Communication challenges like mails, faxes, answering calls, space for meetings etc for a small start-up, where the partners and contractors are in different time zones as well as plan to keep their regular 9-5.

I know there are virtual/ intelligent office solution providers out there who give you all you need – mails and call forwarding, faxes, answer your calls, let you use their facilities for important meetings etc for one flat monthly rate. My question is – Do you have any experience (good or bad) with these virtual/ intelligent office solution providers? Any recommendations…

Devesh Dwivedi

Experienced Management Consultant

I don’t really know of any good “one size fits all” that extends over multiple timezones (and possibly countries?). Regus has been mentioned, and they are quite good. But, I’ve only ever used them for one-off day meetings, though and not as a complete VO. The day rates were comparable to meeting rooms in a conference center or hotel.

The telecom portion is fairly easy. I used to work for Avaya and they have a number of solutions that would address the forwarding, voicemail, faxes, call accounting, time-based routing, etc. Of particular interest would probably be a product called IP Softphone which would give you the transparent virtualization. There are a lot of cheaper VO products and providers, but for sheer scalability and flexibility, I would reach out to an Avaya reseller and talk to them about your needs. I know of a number of HO/VO based businesses that have just bought a used Merlin PBX to start out and then used it as the foundation for a bricks-and-mortar later.

AT&T also has a number of services that may fit your needs. Walking 800 numbers, voicemail, virtual PBXs, etc. The AT&T Webmeeting services (based on WebEx) provide virtual workspaces, Webmeeting services, integrated voice dial-in services, call management, etc. and they’ve always worked very well for me (for calls from a handful to thousands of participants. The latter moves up to a service called AT&T Executive Teleconferencing, but the technology works essentially in the same way)

As for office & meeting space, I would use someone like Regus or your local hotels/conference centers as needed. There’s also nothing wrong with the old standby of having meetings over a meal in a nice restaurant. Pick a nice quiet venue or one with private rooms/meeting areas. No sales meeting in McDonalds or Denny’s (yes, I have actually had vendors “wine and dine” me at a McDonalds!!!!! Scary, but true.). Unless you have a lot of face-to-face meetings, I’d be careful about committing to an office contract. You can generally accomplish the same effect for less money by having a list of “pre-screened” meeting venues to use as needed.

If you had to choose between an insdustry Standard encryption product and a new soon to be a standard which product will you choose?

i.e PKI/PGP/SMIME vs IBE

George Antoniou

Director Information Security at Sodexo

I can’t address the specifics of IBE, but as a general principle I’d go with the standard. Unless you have a vested business interest in the new product or there is some overwhelming technical consideration, the risks should steer you towards the standard.

1) A standard has had more review and scrutiny and has usually been well proven and revised as needed to address any gaps
1b) Risks of unknown gaps or exploits. Time and widespread acceptance are usually the only ways that these gaps are exposed.
2) Adoption of a standard is much more likely than that of a new technology. Dealing with business partners or units within your own organization would likely require negotiations and training to get them onboard with a “non-standard”
3) Classification and approval for export. This is a big consideration for encryption technologies. Chances are that getting approval for the export/import of a “standard” will be much easier that for a new technology. You may find yourself out of luck when/if you have a need to deploy internationally, simply because the various governments haven’t decided how to handle the new technology.
4) Availability of compatible tools sets. Key distributions, monitoring, audit tools, etc. will be much more readily available for a standard than for a new technology.
5) Integration with existing products. (see #4)

So..while I’m a big fan of the “bleeding edge” in my personal life, when dealing with a business application, I would tend to err on the side of caution and stick with the standards.

Sandbox your new technology and develop some experience with it so that you’ll be ready to run with it when there’s a bit more of a track record. Roll it out onto some lower risk platforms when you’re ready. But always be cautious with your critical production systems.

What do you think of Microsoft going after Open-Source?

Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants royalties from distributors and users.

Is this just the tactic of an aging company facing unfavorable market trends and stiff competition from likes of Google. Or does Microsoft have a point, is open source so good because it steals from their patents, and entitled to royalties?

John Rankin

Recruiter and Project Manager at Didit

This is just my opinion, so Microsoft lawyers need not read it.

