Sekiur My Thoughts

Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose discuss their top 5 Must Read Books.

Random w/ Tim and Kevin – Ep3 from Glenn McElhose on Vimeo.

I endorse the following:

• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
  
• Getting Real
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Other books on my reading list this year.

• The Knack
• The Integrity Dividend: Leading by the Power of Your Word
• The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation is Shaking Up the Workplace
• Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time (Gartner)
• Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
• Inside Drucker’s Brain
• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
• High Altitude Leadership: What the World’s Most Forbidding Peaks Teach Us About Success
• Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work
• Content Nation: Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Changes Our Work, Our Lives, and Our Future
• Smart Networking: Attract a Following In Person and Online
• Making Technology Investments Profitable: ROI Road Map to Better Business Cases
• Strategic Alliances: Three Ways to Make Them Work (Memo to the Ceo)
• Reward Systems: Does Yours Measure Up? (Memo to the CEO)
• Wargaming for Leaders : Strategic Decision Making from the Battlefield to the Boardroom

Seven ways to achieve customer service.

Do you know any others?

1. Focus on the wants of the customer
2. Make your effort about fulfilling their need, not having them do what you want
3. Listen don’t hear
4. Determine what action(s) you need to perform to fulfill the customer’s expectations
5. Go above and beyond what is necessary to get the job done
6. Follow-up to ensure the customer is satisfied with the result you have achieved
7. Determine if there is there anything else you can do to make the customer happier?

I ran across this very interesting Gartner Research publication and thought I should share.

Today’s economy calls for changes in managing IT spending and the report walks through new approaches to managing procurement, contract negotiation, operation cost management, equipment retirement and more.

I believe that one of the biggest mistakes companies make is not being proactive in planning for a “recession” budget and once they are hit by the recession, the only way to balance the books as it were is to make the hasty decision to cut personnel in an effort to appease the market.

In many cases cutting costs revitalizes profits but these short-term cuts could have dire long-term consequences. Too often the decision for layoffs is a knee jerk reaction to an overwhelming financial situation that will have a big psychological impact on the company.

The 6-Step Process

1. Don’t Wait for the Cost-Cutting Mandate from Management.
2. Choose the Best and Brightest IT People for the Team.
3. Don’t Allow Finger-Pointing or Second-Guessing.
4. Enlist an Internal Auditor as Scorekeeper.
5. Report Results on a Weekly Basis.
6. Identify a Liaison From the Legal Department.

Recommend Reading:

• Smart IT Actions for Tough Times
• Cutting IT Budgets: Tactics a Survival Guide
• Research Collection: Cost Containment
• Spend Less, Get More: 25 IT Cost Containment Techniques

Unfortunately Nortel was unable to do what it needed to do to stay in business and has filed for bankruptcy, as I noted in a post 4 months ago. Nortel Struggles Continue.

The century-old company, North America’s biggest maker of phone gear and worth about $250 billion at its peak in 2000, fell victim to reduced spending by customers such as Verizon Communications Inc. and competition from Cisco Systems Inc. The company made the filing a day before a $107 million interest payment was due and was granted protection in Ontario Superior Court today.

Chief Executive Officer Mike Zafirovski came to the company in 2005 tasked with turning around a business weighed down by a $3.2 billion accounting fraud and ensuing customer losses. Instead, Nortel has lost almost $7 billion since he took over as the company’s competitive position deteriorated further.

“Nortel must be put on a sound financial footing once and for all,” said Zafirovski, who insisted the company will continue to meet the needs of its existing customers.

The future survival of Nortel, however, is far from certain. Companies that exit the bankruptcy process often emerge in smaller form and are frequently acquired in part or whole by larger suitors looking for a good deal.

“Nortel still has valuable assets,” said analyst Ronald Gruia of the market-research firm Frost & Sullivan. “They are probably going to wait until they have their house in order before they do a disposal.”

Even if the company remains independent, Nortel is unlikely to recapture any semblance of its glory days. The networking industry, jolted earlier this decade by the rise of low-cost Asian vendors, is intensely competitive. What’s more, the phone industry has undergone massive consolidation, giving the few remaining carriers greater leverage over their suppliers.

Sources:

MarketWatch
CBS NEWS Canada

The more I research on the potential and possibilities of VoIP phone systems, the more companies I see trying to get a piece of the market.

Reminds me of a blog entry I read recently “Everything I Know About Business I Learned From Poker” and more specifically the quote: “If there are too many competitors (some irrational or inexperienced), even if you’re the best it’s a lot harder to win.” which definitely rings true here.

Below is a partial list of VoIP phone systems geared towards small businesses, meaning deployments of less than 50 phones. Although several of these systems can easily scale into the hundreds of phones.

