John is a die-hard Guy Kawasaki fun (may be he should take him on as a protégé). Its good to see him chart his own path. Just wish there were more innovative guys around like him.

Sadly, this element is slowly disappearing at the work place.  Technology has become so effective at the work place that we have forgotten how things used to be in the old days (about 35 years ago), when getting information involved a phone call or walking to the person and asking for it. Nowadays all we do is send emails to say thank you, complain, etc. It has replaced face-to-face communication at the work place. We only meet for meetings, everything else is done via email.

Perception is left to what you read, a rather narrow mono-sided approach to influencing opinion. Where’s the beauty in having your emotions/reaction invoked by human expressions, voice intonations etc? Emails simply invoke good or bad feelings to which we react many at time wrongly.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not against emails at the workplace, just that as a species we are losing that what is vital to us. Wouldn’t it be better not easier to raise a complain with whomever face-to-face than by email?

There’s a saying in swahili that goes “usiache mbachao kwa mswala upitao” (One does not throw away one’s old praying mat just because of a new one that one has borrowed).  Too many of us are hiding behind emails replacing this beautiful attribute of human contact with technology.

Despite his failure, his beliefs hold a truism that embodies humanity’s objectives. If only a lot more was said about this rather than his failure to sort the policy issues his conutry faced due to an entrenched aristocracy. He really is a forgotten hero!

The business plan is finally almost done. Mucheru and I couldn’t do more about it or so we thought until I gave it to my friend, Cynthia who pointed out major shortcomings in the draft. It helps to have an informed third party look at this stuff. So now its back to the drawing board to sort things out.

I recently bought a book Selling The Invisible, Harry Beckwith which I recommend to anyone who’s serious about selling a service/product/themselves. How many times have you gone for an interview/presentation and didn’t seem to have the answers the prospect required? I stopped counting a few years back. Even after going through all those books and articles that promise you success if you stick to the guidelines they give, you still can’t seem to get the formula (I don’t believe there’s one) right.

Harry’s informed opinion is rather interesting. Its about creating a position on how you want to be perceived. It sounds obvious yet it’s not. How do you deliver a message about yourself to change the perception of your prospect without coming off as too over-confident or ambivalent? His approach is simple:

• Who are you?
• What business/profession are you in?
• What are the special needs of those you want to serve?
• Who are your competitors?
• What unique benefit will the prospect derive from your service?

Simply put these questions beg you to take stock of who you are or what you are selling.

Advanced I.T. organizations make “aggressive” use of technologies that support a service-oriented mindset and are devoting more time to implementing industry best practices, according to research from Ovum Summit. The Boston-based consulting firm interviewed 300 technology managers and identified six things that the most effective technology departments do, starting with making sure their I.T. projects are aligned with business needs.

In effect, the top I.T. people have shifted from acting as installers of hardware and software to defining themselves as business people who see a need and fulfill it. “The better I.T. organizations have crossed over to viewing I.T. as a service,” says Ovum vice president Mary Johnston Turner.

Overall, Ovum found, effective technology departments:

• Use consolidation and virtualization technologies to become more flexible
• Invest in service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications to promote software reuse
• Adopt recommendations from the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, which is a set of best practices in corporate technology
• Invest in automated technology management tools
• Align business and I.T. in terms of governance and monitoring service levels
• Take on new challenges ranging from development of end-of-life and recycling strategies for old hardware to experimentation with emerging social software tools, such as wikis, to improve productivity.

The Ovum study offered specifics on the speed at which I.T. is adopting new technologies. For example, among companies with more than 1,000 employees, 55% reported using virtualization – configuring servers to run many applications and operating systems on a single computer-and another 26% said it’s part of their long-term strategy. Last year, only 32% of technology managers told Ovum they were using virtualization.

Meanwhile, 42% of respondents this year said they are using SOA techniques to let heterogeneous software components communicate in standard ways. That’s a big jump from the 27% of respondents using SOA last year.