The assumption seems to be that Microsoft intends to win some legal battle against Open-Source. I content that this has nothing to do with winning a case and everything to do with seeding FUD. There are three things that I see being accomplished here: 1) Microsoft is coercing companies into inking settlements that set a nasty precedent for future Open-source development. 2) FUD has now been created around using Open-source products [most notably in a business environment where you might get sued] and 3) FUD has been created around developing open-source projects or using open-source in any sort of commercial setting.

I suspect that the majority of these “infringements” won’t stand up just because of the “prior art” argument. Seriously, how can MS claim that the Linux kernel infringes 42 patents when the concept predates Microsoft by 10 years and Windows by 20. I won’t even get into the interface infringements (cough…Xerox, Mac, Desqview, GEM, Amiga Workbench..). Nobody is going to know if there’s any merit to the claims unless they go public with the specifics. And it’s very unlikely that they’re ever going to do that. They’re going to selectively go after individual companies in private settlements and let everyone else huddle in fear of being next on the list.

Regardless of whether or not Microsoft ever wins a court case, the damage is done. CIOs and IT line managers will have to contend with the bad reputation and the underlying fear that Microsoft has now created around open-source. With every settlement that gets inked with Microsoft, that FUD is going to gain credibility and open-source will backslide further.

I have to hand it to Microsoft. It’s an incredibly smart (and very Machiavellian) business move. The vast majority of the people that they piss off with this move *aren’t* the business decision makers. So they aren’t really putting their corporate base at much risk. As for the informed consumers that realize what a joke this is, well…as long as Microsoft rules in the corporate world, we’re going to keep running it in our homes, schools and governments. And if MS succeeds in scaring away enough of the Linux developers, we won’t even have that as an option for dissent.

Why aren’t big corporations jumping onto the web?

I work for the IT department of a large pharmaceutical and I’ve been trying to drag them into the 21st century. In my previous company, we used ICQ and Netmeeting for collaboration and we used Hotmail as our mail platform. Our infrastructure required no support, no servers and it was always updated and secure. I’ve explained to management how we save on costs if we moved off our ancient Lotus mail system to a hosted solution. I proposed using ICQ or Microsoft Netmeeting instead of our internal tools and using tools like vBulletin forums for collaboration. When I brought up MySpace for linking to our clients, I didn’t even get two sentences out before being shot down. Everyone else in the world seems to get that we’re moving to the web. Why can’t big corporations see the future?

Frustrated Technologist

I feel your pain. But I also understand the position of your management.

Small companies are more agile and accepting of risk because they can see it quickly and respond just as fast. If your mail host screws up, you can send out a quick memo and move your dozen employees to a new host overnight. If there’s a security breach on ICQ or Netmeeting, it’ll come up in the morning meeting and everyone will understand what they can and can’t do until it’s resolved. If someone has questions, they’ll walk over and ask “Ted the IT guy” for help. If there’s a lawsuit, the company lawyer can walk around and manually copy all of the relevant documents, emails, etc to a USB stick. If a service goes bankrupt overnight, moving to an alternate platform may simply mean that someone walks around and adds a new bookmark to everyone’s browser. If security is breached, the impact may be a few dozen customers or some proprietary information. It could be damaging to the company, but the scope is limited.

Large companies simply can’t accept these risks as easily. If a publicly hosted mail service screws up, they may have to inform 100,000 employees and migrate them to a new platform. That could be months worth of work and manpower. If there’s a security breach on a public messaging tool, it could be a month before everyone in the company even gets around to reading the memo. If there’s a lawsuit (and the bigger the company, the more of a target they become for frivolous litigation), you now have an issue of even identifying who and what is relevant to the case. By the time that you get around to identifying the information that you need, it’s probably been deleted. If the data is centralized and archived, it can be browsed on an as-needed basis. If security is breached, the data of hundreds of thousands of customers could be compromised. In the case of a pharmaceutical, trade secrets worth billions of dollars could be exposed or personal medical histories could become public knowledge. In addition to the loss of intellectual property, the company would also have a huge lawsuit from their clients and they’d be liable for substantial punitive damages.