1. PhoneBochs from Rochbochs, Inc. (Duluth, MN based Rochbochs builds appliances based on Linux ranging from firewalls, asterisk telephony, Zimbra Email Collaboration and Fax over IP.)
2. GXE502X from Grandstream. (Brookline, MA based Grandstream builds the GXE502x appliance, a powerful all-in-one voice + video + fax + data communication solution for the small to medium sized business)
3. Jazinga PBX from Jazinga. (Toronto based Jazinga integrates data networking, traditional telephone service and low-cost Voice-over-IP (VoIP) service into one simple solution for small business and homes)
4. Response Point from Microsoft. (Redmond, WA based Microsoft could not miss the action and introduced their next generation phone system for small businesses.)
5. Trixbox from Fonality. (Los Angeles, CA based Fonality who acquired Trixbox which itself was re-branded from the open source project Asterisk @Home brings both software and appliance offerings to the table going beyond the small business market.)
6. Switchvox IP PBX from Digium. (Huntsville, AL based Digium and the cradle of Asterisk brings forth their flagship product Switchvox which is probably one of the most popular offerings out there today.)
7. TalkSwitch from Centrepoint Technologies. (Canada based Centrepoint, now TalkSwitch provides telecommunications solutions ideal for small and multi-location businesses with up to 32 telephone users per office.)
8. PIKA WARP by PIKA Technologies. (Ontario, Canada based PIKA builds appliances focused on Asterisk and Linux solutions for small businesses.)
9. BYOB by yourself. (Locally based, you can “Build Your Own Box” using Sangoma or Digium hardware for POTS landlines and build your own VoIP phone system using any Asterisk distribution, including Trixbox®, Elastix, AsteriskNOW, Elastix, CentPBX, and PBX-in-a-Flash, or FreeSWITCH, or YATE.

Amongst the other options available are the hosted solution where you pay a fixed cost per device, and then there’s the Colo solution where you would have one of the options above hosted by someone else.

There are many variables that need to be taken into account and every business is different.

Small businesses are likely to have some type of broadband connectivity to the Internet, whether cable or DSL and not the more reliable T1 circuit. Although I have not had any problems with my broadband connection for over 3 years, I have seen businesses add redundant cable and/or DSL because they have to stay up when their service gets interrupted occasionally during a storm.

The amount of simultanous calls at any one time and the codec used will also play a role in deciding if the hosted solution is viable, since most broadband providers do not offer symmetrical upload and download speeds but rather assimetrical where the upload is usually much lower than the download speeds.

My rule of thumb for a business with more than 10 phones and 3 lines with heavy phone usage is to stay with the premises PBX and only use VoIP trunks as secondary circuits for savings.

On October 16th, Oil prices plummeted below $70 for the first time in 16 months, loosing half its value since hitting a record high of $147.27, prompting the oil cartel OPEC to call an emergency meeting.

OPEC cut production by 1.5 million barrels a day starting November after their emergency meeting on October 24th one month ahead of their scheduled meeting.

Although their next meeting was not scheduled until December 17th, the OPEC cartel will meet again this coming November 29th in Cairo, most likely to make another cut in production. In this global financial turmoil, they run the risk of taking things too far as demands for energy increase during the winter months.

The drop in prices has already created problems for oil producers, who have become accustomed to high prices. Iran needs oil prices at $95 a barrel to balance the budget, Russia needs $70, Venezuela needs $60 and Saudi Arabia needs $55 a barrel, according to Deutsche Bank estimates. Cartel representatives have hinted at the idea of fixing a price high and low, which they call “ideal” ranging between $70 and $90 a barrel.

Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo was a Venezuelan minister of energy that popularized the phrase “oil: the devil’s excrement” and the minister said that the oil corrupts the power.

Gasoline: The fall in world oil prices since July has pushed gasoline in the United States, the world’s largest oil consumer, from a high of $4.114 a gallon on average to $1.91 a gallon Monday, according to motorist group AAA.

Source:

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/24/markets/oil/

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/16/business/oil.php

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008429585_webgasprices24m.html

As I had predicted back in October 20th here, Reuters is reporting that Circuit City has filed for bankruptcy.

What’s amazing to me, is how the board of directors allowed this company to go downhill for over 2 years without taking action.

Failure is caused by not delivering:

• What is promised
• What is needed
• What is expected

The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the goals of the project charter while adhering to three out of the four classic project constraints some time referred to as the “triple constraints” The four constraints are defined as scope, time, cost and quality.

Top 10 Project Success Factors

1. User involvement
2. Executive management support
3. Experienced project manager
4. Clear business objectives
5. Minimization of scope
6. Agile requirements process
7. Standard software infrastructure
8. Formal methodology
9. Reliable estimates
10. Skilled Staff

In order for a project to be successful, communication is of utmost importance. Stakeholders need to communicate what the requirements are in a clear, precise and straightforward manner.

The key word here is requirements. So what are requirements?

In engineering, a requirement is a singular documented need of what a particular product or service should be or do. It is most commonly used in a formal sense in systems engineering or software engineering. It is a statement that identifies a necessary attribute, capability, characteristic, or quality of a system in order for it to have value and utility to a user.^[1]

In simpler terms its a capability a customer needs to solve a problem or achieve an objective.

The communication and subsequent agreement of that need will play a major role, if not the major role in the success of a project.

Stages in the Requirements Management Process

• Elicitation
  • Identify Stake Holders
  • Identify requirements sources
  • Elicit requirements

• Analysis
  • Document assumptions
  • Identify issues and risks
  • Identify constraints and dependencies
  • Prioritize the requirements

• Representation
  • Create graphical models and prototypes
  • Create textual documents

• Validation
  • Identify quality characteristics
  • Eliminate ambiguities
  • Trace the requirements
  • Conduct requirements reviews

• Change Control
  • Baseline accepted requirements
  • Follow change control process
  • Maintain requirements

Following a strict methodology within project management will greatly reduce the risks associated with not being able to deliver because of failure.

An finally some stats on project failure:

• An IT project is more likely to be unsuccessful than successful
• About 1 out of 5 IT projects is likely to bring full satisfaction
• The larger the project the more likely the failure

Sources:

Requirements Quest