The management guru's in one day!

The management guru's in one day!

At this moment I am in the train, returning from a seminar based on management theories. Filled with ambition and renewed energy to guide te business through these times, I am tired and asking myself what it was that I learned most today?

Most of us know a lot of the stuff that was presented, Mintzberg, Porter, Goldratt, golden oldies that you have learned during your college and university years. But how different does the message arrive when you have been managing your own company for some years in comparison to the times that your biggest worry was which bar to visit that evening..

For me the word Focus rings through most at the moment. As the most valuable confrontation of today. Yes, confrontation, because be honest, the main message is: "you have learned this almost 14 years ago, why don't you act like it?". 

Focus!

- focus on what you are as a company,

- focus on what your clients need your company for,

- focus on the skills at hand to do that what is aimed for and required.

And using a lot of techniques to mold those focusses together in one proposition.

A nice day, a fun day, not a dull moment, guidance for me as the entrepreneur who is to guide.. It was another great day in business!

Doede van Haperen

www.lakran.com

www.postulit.com

When to optimize?!

When to optimize?!

...and when just automate?

The other day I was involved in a conference call with a client of mine. Plans involving P2P related steps in SAP. So we where called in to think along based on our experience and known creativity. Torn between current business wishes to make things more simple and future policies to come to more extensive integrations, the IT department had to come up with an idea. But waiting for the future, the budget was limited, and being pushed by the business, the time to solution was limited as well...

That made me think, when do you advice on optimizing, when do you advice on just automating and when do you decide to not advice at all and do as asked?

Is there simple ruling for this dilemma? I think there is, and it is one of the simplest rules in the project book, but a lot of IT guys (and girls too, really) tend to forget it: keep on focussing on the business case!

1. Keep asking you client/internal business "why"?

2. Keep calculating on the result, do we gain by this idea in money, and if not, is that covered by qualitative motivators for the solution?

3. Be careful the moment a project just becomes qualitatively motivated. These are the projects that usually derail on cost!

4. And an important one which is more difficult to assess: is it worth the fuzz?

In P2P related projects the quantitative business case is often huge on price reduction, and slim on process improvement. But still, when playing it right, this second category can cover a complete project by itself. When you focus on the part that is enough, in my experience you get the correct focus. Eliminating unneccessary fuzz, building a lean project and covering your business needs. From there on start using and start optimizing.

So when to advice what? Drop your own boxed thoughts and listen to your client, do not do for the doing, but do for the goal!

Doede van Haperen

www.lakran.com

www.postulit.com

Confronting

Confronting

Maintaining a weblog was fun I thought, a nice channel to express your experiences and let the world have an idea of what you are busy with. But it appears to be also very confronting: it tells you when you are (behaving yourselve?) too busy! Before you know it, about two weeks have passed. And again, what a few weeks those were...

Potential clients asking for a lot of attention, current clients reaching project deadlines, employees are taking their spring-vacation, discussions on internal product development and on top of that you try to execute some billable hours yourselve at important projects.
All keeping you up late, keeping you busy during the day and keeping the "up-time" at more and more stressful levels...

Yesterday we had a bank holiday in The Netherlands (we got a new King and Queen!), I was at a celebration where one of my friends, entrepreneur as well, kept on checking his iPhone to see what his abroad susidiaries where doing. As a person, you tend to take over that habit imediately, so I was handling mine pretty soon... Fortunately I ran into the attached picture-perfect-moment that same evening: a staring contest with a pigeon in my garden, that seemed to tell me "just enjoy this sunset now...".

...Pigeons are wise, able to confront me the same way my Blogger-account does. For the rest of the week, my time is vacation time! Taking the down-time to compensate for the rushes of up-time required at the moment, reading a book and doing some study, playing with my daughter and...who knows, run into some pigeons again;-)

Doede van Haperen
www.lakran.com
www.postulit.com

Production rising

Production rising

It has been a great week. As a business we are really growing into our new fase of maturity. Proud to see that what you have started years ago begins to thrive on it's own. The last week was all about setting the pace, agreeing on who-should-do-what and then simply start doing.
But let me start at the beginning...

Over the last few months we were growing. This was not by chance, but strategically planned due to development plans. The hourly-based services we traditionally deliver should be enriched in the future by full-solution-products. This would take two changes within the firm:

Add capacity: we would not be able to combine sufficient turnover with qualitative product development with the capacity on resources we had. So growth was the answer.
Simplify the message in the market: selling solutions instead of only consulting asks for a very clean and clear message, so the core business of the firm had to be identified even more as we already did. A split in two companies with both their own, clean, message was the answer.

Since March 1st we are active with two firms, one focussed on Procurement from a business perspective, one focussed on Procurement from an IT (SAP) perspective. But both with a clear objective: start developing solutions for customers besides only staffing their projects!

It was a hectic month to get the ideas channelled, but last week the business plan for one of our new Interim Procurement Initiatives was closed up. On top of that, yesterday the developers started the build of our first end-to-end (SAP SRM based) software solution..

..the plant is in power, the production is in session!

Doede van Haperen
www.lakran.com
www.postulit.com

Long hours of testing and fixing

Long hours of testing and fixing

...and discussing what to fix. Check the dashboard picture, see the time, third working day in a row that meal time has long passed before we went home from the customers' site. SAP SRM in an implementation that is divided in Template versus roll-out localizations. Interesting days full of discussion-based fixing of test-defects.

Template-based implementations: hard to do it perfectly. Either you run into unhappy local users that do not feel themselves fully at-home in the new environment, or you will run into an un-manageable (and thus way too expensive) project/investment when you manage the template not strict enough and want to please users! Caught between that rock and that hard case...

What to do then, how to make it work? To my opinion, after some years of seeing it happen, one golden rule: anticipate the localization-factor before you start your template. Sounds simple, here is what I mean.

1. Have a very clear picture of what it is you want to safeguard with the template strategy! Is it a certain policy you want to uphold, or is it just a manageable and maintainable system? Be sure to clearly state that within your managed change process.
2. Make sure that a proper sounding board is enabled before you start workshops. No inbalance between bloodtypes in your company or different attention to importance of Business Units. Every person in that group should count, from content, expertise, as well as validity and mandate perspective.
3. Design and build your custom developments in such a way that not only the development works as designed, but also easilly allows added development in those spots that allow localization from the basic strategy-standpoint.
4. The first thing that needs design in the project is the "request for change" process, only after that you can start your template P2P design.

Having concluded this from the position I had in some of the projects that I have seen: yes, for sure, it sounds simple enough. But having it managed for a few times as well, I know it is certainly not. But then again, long hours for a few weeks make a real project team, and that is priceless...

Doede van Haperen
www.lakran.com
www.postulit.com

The week of knowledge

The week of knowledge

An interesting week. Filled with new knowledge, but on all kinds of different aspects in my working life!
The introduction to the new to be released European Public Tender rules was interesting from my Entrepreneur's view as well as from my Procurement-consulting's view. As a supplier I am very glad with the fact that those new set of rules attempt to force a more qualitative and considered way of working with some of the tendering governments. So dear suppliers, please let me urge you (us) all to keep them to that principles. But on the other hand, as a procurement consultant, delivering processes and procedures, and also a.i. purchasers to those same governments, it will force our competition to bringing their work at our level of quality, because the rules simply do not allow for shortage of carefullness anymore. In general I would say: hopefully it will help us professionalize our B2G market again for a little bit.
Let us wait and see from April 1st, ehm, really, April 1st...?

More knowledge this week came from an insight session we had at our office yesterday within SAP SRM 7.02. Insiders know that really (!) understanding what's new within a new Enhancementpack (EHP2 in this case) is key to being of distinctive added value to your customers. Thanks a lot to our German friends for giving us the opportunity again! We are certainly able to use the information in our product development and service delivery.

Last but not least, I started a study over the last few days towards the change effectiveness of eProcurement implementations and the differentiating behavior of key-figures in that effect.. way too much to tell about now, but it will keep me busy over the coming months so certainly it will be brushed upon a few times in this weblog!

Time to start thinking about an Easter weekend now..

Doede van Haperen
www.lakran.com
www.postulit.com

How difficult! But why?

 

How difficult! But why?

Sometimes in the life of consultancy, you’ll find discussions that go over and over again without you actually grasping the deeper reason why people make it so difficult. This week, I was involved in a meeting at one of my customers on the topic of integration with Temps Agencies. Of course I understand the fact that things seem easier when you have done it 20 times before, where the matter is new to others in the room, but why oh why has this topic already been under discussion here for more than one and a half years…?
 

Optimizing Temporary Labor related P2P solutions is easier than it seems, just keep in mind the following 4 key principles:

 

1.     Never enter data more than once, the transactional volumes are simply too high to accept data failures by typo’s in copy actions.

2.     Who is the owner of the data-object? That is the one that brings or maintains that data-object in the process.

3.     Market standards (technology-driven as well as process-driven, such as SETU and SIDES) are there for a reason: they standardize a complete market, bend along, lower your risk and supplier lock-in!

4.     Do not hassle about the savings and costs on any individual basis. Optimize the dataflow, optimize your informational value, minimize the chance for failure, and divide the benefits afterwards… Keep commercial discussions away from your change project

 

They always say “procurement of people is not the same as procurement of goods”, but the simplest of Supply Chain Optimization values are the only truth really to make it happen…

 

Doede van Haperen

www.lakran.com

www.postulit.com