Here’s an analogy that might help:
Imagine that a couple of college kids come knocking on your door and tell you that they’re offering a new banking service. You give them all of your money and they’ll pay you 10% interest and any time you need cash, you just call them and they’ll hand deliver it to you wherever you are. You check with their references and it all checks out as legitimate. They don’t have the overhead of insurance, offices, regulation or FDIC. They just keep the money in a bunch of labelled shoeboxes and take it out when you need it. From your perspective, they provide a great ROI and they provide much better service than your bank. Would you turn over your savings to them?

Increased size and complexity leads to an inevitable loss of agility. The advantage of centralized and internally hosted IT is that you have the control that you need to compensate for that lack of agility (somewhat). Unfortunately, that control is expensive and the need for it isn’t always obvious. It becomes a source of frustration to the people who are used to acting as individuals instead of part of a larger collective. It’s ironic that small companies lack the resources to fully leverage their agility and large corporations lack the agility to make the best use of their resources.

What it comes down to is that to an individual, information is something to be shared. To a corporation, it’s something to be hoarded and protected. That leads to the “command and control” mentality that we see in most large companies. It leads to processes and infrastructures that are focused on avoiding risk. It’s also what inevitably leads to the small, nimble startups taking market share away from the slow moving dinosaurs. The compromise is to educate your employees and let them run their areas like individual businesses. Lay out ground rules and strategies to keep everyone aligned, but start acting like a pack of coordinated lions/wolves/whatever instead of a single monolithic dinosaur. Let groups make intelligent decisions about whether or not they can accept the risk of using an external mail service or chat client. (but make sure that they *understand* the risk and their responsibilities) Let them choose the devices and software that they want to use as long as it conforms to the rules that matter. Sure you lose some of the savings that you got by commoditizing the decisions, but you also force the units to think on their own and manage their own risk.

As always, that’s just my two cents. I hope that it’s been worth at least that much to you 🙂

Who is more important – the partner who brings in the customers and manages the clients or the partner who does the back end operations?

I understand that they both are equally important to the success of a business but when it comes to sharing profit or deciding on a collaboration ratio – who should get more, by how much and why?

Will the ideal collaboration only be a “time & expense” reimbursement collaboration where both get reimbursed for their time & expenses they incurred and then they share the margin equally…How would you like to share your business and margin in such case?

Devesh Dwivedi

Experienced Management Consultant

This is not as difficult a question as it seems. A very wise man, that I had the pleasure of working for, once told me something that changed my life…

“You don’t get what you’re worth. You get what you negotiate.”

Unfortunately, people continually compare themselves against others and worry about how their compensation stacks up against the other guy. They somehow take it as a given that the money they earn is directly tied to the value that they provide or their value as a person.

My wife worked in a job where she almost felt like she was robbing the company. She was making more money than she had ever made before and was incredibly happy. Then she found out the the slacker that sat next to her made 20% more than she did. Suddenly, the salary was unfair and she became a disgruntled employee. So what changed? Was she doing any more work? No. Was she making less money? No. Did her job change in any way? No.

So…what’s my point? There is no hard and fast rule for dividing up the revenues. I’ve seen account execs that work their butts off for 10% and they’re incredibly happy and wealthy. I’ve also seen lazy “do-nothing” reps that demand 60% or more and feel like they aren’t getting their share.

Personally, I think that the “hours” split is a silly one. If an AE can close a multi-million dollar deal in an hour and maintain it with a phone call per month, they provide the exact same value as the AE that has to sit on the account for hours per day. Similarly, a developer on the ground may work 80 hours a week, but piss off the customer with a bad attitude, miscommunication or broken code. You could use hours as a starting point (ie: “it would be reasonable to expect this to be a xxx hour commitment”) but I certainly wouldn’t use actuals.

My general rule of thumb is to simply ask each what their expectations are (hard dollars….not percentage of the pie), find a viable middle ground and try to keep 20-30% back for regular bonuses or for adjustments based on effort and complexity (difficult client that requires more hand-holding…excessive hours….etc.) . It’s more difficult when you’re one of the people in the mix. But you can still do it with customer satisfaction surveys or by just sitting down with folks at the table to discuss contributions. It’s funny how much more honest people will be about their contributions when they’re sitting across the table from one another trying to figure out how to divy up the money. It *does* require a certain amount of maturity in all parties. But if you have consulting professionals, that maturity is usually there (to some extent).