In other findings, 51% of companies said they are using ITIL, the best practices library maintained under copyright by the British Office of Government Commerce. That is, some or all of the technologists at those companies are certified in ITIL and are putting in those best practices. And 75% consolidated application or storage servers in their data centers, compared to 47% last year.

Corporate technology groups are becoming more like outsourcers such as Electronic Data Systems and Computer Sciences Corp., Johnston Turner says. For example, corporate I.T. increasingly uses best practices and consistent metrics to measure how and how well they deliver services to the company, she says. That flips the traditional focus on how well products performed by, for instance, tracking component uptime or the availability of individual applications. “That’s a huge shift,” she says.

To Kevin Stack, chief information officer at Jo-Ann Stores in Hudson, Ohio, Ovum’s findings make sense. The things his 108-person staff does aren’t tech projects, he says. Nowadays, he says, it’s all about the business. A specialty retailer of crafts and sewing products, Jo-Ann Stores had $1.85 billion in revenue for the year ended Feb. 3.

“The days of taking projects over the phone from the business channel are over,” says Stack, who didn’t participate in Ovum’s survey. I.T.’s job, Stack adds, is “helping the business grow as opposed to putting in new cool technology to support infrastructure.”

Courtesy of Baseline Magazene

On Sunday they had the stadium show. I was in the vicinity running errands. A few hours before the show begun there was quite a crowd outside waiting to go in. As always there is always a bunch of people who just love freebies. Rude shock on them as there were no freebies that day. As a result of their useless anger and frustrations they resulted to hooliganism. Wielding huge stones and all manner of crude weapons they terrorised motorists, passers by and robbed public transport vehicle conductors money.

It was one of those nowadays common occassions where the men in blue were prepared for such occurences. The entire area was cordoned off and put on a temporary curfew. As a result I did not fulfill my errands and was late for a meeting. All the same, kudos to the men in blue. At least I survived the drama!

In recent times, the open source software phenomenon has attracted considerable attention as a seemingly agile practice-led initiative that appears to address each of the three aspects of the software crisis: cost, time-scale and quality. Open source products are freely available for public download. Thus, the cost issue is immediately addressed. From the point of view of development speed, the collaborative, parallel efforts of globally-distributed co-developers has allowed many open source products to be developed much more quickly than conventional software. In terms of quality, many open source products are recognized for their high standards of reliability, efficiency and robustness, and the open source phenomenon has produced several ‘category killers’ (i.e., products that remove any incentive to develop any competing products) in their respective areas – Gnu/Linux, Apache, Bind all spring to mind.

The open source model also appears to harness the most scarce resource of all – talented software developers. The resulting peer review model, comprising extremely talented individuals, serves to ensure the quality of the software produced. This is the essence of the argument from open source advocates.

Yesterday we sat down to make amendments to the final plan as well as do the financial projections. The selling point of any business idea is numbers. Cashflow, break-even analysis and an investor exit strategy. While the doing the the startup costs we came to the crucial aspect of salaries and wages. It was easy a task to determine the wages for the to-be-employees but as a founder/director how do you pay yourself?

The mistake most of us do is award ourselves nice packages when the business is starting. With hindsight we embarked on detailing our monthly expenses slashing back on some. Is the loss of a huge chunk of your paycheck a worthy trade off for your dream? To some this is a no brainer. The sacrifice is greater than the immediate loss.

We later on went on a short tour scouting for prospective premises. We found a few but haven’t settled on any yet. While doing those rounds it occured to me that every aspect of the plan was starting to fall into place. The ball was rolling slowly to start with, but rolling. I was afraid, not of walking out of employment but of venturing into something that I stood to lose everything if it failed. I have always worked on the worse case scenario all my life but in this case there’s no worse case scenario …. it’s either success or damnation.

