everyone sees or thinks of things in the same way, and this has become alarmingly obvious when a group of colleagues and others discuss the Agile umbrella of IT methodologies. This is a fundamental risk we need to deal with in order to demonstrate our corporate culture, professional excellence, consistent project approach, and platform for marketing to clients.

In this case, Agile Development, not only are we talking about a set of methodologies under an overarching set of principles, each method has its respective theoretical pros and cons as well as what the professional and individual experiences of our staff have been, with any one or more approaches. No doubt there will be divergent opinions, but that is why we need a core position that we can then at least tweak on a project basis. In our business, experience is everything.

One avenue to aid this problem, might be to have a corporate taxonomy for our company that we all agree on. This would include the definition of terms, how techniques/process relate to one another (or not), and any crossovers. The natural extension would then to be to draw out the "best practices" or some working model that we believe would form the core approach for our company, given the type of projects we typcially undertake in Capital Markets.

Based on other feedback, it sounds like we need a hybrid model that also factors in real client needs as well as the best blended approach that might have a chance of *actually* working on client sites. Either way, we need to have a common language and "corporate view"that we can all adhere to before, during and after client projects. Perhaps a corporate Wiki is what we need.