When it comes to professional networking, what do you prefer quality or quantity?

Devesh Dwivedi

Experienced Management Consultant

It’s important to get out there and talk to people (quantity) in order to find the people that you really connect with (quality). The more people that you encounter and interact with, the better your pool of quality contacts will be.

With that said, it’s difficult to maintain a good relationship with your network if it grows too large. You’ll have to judge for yourself what that balance is.

How honest does one need to be about salary history?

Specifically, when salary raise is one of the important reasons behind new job? Can your new employer ask for your past Pay-stubs to verify your salary?

Devesh Dwivedi

Experienced Management Consultant

There are very few things that an employer can’t ask. However, you’re not obligated to answer and they aren’t obligated to provide you with a job offer.

If you’re uncomfortable with the request, say so. If you’ve lied in the interview, you’re screwed. If you accept a job offer, they’re likely to insist on the salary confirmation as a condition of the offer and I know that I’d consider it a deal breaker if I found out that a candidate had lied to me.

You can try a couple of strategies:

1) Provide your current salary, but indicate that your primary motivation for changing jobs is money. Clearly state why you feel that you deserve more money/more responsibility (new skills, experience, certifications, training, etc.) and that you can do the job that they’re recruiting for. They’re unlikely to “low ball” you, since you’re demonstrating that money will be a factor in retaining you.

2) Tell them that you are uncomfortable disclosing financial information during an initial interview, but will gladly provide them with the information if and when you get to the offer stage. This essentially shuts down the discussion but shows that you’re not going to hide the information.

I’ve successfully used both strategies. The second was because I was taking a significant pay cut to get into a lower stress job. But I was worried that I’d scare them off if they knew what I was making. Ultimately, they never asked for the salary confirmation. They’re just as likely to assume that I was making much less, though.

I attended your session on Portfolio management at Symposium last month. It was a very informative use of time. You mentioned using drivers and categories for demand management and I was wondering if you could provide me some more detail?

Kulasekhar Jayaraman – via email

Thanks for the feedback. The session was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed the discussions.

The Work Types and Drivers approach is a compromise that we came up with to address the disconnect between the nature of a work request or project and the motivator for the request. We were having continual debates about “discretionary” vs “non-discretionary”, BAU vs KTLO, etc. By implementing this dual category model, we ended up with a way of tagging projects in such a way that we could map a project to any set of definitions or criteria that we needed to. It provided the right level of detail to be able to provide the engineers, executives and finance with the appropriate split and sorts that they needed.

Here’s the summary:

Work Types

Keep The Lights On/Operational Support/Core

Technical Continuity

Business Continuity

Minor Enhancement (Discretionary)

Major Enhancement

We’re struggling with how to compare different projects for prioritization. Do you have any advice for objectively assessing a proposed project?

PMPat via email

Those of you that have followed me in the PMI forums know that I’m a huge fan of Karl Weigers. In a prior company, my team adapted one of his requirements tools for objectively assigning a score to each project proposal. A sample of the tool is attached. Remember to work with your business partners to determine how to tailor it to your needs.I would also recommend assigning a relative weight to each line item. But even without that, it still provides a rough rating and assessment.

I hope that this helps to get you started. Drop me a note to let me know how you make out.

Image your company as a sports franchise. Your managers have recruited the best athletes from around the world, the best coaches and you’ve provided them with the best equipment. The owners and board of directors are up in the skybox looking down on the field and anxiously anticipating a winning season.

Now for the complications:

Nobody actually sat down with the hiring managers and told them what game was going to be played. So the athletes and coaches are from a dozen different sports and disciplines. Additionally, they’re all equipped with their own specific equipment, balls, pucks, rackets, etc.
The playing field is completely shrouded in fog and your players can only see what’s happening within a few yards of where they’re standing. They only interact with other players that happen to enter within that circle of vision and they have no idea where they are relative to the goals, the competition or the rest of their team.