Mucheru’s words, “The first year is critical” keep ringing in my mind. It’s make or break! Faced with the dilemma of a lack of experience in one of the core aspects of the concept underlines the motto “Failure is not an option“. I’m still afraid and yet I find it healthy because it keeps me focused on what needs to be done to make this brilliant idea become a reality.

I wonder if any afropreneurs out there felt this way?

A few years back Mucheru told me about this business idea that I immediately bought into. We just kept toying with the idea and even went as far as buying a domain and developing a transaction system for it based on how we envisioned business concept to work as well as what others have established. Somewhat with the hussles of employment and studies the prospect of turning the idea into a reality seemed to diminish. Recently, the need to see this idea through has been like a nagging woman. We sat down last weekend for about four hours to do the business plan. It was an intensive and most rewarding brainstorming session guided by questions and expectations any financier will ask and expect.

Across the corporate world, those making the biggest profits are those that add value to an existing product/service. The Afropreneurship model is founded on this fact. The target market is limitless and the possibilities for our prospective clients will be endless. The model works on a rather interesting novelty, it is not negatively affected by the economy. When the economy takes a plunge for the worse we experience an upward surge in clientele. When it takes a turnaround for the better there’s an increase in trade volume among our existing clientele.

While looking at the challenges we expected to face, it became apparent that apart from running a somewhat parallel economy we were going to take taxation complications to a whole new ball game. The concept has successfully worked elsewhere especially in the western world and with a little insight into the corporate world it should work on this part of the world.

The most satisfying aspect about this experience is the refreshing feeling of being alive brought about by pursuing something you believe in. This coming weekend we meet to refine the plan as well as come up with a project plan.

Chances are, you won’t find these highly skilled people in your own backyard. Yet you need them more than ever, now that competition is swooping down faster than business opportunities are taking off. And you realize that without them, your big dreams for a flourishing enterprise could rapidly go up in smoke. But you don’t have to manage all business functions in-house. Outsourcing provides a neat solution to several of your business problems.

Sadly in third world nations organizations have not been quick to embrace this practice as an intrinsic part of their business strategy and those that have have seen their balance sheets improve greatly in 2 to 3 years. Outsourcing extends the following advantages to the business:

1. Reduced overheads thereby freeing up resources
2. Avoid capital expenditure
3. Improved efficiency
4. Offloading of non-core functions
5. Access to specialized skills
6. Save on manpower and training costs
7. Reduced operating costs
8. Improved speed and service
9. Established long-term, strategic relationships with world-class service providers to gain a competitive edge
10. Enhanced tactical and strategic advantages
11. Focus on strategic thinking, process reengineering and managing trading partner relationships
12. Spread your risks
13. Provide the best quality services, products and people
14. Reliability and innovation
15. Provide value-added services
16. Increase customer satisfaction
17. Avoid the cost of chasing technology
18. Leverage the provider’s extensive investments in technology, methodologies and people
19. Benefit from the provider’s expertise in solving problems for a variety of clients with similar requirements.
20. Focus scarce resources on time-critical projects such as application reengineering
21. Obtain needed project management and implementation consulting expertise, along with access to best practices and proven methodologies
22. Reduce the risk of technological obsolescence and increase efficiency by consolidating and centralizing functions
23. Keep pace and minimize the impact of rapid changes in applications and standards
24. Extend the reach to more trading partners quickly and efficiently
25. Reduce the overall IT management burden while retaining control of strategic decision making.

In summary, the reason why outsourcing is (and still) a success could be put on its ability to reduce cost but at the same time, still provide the quality that organizations need in their business operations. The only difference now is the way organizations deal with their outsourcing deals which equates to the success rate.

Every project management guru says measure productivity. For some of these factors measurement is easy since they are based on output. Productivity on the other hand can be measured for some projects such business development, sales and marketing simply because the output of such projects has a direct impact on the balance sheet.

How do you measure IT projects? Do you look at efficiency, productivity or both? These aspects cannot be quantified. How do you measure the unquantifiable? There’s a school of thought that suggests timelines and other deliverables apart from the end product best measure productivity. However, these factors do not indicate the quality of the work. Would you rather have a project done on time with the necessary deliverables or quality work? What’s the trade off between quality and quantity?

