A New Beginning

Since taking a full time job, it has been difficult to find the time to devote to writing. As I look back over the year, it has been interesting, exciting and rewarding, but somehow lacking one crucial element. As much as I try to put the blogging and daily social interaction behind me and out of my head, it has left a small but persistent void in my life.

This has brought me to my 2013 New Year's resolution. I must return to writing.

It will be difficult and there is no way I can produce a daily column, but I will make every effort to post at least two or three original columns each month. Those of you who have been most loyal followers will understand the quality of any post depends on the amount of time one has to devote to it. I am determined to keep the quality as least as high as it has been in the past and so this means limiting the numbers.

Choosing topics may be difficult, too, as clearly I will not write anything about the company, the job or current projects.  I will continue to draw on my past experiences, or independent thoughts and ideas that wander to the surface from some deep, dark place in my brain.

Of course, I will also post guest columns as I have in the past few months providing ample reading material and filling in those weeks when I can't bang out one of my own.

So. my fondest hope and dream is that we continue our voyage together, cruising in new directions, and some old, familiar ports.

As always, I look forward to your feedback, comments and opinions, and I welcome suggestions for topics of interest to you.

Best wishes for smooth sailing in the coming year!

Captain Joe  

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

The Customer Experience Race Is Out of the Blocks

My good friend Andrew Spanyi has been a faithful and supportive reader and asked if he could share some of his "views" from the bridge. He permitted me to reprint the following column for your review and reaction. Andrew is a senior consultant at the Cutter Consortium.

The title of a recent article in The Economist reads, " Companies Hope That "Chief Customer Officers" Will Provide Better Service. Yeah, Right." The article reports not only that some firms have started appointing chief customer officers (CCOs) to serve the customer more attentively, but that some of these CCOs have many assistants, such as a "vice president of customers-for-life" (Salesforce.com), or a "vice president of customer advocacy"(NetApp), and even a "director of customer listening" (Cisco). Add this to the slate of "vice presidents, customer experience" at companies such as Fidelity, Intuit, Healthy Directions, and others. It's pretty clear that the race is on.

While such appointments of key executives to take charge of assessing customer experience are certainly a step in the right direction, there are grounds for a healthy dose of skepticism. Even though the idea that the primary purpose of business is to create and retain customers goes all the way back to Peter Drucker's 1954 book The Practice of Management , many organizations have struggled in shifting management attention from traditional financial metrics to the critical few measures that really matter to customers. And it's not just about metrics; fundamental changes in culture are also needed for optimum results. So, action has lagged rhetoric.

The first step in viewing the business from the customer's point of view involves measuring and monitoring the firm's performance in terms of delivering what customers really want. What customers really want are the following:

1. On-time delivery (ideally when customers asked for it, or at least when it was promised to be delivered)
2. Accuracy (the exact items/services they ordered)
3. Completeness (no back orders or call backs)
4. Responsiveness to inquiries (first time right)
5. An accurate invoice
6. Value for money
7. Flawless service/support (both during and after product/service delivery)

A tight collaboration between business and IT is needed to make any progress in automating the collection of critical-to-customer metrics. That's easier said than done. A surprising number of companies continue to monitor metrics such as when orders are shipped as opposed to when these are received, the average time needed to respond to a customer inquiry as opposed to the frequency with which customer inquiries are resolved correctly the first time, and so on. Even when the right metrics are monitored, they often don't make it to the scoreboard that the senior leadership team (SLT) monitors and are buried deep in the bowels of an analytical group. Further, an end-to-end process-based view is needed to find the root cause when performance dips below a certain level and this view of business is frequently missing, or at least not transparent, at the SLT level.

While some progress has been made in the area of customer-centric measurement, largely due to an increasing emphasis on Big Data and process analytics, it is not yet clear whether this will have sufficient impact to shift management attention to a more customer-centric and systemic view of business. Organizational culture is sometimes tagged as the culprit. Yet, culture is dependent on what the organization measures, manages, and rewards. To shift culture requires not only attention to customer-focused metrics, but also on models, governance, and reward systems, as summarized below:

• Model: The use of simple, visually compelling schematics of a high-level process-based view of the business and a one-page schematic for at least each customer-touching process is needed to maintain a focus on performing for customers and the need for cross-departmental collaboration.
• Governance: Given the development of the right models and metrics, establishing a process-based governance framework to emphasize value creation is necessary to embed a new way of "how we do things around here."
• Reward systems: This involves aligning reward and recognition systems to acknowledge the efforts of individuals and teams that enable performance for customers.