The coaches get feedback from the players that they can’t find the goals or even the ball. At the same time, the coaches are getting feedback from the skybox that the team is losing the game. To try to make sense of the game,  the coaches decide to mark up the field with some guidance. Each coach makes assumptions about the game being played and what the goals are. Unfortunately, each coach draws different plays and strategies directly onto the field and the team can’t tell which is which.

The Owners sees that their team isn’t winning. They can only see the people that come out of the fog right in front of them looking lost and confused. The owners have  the goals to directly under the skybox in the hope that the realignment will result in some of those wanderers scoring points.

The team gets frustrated with the inability to score and they try to figure out the problem on their own. They decide that the coaches and owners must be stupid or crazy. Small groups of players independently decide on strategies to fix the problem. Since the game has never been defined and they can’t directly see the goals, the players are forced to make assumptions.  Between them they decide to bring extra balls, a hockey stick, two tennis rackets and a team of seeing-eye dogs onto the field.

The coaches see the changes and begin to question their own assumptions about the game. They re-align around whatever small successes they perceive. They  try to keep the  game going by hiring pro hockey players, a pair of tennis stars and a dog trainer. The Board tells the coaches that they’re over budget, so the coaches fire the most highly paid of the original players to try to reduce expenses.
The fans (the users) become confused and disgruntled and start looking towards other teams and players to follow. Some of the fans get ambitious, form their own teams and enter the field in the assumption that they could play better.
The Board sees the money drying up and the lack any apparent scored goals. They fire the coaches and the rest of the original players. They look at the organization and determine where the team seems to be struggling. They hire 3 more animal trainers, a consulting tennis coach and they buy a zamboni to ice the field to make better use of the hockey players.

The dogs get run over by the zamboni. The animal trainers all defect to Las Vegas to train tigers. The hockey players join an off-broadway ice show. The tennis coaches try to recruit tennis players, but the board decides to hire professional cricket players for half the price.

The situation fails to improve.

Hoping to turn it around, management equips everyone with headsets so that they can communicate. New scoreboards are installed to better report the scores to management. Everyone is sent on motivational training and the markings on the ice are all repainted in neon green.

So, you now have a bunch of cricket players being coached by tennis coaches, sliding on the ice in dense fog trying to make sense of what the actual game is and where the goals are. However, you truly do have a group of talented individuals. Each individual is performing to the best of their abilities. Occasionally goals are scored through acts of personal heroics. But the overall efficiency, control and alignment of the organization is shot and you’re left wondering how you got here.

This scenario may seem extreme. But, surprisingly, it’s not that far off what’s happening in organizations on a daily basis. The larger the organization becomes, the more difficult it is to keep the pieces aligned and focused on common goals. The lack of a shared context leads to a lot of ambiguity, conflicting goals and strategies, a perception of others in the organization as “stupid” or “incompetent” and a considerable amount of misdirected and wasted effort. Groups adhere to their own agendas, often with no regard or awareness for corporate strategy. Impacts to other teams are only considered when something “breaks” and often, the organization continues to function by brute force and individual efforts rather than through good planning or alignment.

This goes beyond a simple communication problem. As an organization grows, alignment drifts, personal political agendas begin to overshadow the “good of the company” and the idea of “team” becomes a localized concept. We forget that the “team” is really the entire company and not just our little corner of the corporate world.
The larger the organization, the stronger the leadership needs to be. That doesn’t mean that the leaders need to micromanage. Instead, they need to provide clear direction and expectations (what game are we playing and what are the rules?) ensure that every level of the organization has the authority to make their own decisions within the rules (fans stay off the field. Coaches set the strategy. Stadium staff maintain the stadium, goals and markings. Equipment managers control the equipment selection, etc.) and provide feedback on what’s successful and what isn’t. Trust is a big part of successful leadership. It leads to empowerment, better decision making on the floor and a more responsive and agile organization. But direction is needed if you want to keep those trusted individuals aligned to common goals. You can’t just assume that everyone is playing the same game.

By recognizing what’s going on, opening up a continuous dialogue and providing your staff with the tools and information to make the right decisions, you can recapture that small-company alignment, passion and team dynamic. Couple that with the resources and talent pool of a large corporation and you have a potential championship team.