In striving to achieve the basic expectations of time,cost etc. (quantity), we overlook the quality aspect. The nature of IT projects is such that the quality of the end product is what matters to the user and the business. Time, finances and other apects are purely disciplinary in terms of adhering to expectations. The quality of the end product can be used to justify all other factors. Quality justifies productivity. However, in order to stick to proper project management practises, it paramount to provide the business with progress reports.

Though not indicating productivity, they give the business a understanding of the status of the project and insight to the quality of the product.

There’s no formula for determining the productivity because the factors to be considered are endless but a great starting point would be progress reports and the quality of the end product. These two will prove that the team is productive and the project a success.

Organisations spend millions of dollars annually acquiring and/or upgrading information systems. The need of end-to-end solutions (different systems using the same underlying technology) to provide a business with the edge of over competition has never been necessary as it is now. These solutions provide a business with the following advantages:

• Broader, better and modular functionality
• Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) through improved systems integration
• Consolidated support across multiple products
• Accountability

Despite all these benefits provided, organisations as well as those who develop these systems focus on service delivery architectures with minimal reporting and decision support tools. In the initial phase of automation any organisation seeks to computerise its operations, that is, shift from manual to computerised practices. With time there’s a shift towards improving the computerised processes as the organisation enjoys the benefits of the system. During this stage the company acquires additional functionality in terms of reporting and decision support tools. Sadly this marks the end of the growth for the system.

The aim of any system is to provide solutions to the business that will make the business better. In as much as process management and improvement is important to a business, the management information provided by the systems that support its operational activities cannot be underestimated. Better visibility of the business enables faster responses to improve operational efficiency. This can only be achieved by basing decisions on facts and logical conclusions drawn from the information provided by its information systems. As it stands currently in most organisations most of these decisions are made based on “best guess” scenarios.

This approach works well for start ups since they don’t have adequate information to base decisions on. With growth this trend changes and more and more decisions are made based on the operational information gathered. The aim of any business is growth. The business wires are full of mergers and acquisitions, expansions into new markets, strategic partnerships etc. This brings into focus two oftenly confused terms; Continuous and Continual growth.

Continuous growth is all about growth without evaluation. The risk lies in hitting a snag in your growth plans and not having a fall back stage. With continual growth, after certain growth the business revaluates its strategies and makes the necessary decisions. This is not possible without timely decision support information provided by the information systems. In evaluating progress the entire organisation, operational, tactical and strategic levels, look at the same information from different angles.

Service level architecture systems barely provide this information since they act as disparate systems. In order to make sound decisions based on facts, trends and other factors it is imperative to collate these disparate systems to a single system that will provide meaningful information to the business. This is the challenge of modern day businesses.

The solution lies in intelligent systems that will provide the business with a dashboard that collates information from disparate sources (operational systems) and present the same in a simple yet detailed manner. The common term for such systems is Business Intelligence systems. They have the capability to provide information based on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) defined by the business. The ability to view progress in terms of KPIs such as productivity, CRM, sales, personnel provides the business with the much required insight in decision making.

A business intelligence system is aimed to:

1. Protect existing investments
2. Extend the value of your applications
3. Evolve your business to the next level

Every business that has been operational for two or more years will require a business intelligence system. These systems and the technology are not one off and require constant re-evaluation to factor business needs.

There are several approaches to acquiring one. One is to build internal online analytical processing systems that gather data from the disparate systems. This approach entails acquiring particular skill sets, database architect, reporting analyst and basic infrastructure such as a database. The idea is to have the database architect build data warehouses, data marts and data cubes (the underlying technology behind business intelligence systems) from data within the disparate systems that will be used by the reporting analyst to provide the necessary business dashboards.

