Change management can often be seen as something that is going to cause nothing but hassle and pain. I found this great little video on the essence of how to manage organisational change on YouTube that I thought I’d share with you.
Change management does not have to be scary.
Communication, openness, planning and team engagement will help ensure it’s success.
Do you engage the rest of your business when implementing change?
Another great Dilbert cartoon to drive home the point that it is vital to understand what someone is looking for in a project i.e. the project scope.
I’ll be writing more about project scoping in a future post, but this has helped me frame my thoughts so I thought I’d share it with you now.
Business partnerships are built on trust. Trust is the foundation against which everything else grows. Trust in the capabilities of the other person, trust that they will do the best for the company, 
trust that they will meet any challenges head-on.
And this is right, if you can’t trust your business partner(s) 125%, then don’t go into business with them in the first place. This is the one of those times that it really is ok to listen to your gut instincts.
Eoin and I trust each other to completely. In fact we trust each other so much we put a business partnership agreement in place.
Er, if you trust each other so much, why would you bother?
Marketing and sales, the key functions of any business to generate the revenues to keep you in operation. But when is the right time to start marketing and sales activity when you are a start-up business?
This question needs a bit of thought. When you are ready is the right answer, but what on earth does that actually mean?
Are those who shout their intentions from the roof-tops and let the world know that they are coming before they actually do correct?
Or is it more appropriate to stay quiet working away diligently in a “black box” only targeting a selected audience to achieve your purpose.
I was perusing the Small Business News earlier and came across this post on business planning and how it applies to your blog and/or website. I have to be honest, the concept of a business plan for the blog was something that struck me as being slightly over the top.
What was actually being suggested was ensuring that you have goals and plans set for your business blog rather than the full scale monster business plan that we are all familiar with. This made complete sense to me.
Unless your blog is a hobby and you are literally writing purely to share your ideas/views with the world, then the chances are you are hoping that your blog will bring customer traffic to your site. If this is the case, then the message that you need to put on it should be relevant and compelling to the person reading it – especially if you are going to convert them into a paying customer.
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Painting techniques, the odd things that go through my head at times. However, this has stemmed from my need to prepare and paint my side gate before it starts to rot.
It’s my annual “sort out the woodwork in the garden” time of year. You know, that list of stuff that never seems to get done – the panel fence, the garden shed, the fascia on the house (for those of us without uPVC…).
Perhaps approach would be a better word. I have to think about how I’m going to approach each piece of woodwork that needs to be sorted out. (more…)
I was reading a post by Seth Godin on where we find good ideas. The imagery that he used of the stale corporate meeting room where everyone is “brain-storming” to come up with the next great thing was very powerful – probably because I’ve been there and done that in the long distant past.
Crisis management aside, the idea that a room with people stuffed in it (even if it is comfortable) with the specific instruction to come up with something new is almost inevitably doomed to failure.
“Ok, think of a great idea, something original… oh and we have less than an hour”.
Hmm, perhaps not.
We thought long and hard about going for an open beta test on MyProjectTracker. On the plus side we felt we’d get honest feedback from people who did not know us i.e. not the friends and family brigade. On the negative side, we were putting the product out there and leaving ourselves open to criticism.
We elected to go for it and opened up the product so anyone could sign up to and have a look around. We felt the benefits of open and honest feedback far outweighed the risk of exposing ourselves to potential criticisms.
We pushed the product for exactly one week directly to companies and via the usual social media channels. We decided to ease off once we had about 125 users signing up. We had a target of 20% of those people to actually go beyond the look around and actually get themselves setup and using the product in anger.
We hit our target in less than a fortnight – delighted. We got our sign-ups and our 20% of active users – a mix of businesses from single person consultancies to our largest, a company with 30+ employees. A good cross-section we felt.
This morning, I was reading a post on Bloggertone that reminded me of our own journey to get where we are at the moment.
When Eoin and I presented the concepts for MyProjectTracker to our friends in Contrast, we had already written down to an implementation level i.e. dictating (almost), how we wanted the product to be built. We had gone the direct route to come up with an answer for how the product should be put together based on our own experiences up to that point. Oh, and to ensure it was deployed as fast as possible (in our eyes).
We have all written business plans and most are works of well-written fiction created to project the best possible scenario of your business, usually for investors. Ok, I make light of their usefulness, but in reality they are too cumbersome to work with to plan your goals and objectives.
This is where a business development plan comes in which gets you to ask and answer the questions:
“where are you now?”
“where do you want to be?”
“what are you going to do to get there?”
This sounds initially like a complicated exercise. Not so. You should be able to write a business development plan in two pages or less, in fact the less the better as it gives you focus.
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