How is your organization doing in these areas? I welcome your comments about this Advisor and encourage you to send your insights to me at aspanyi@cutter.com. 



Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

Recruiters Not Calling? Five Reasons & How To Fix It

Here is another article contributed by my friend Deborah Walker, career coach. This is great advice and so I am delighted to be able to pass it along here on the bridge.

You’ve been hoping for a new job, but your phone is silent. No recruiters calling, no job offers;it’s so quiet you can almost hear the crickets outside. Maybe it’s time to reassess. Does this sound like your job search efforts?

• 

  You’ve sent out hundreds of resumes to countless job postings but received little or no response.
• You’ve left dozens of voice mails to recruiters explaining why you are a perfect fit—and they never return your call.
• You’ve tweaked your resume so many times you no longer recognize it.

If this describes your situation, you are not alone. Many talented, qualified job seekers get ignored by recruiters and hiring managers simply because their resume has one or more of the following problems.

1. Your resume highlights your lack of industry experience

Most recruiters are looking for a point-by-point candidate match when screening resumes. Industry background usually ranks high on the list of qualifying issues. If you don’t have experience in that industry, your resume is going straight to the circular file—unless you can give them a compelling reason to keep your resume in the stack. If you lack specific industry experience, but you know you have the basic skills for the job, try highlighting your transferable skills instead. Job seekers who lack industry experience can make it past the resume screener by proving their ability with skills they have that transfer from industry to industry. Examples of transferable skills include expertise gained in sales, customer service, finance, accounting, negotiation, cross-functional communications, and/or team building. Look at the skills they need, then figure out how your background is a match.

2. Your resume shouts “Overqualified!”

Nothing scares off a recruiter faster than a candidate who is obviously overqualified for the job. The two main concerns are (1) that the candidate would soon get bored and leave at his earliest convenience, and (2) that the candidate would be too expensive to hire. Even worse is the assumption that the over qualified candidate is on a downward career slope—a has-been with all his best years behind him. There are, however, many valid reasons job seekers wish to downsize to jobs with fewer responsibilities. Whatever your reasons, tailor your resume to fit your current career objective. This means you’ll want to play down your prior responsibilities, list only relevant education (don’t list a PhD if you are applying for a mid-level management position!), and emphasize tactical experience over strategic planning when appropriate.

3. Your resume is crammed with information, but not the right kind

Pity the poor recruiter who must get through 200 applicant resumes before lunchtime. If your resume is in the pile, it will get a quick scan and pass over if she can’t find what she is looking for in less than 30 seconds. If you have a resume that is disorganized or full of dense blocks of text, how will the recruiter learn anything about you? You’ll catch the recruiter’s attention if you have a clear, easy-to-read resume that highlights your skills and accomplishments, even at a glance. The first rule of resume effectiveness is relevancy, so edit out the past data and redundant facts that aren't relevant to your current career path. Fill your resume only with the skills needed for that particular job, and you’ll go a long way toward getting a recruiter’s attention.

4. Your resume has too little information

While the “strong, silent type” may be attractive in men, it just plain flops in a resume. A resume that looks more like an outline just doesn’t give the reader enough to work with. Recruiters don’t want to guess what you did at your last job. You need to include enough information to give prospective employers a vision of the possibilities if they choose to hire you. If you struggle with what to include in your resume, use job  descriptions to help you understand what recruiters will want to find in your resume. Then review your  previous jobs to determine what skills you have that will be a good match.

5. Your resume doesn’t include accomplishments

If you haven’t thought lately about how your employer has benefited from having you as an employee, it’s a sure bet that your resume is lacking in accomplishments. Remember, as a job seeker you are selling your talents, and you are competing with many others who have the same qualifications as you do.  Accomplishments give recruiters a reason to choose you over others for the interview short list. Give screeners ample reason to select you for interview. Highlight how you have saved time, increased efficiency, cut cost and increased client satisfaction. After all, if you don’t tell them, nobody else will!