The second alternative is to acquire a customisable business intelligence suit. There numerous products in the market but before you go out and acquire one, here are a few pointers to consider apart from the obvious compatibility issues:

Customer Success

1. What’s the vendor’s customer base and experience?
2. What’s the vendor’s success rate across multiple industries?

Complete Solution

1. Does the vendor offer a complete suit in terms of applications, middleware, database and infrastructure?

Strong strategic roadmap

1. What’s the vendor’s acquisition plans or objectives?
2. How much does the vendor spend on R&D?
3. What sort of results has the vendor delivered with regards to market observations?

Business Intelligence systems are quickly becoming the new frontier for businesses. The abilities and growth of a business will develop and reveal themselves increasingly with the adoption of relevant technology.

“It is better to be bold than to circumspect, because fortune is of a sex which likes not a tardy wooer and repulses all who are not ardent.” – Niccolo Machiavelli

If you have never tried your hand at this and have found yourself in that position here are a few pointers:

Planning

1. In association with the project team and stakeholders, refine project requirements, assumptions and constraints to baseline the scope of work and enable development of the project plan.
2. Develop a formal and comprehensive project plan by integrating and documenting project deliverables, acceptance criteria, processes, procedures, risks , and tasks to facilitate project executing , controlling, and closing processes and obtain project plan approval by reviewing the plan with required stakeholders to confirm project baselines prior to proceeding with executing processes. A successful venture is 80% planning and 20% execution. An elaborate plan will give you the necessary foundation to build on to see the project through.
3. Establish project controls by defining the required correct processes, measures, and controls to manage project change, communications, procurement, risk, quality, and human resources to facilitate project executing and controlling processes, and to ensure compliance with generally accepted industry standards.

Execution

1. Commit project resources in accordance with the project plan to ensure all activities are performed.
2. Manage project activities and team resources by ensuring that activities are executed as planned in order to achieve the project objectives.
3. Communicate project progress by producing project status reports
4. Ensure implementation of activities is in line with the quality assurance plan, security and audit requirements

Control

1. Measure project performance continually by comparing results to baseline in order to identify project trend and variances. Take timely corrective action by addressing the root causes in the problem areas in order to eliminate or minimize negative impact.
2. Evaluate the effectiveness of corrective actions by measuring subsequent performance in order to determine need for further actions
3. Ensure compliance with the change management plan by monitoring response to change initiatives in order to manage scope
4. Re-assess project controls via periodic reviews to ensure effectiveness and currency
5. Respond to risk event triggers in accordance with the risk management & response plan to manage project outcomes
6. Monitor project activity to ensure authorized approaches and processes are followed or to identify need for corrective actions.

Closure

1. Obtain final acceptance of deliverables by obtaining formal approval from appropriate stakeholders to achieve close out
2. Document lessons learned by surveying project team members and relevant stakeholders to use for the benefit of future projects
3. Facilitate administrative closure in accordance with the project plan in order to comply with organizational and stakeholder requirements
4. Preserve essential records for future use to adhere to legal, audit and other requirements.

There are times when everything you do seems to turn out wrong. You feel as though you in a catch 22 situation. It’s at those times you feel tempted to make what the hell decisions. These are good at buying you time when your wife/girlfriend is pissed as hell at you.

Dare to follow your gut instinct. At times the unconventional could just be what the project requires to keep it going. “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.” – Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

I love this time of the year. I’m guaranteed as much action as I can handle, sportwise I mean. The joys and sorrows of my teams winning and losing. The nerve racking agony of watching a team fight to the end. The never give up attitude. The need to slap a player through the TV just to wake him to the fact that the team is losing. All these emotions. No wonder women complain we are emotionless. The barman gets all the joys and sorrows. By the time I get home am drained of emotion and passion.

In all this drama you get to pick up one or two treasured anthems. Here are a couple for all those who enjoy having a go at your opponents:

1. Swing Low Sweet Chariot(2)

Swing low, sweet chariot, ho
Coming for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot, ho
Coming for to carry me home.

I looked over Jordan, and what did I see, ho
Coming for to carry me home.
A band of angels, coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.

2. Beer Prayer

Our lager,
Which art in barrels,
Hallowed be thy drink
Thy will be drunk, I will be drunk,
At home as it is in the pub,
Give us this day our foamy head,
And forgive us our spillages,
As we forgive those who spill against us,
And lead us not into incarceration,
But deliver us from hangovers,
For thine is the beer, The Bitter, The Lager.
Barmen

3. If I Were The Marrying Kind

If I were the marrying kind,
Which thank the Lord I’m not, sir,
The kind of man that I would be
Would be a rugby

Prop, Sir
Prop, Sir?
I’d support a hooker, she’d support a hooker
We’d all support hookers together.
We’d be all right in the middle of the night,
Supporting hookers together.

chorus

Prop #2: I’d bind tight…
Hooker: I’d strike hard…
Hooker #2: I’d throw it in…
Lock: I’d sniff butt
Lock #2: I’d push hard…
Number 8: I’d split cheeks
Flanker: I’d hold it in
Scrum Half: I’d put it in…
Stand-off: I’d whip it out…
Stand-off #2: I’d pass it on…
Centre: I’d put it out…
Winger: I’d get none…
Winger #2 I’d go hard…
Fullback: I’d find touch…
Fullback #2: I’d kick balls…
Referee: I’d fuck it up…
Referee #2: I’d blow hard…

Groundskeeper: I’d trim bush
Groundskeeper #2: I’d do lines
Groundskeeper #3: I’d fill holes…
Groundskeeper #4: I’d sow seeds…

Goal Post: I’d stand erect
Touch Line: I’d get laid…
Referee’s Whistle: I’d get blown
Water Bottle: I’d get sucked
Rugby Boot: I’d get smelly
Rugby Boot #2: I’d come in boxes
Cleat: I’d get screwed
Ball: I’d get pumped
Wet Weather Spectator: I’d get wet
Wet Weather Spectator #2: I’d come in rubbers
Fair Weather Spectator: I’d come again

Away Team Spectator: I’d eat out…
Rugby Partier: I’d keep it up…
Halftime orange: I’d get sucked

Next time you feel the pressure let out steam as a spectator pray and sign as hard as you can. This article was inspired by my two greatest pals. Have one for me, boys. I can’t wait for fridays!

In the world of projects and project managers few words and or phrases make sense to techies. In the effort to manage others and yourself you always find yourself asking questions or making statements that every techie hates yet quite effective on your part.

You must be seen to share the interests of the business as well as the misery of your techies. I must say this is a tricky and quite elusive balance yet your success as a project manager depends on this. Getting support from above and below will ensure the success of the project.

As part of my experience I have compiled a list of questions/statements your superiors will love and the techies hate:

1. Just a quick one …. (usually followed by a bunch of questions on the status of each incomplete phase of the project as of yesterdays meeting)
2. Do me a favour …. (usually followed by a six or more point action item list requiring days to answer to which you want immediate answers)
3. How soon can we have it done? … (usually asked after specifying a whole bunch of new requirements right in the middle of development or near the end)
4. What’s the ETA? … (usually asked after specifying new requirements that the techies have explicitly stated that they have to get back to you on the timelines once they establish what it’ll take to fullfill them)
5. Good one but I have a few suggestions … (usually followed an overhaul of the existing requirements and negation or belittlement of the techie’s contribution). This is meant to give the techie the impression that they matter to the organisation and at the same time show them who is boss.
6. This is what I’m saying … (usually followed by a string of sentences that only make sense to you)
7. Done! … (usually said with finality. This means the work will be done by the end of the week or when the techie feels like)

Project management is a skill acquired over time. “Skill is successfully walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. Intelligence is not trying.” – Unknown

However, if you have no idea what you are doing but seem to be making headway nonetheless always remember “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” – Saul Bellow