WisHList Newsletter October 2008

• To spend or not to spend in tough times
• PM power tips: The right structure to support success
• The WisHList X-factor
• Wishing Well

To spend or not to spend in tough times

With talk about a world-wide recession dominating financial discussions, budgets are not easily allocated or spent. What approach should you take towards IT spending? The usual knee-jerk response in a recession is to cut back or freeze IT spending. But is that necessarily the best strategy?

There is no single, definitive answer, but following are a few thoughts to mull over when you consider signing, or not, on the dotted line.

Think about the advertising industry. In difficult economic times, advertisers tend to cut back on ad spending, some dramatically so. But there are companies that don’t cut back. With their competitors lowering their advertising profiles and ducking for cover, these companies see it as an opportunity to grab market share and emerge ahead of the pack when the good economic times return. And more often than not, it’s a winning strategy.

In the same vein, there are professional investors who know that the time to buy is when other people are selling, and the time to sell is when other people are buying. This may seem like a counterintuitive approach, but it’s done wonders for the likes of Warren Buffet, America’s most successful investor. These are people who have consistently employed this approach, and it’s helped make many of them very, very rich.

Moving in the opposite direction of the crowd is not something that makes sense for every organisation, nor is it a guarantee of success.  But it is something you ought to consider.

Here’s how IT can help you in tough times:

• Invest in software solutions like business intelligence (BI) and business performance management (BPM) to make better, faster business decisions and squeeze more profit from your existing operations.
• Deploying collaboration and remote meeting solutions to reduce travel costs without sacrificing creativity and team synergy.
• Hosted solutions and cloud computing with their vastly lower capital investment requirements can help you capitalize on cost-effective ways of helping your business become more efficient, while positioning it to emerge stronger and more profitable when the good economic times return.

There are other angles to work when the economy goes into recession. You can cut a better deal with software vendors in a recession, a time when they’re especially hungry for your business. With many companies, some undoubtedly your competitors, letting IT staff go, there’s an opportunity to scoop up some excellent talent that simply wouldn’t be available if the economy was good.

The bottom line is pretty clear: under-investing in IT can lead to poor customer service, lost business, and a lack of productivity – none of which is good for business.

Just because it’s so commonly done doesn’t make cutting or freezing IT spending in a recession the right course of action for you. In bad times as in good, there are opportunities waiting to be found. Assuming that your organisation’s circumstances don’t absolutely prevent it, you just have to be willing to buck the trends and find them.

Adapted from a blog by Larry Blitz

PM power tips: The right structure to support success

In the previous edition of WWW we looked at how to pick the right people for your project team. However, the group of individuals need an enabling environment to achieve their objectives. This is where organisational structure enters the picture.

Establish Centres of Excellence

Even though you want to have generalising specialists on your project team, you still need some means of providing coaching and training for specific skill sets. Depending on the size of the organisation you may also want to develop organisational standards. Centres of Excellence provide a focused collection of knowledge on a particular skill set. These may be the organisational units or departments to which people are assigned for HR purposes. The trick to remember is to not allow these units to degrade into a collection of specialists.

Build teams around a specific product or system

For HR purposes people report to a resource manager providing guidance on a specific skill set, but for everyday work they are organised into teams that are focused on a particular product or system. This style of organisation has two main advantages:

• It keeps a team together for an extended period of time, which allows them to reach gelling status; and
• It allows the members of the team to focus on a specific subject area.

Keep the passion alive

The problem with having product-focused teams is that the team could get to the point where they run out of challenges and start to lose interest in what they are doing. There are a couple of ways to tackle this:

• If you have a well gelled team that has gotten the product to a completed state, move the entire team onto some other project. This provides the team with new challenges while at the same time giving the new project a head start by placing it in the hands of a well performing team from the beginning.
• Provide the team with the opportunity to learn new skills while working on the same project will keep the passion alive while increasing the number of generalising specialists in the company.

Don't be afraid to change seats on the bus

In Good to Great Jim Collin describes great companies as those that are willing to make sure they have the right people on the bus (or off the bus in some cases) and in the right seat on the bus.

In the process of forming your gelling teams, you are bound to find cases where you have someone that you want in your organisation, but they may not necessarily on the right project - they are on the right bus, but not in the right seat. In other cases you will find people that frankly are not on the right bus. In those cases, you should get them off that bus as soon as possible otherwise they will impact the performance of the team. If the rest of the team is truly performing well, they may very well help the team member off the bus themselves.

Information courtesy of Kent McDonald

The WisHList X-factor

Estelle Louw has been with WisHList Corporation for three years – and has resigned from and rejoined the company three times! Although she had good reasons for leaving, NAV and the WisHList X-factor brought her back time after time.

“I’ve worked with ERP systems for a long time, but NAV is in a class of its own. I love its flexibility and the fact that it can be customised to do just about anything the customer wants”, explains Estelle. Wishlist is more or less the same. “I tried going back to corporate life but even a bigger salary couldn’t compensate for a flexible environment in which people are encouraged to grow, take responsibility and implement their ideas. I just really enjoy my colleagues, what we do here and how we go about it.”

Wishing Well

"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
- Winston Churchill -

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