If you use this five-point checklist to restructure your resume, you’ll soon hear back from recruiters who appreciate qualified, articulate and confident candidates. The time you spend enhancing your resume could shave off months of fruitless labor and frustrating effort in your job search.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

In Memory of Stephen Covey

This weekend we lost a great author and guide to better personal time management, Stephen Covey. His book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, was one of the all time best and often cited works dealing with how to maximize the use of your time and talents.

This morning one of my alerts brought me a link to this article in the Business Insider magazine.  It is a wonderful summary of the book and I highly recommend you read it. If you have read the book it is still a timely and useful review. If not, you can learn a lot and it just might prompt you to buy the book. It is a worthwhile investment.

The catch-phrase, "Start with the end in mind" taken from Covey's  by me a very long time ago, is to this day a mantra that I frequently use both in the office and at home. Of all the advice contained in this text, this is the one which has been my guiding light to success.

After all, if you don't know where you want to go, any road will get you there.  But when you have a specific destination in mind it becomes easy to chart the most efficient and effective means of getting there. 

So my advice is stop spending so much time and energy on the how and why. Instead, first nail the answer to where and the rest will follow.

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC

All that divides us….

My good friend David O'Malley has been a faithful and supportive reader and asked if he could share some of his "views" from the bridge. He submitted the following column for your consideration and enjoyment.  He writes well and makes a lot of sense. 

On the face of it, what would a Farmer living in rural Poland have in common with an IT Manager from Connecticut? I mean, I can’t think of two professions that are further apart - One is entirely physical, commodity based, less a profession than a way of life. The other is virtual, “thought” based, the work of desk jockey’s. Personally, I’m a city person - America is far away from Poland, not just geographically, but culturally, and on top of that, we don’t even speak the same language. The divisions appear insurmountable.

Well, let me introduce you to Andrew Szczur, my wife’s Uncle who is, indeed, that Farmer in rural Poland and as it turns out, we actually have a lot in common.

To start, Andrew and I are about the same age, are married and we both have two young daughters. You’ll be glad to know that the constant ferrying of kids to extra-curricular activities is just as prevalent in Central Europe as it is here in America!

Andrew is very active as a volunteer Fire Fighter in his town – a specialized position that requires regular training and, as in America, a constant fight for funds to maintain and upgrade equipment. Although retired for a few years now, I spent 7 years as a volunteer EMT in Connecticut, so we could understand our respective protocols easily enough.

Throw in a general love of sport and some good old-fashioned BBQ’s and once we took the time to understand each other we found that our interests, goals and motivations in life, were pretty similar.

When it came down to it, the only thing that really divides us, is Language.

So how is this story relevant to you? Joe dedicated this blog to the idea that we in the IT industry have to get out of the “engine room” of our industries, and get into the Captains Bridge. As Joe would point out, we’re perfectly placed to do so – I mean, all of our companies complex business rules come to IT professionals for formalization, right? We even have career paths dedicated to teasing out the intricacies and nuances of these rules.

Understanding processes is one thing, understanding people is a whole different kettle of fish. If we want to get out of the engine room, we have to find commonalities with those who populate the Bridge of the ship. The motivations, fears, hopes, goals.

It starts with speaking a common language.

Do you know what EBITDA is, and why it’s important? If your company is public, can you read and fully understand the 10k? Which parts of that document relate most heavily to your company’s current growth strategy? How does that strategy affect the various stakeholders in your company that currently occupy the Bridge? More importantly, where do you fit into that strategy?

At the company cocktail hour, when a Senior Stakeholder asks you that innocuous, but oft loaded, question “So, David, what are you working on these days?” Can you answer in a language that the Stakeholder will understand, or does someone need to translate your answer for you?

Now make no mistake, it’s not easy, you have to work hard at it. With Andrew and I, it was a two way street – finding different ways to say the same thing, using the vocabulary of a four-year-old, and neutralizing accents. But it usually takes one person to make the first jump, put themselves out there and get the conversation rolling. Yes, it’s difficult.

The payoff, however, is unity. Or, as we call it in Corporate America, “Alignment”. Maybe, even, an eventual seat at the helm?

Z jedności jest siła.

David

Captain Joe

Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC