Stop Hiding Behind PowerPoint

PowerPoint vs. No PowerPoint, that is the question...

I have a number of "Andrea-isms" that I share with my team, colleagues, and on this blog from time to time. One is "Blank Whiteboards Beget Blank Stares." I encourage the folks around me to come prepared to challenging discussions with a "straw man" idea for what is needed, giving the folks engaged in the discussion something to which they can react, critique, and evolve. It works...just this week I shared with a colleague the current wireframes for a new technology I am building. He was able to confirm many of the things I am planning for this technology, but in the process also expanded my thinking with ideas he had that would make the solution more valuable to him. Would I have been able to get such a reaction if I didn't show him anything and illustrate what I was planning. Maybe, but given that I have a hypothesis and proposed solution, of course I will show it to him and ask him to poke holes in it.

I didn't, however, come up with a 25-slide deck to run through with him, asking him to review and read each slide while I spoke to him about what each meant, and then asking him to think creatively as part of a dialog to evolve my thinking. If I had, he would have been sucked into the slides, trying to read each word and understand what I was trying to get across while also trying to the words I was throwing at him. I would have been more focused on presenting and "getting through all my slides" than I would have been in having an open discussion with him about how to make my solution better and more valuable to him.

Unfortunately, I think many of us rely too much on tools like PowerPoint when we feel we have important points we want to get across, limited time to do so, and a large and/or challenging audience that we may or may not know. The end result is a presentation during which you impart all of your wisdom and learn little or nothing from the audience or meeting participants.

I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with David A. Fields, a consultant to the consulting community and an expert in connecting the right consultant to his business customers, enabling a higher ROI on services rendered. David hosted a session with the Crimson Consulting Collaborative, of which I am part, and discussed ways consultants fail to properly sell their value and drive revenue. It was great. David reminded many of us of key best practices that are easily forgotten or not trusted when in the field, and he did so without a single PowerPoint.

As a participant, David's session felt very much like an ad hoc discussion with like-minded people, he as the facilitator. The reality is, though, that David had a well-planned and practiced presentation in which he planned to take us through a journey of "ah ha" moments. He's done this session before, and he will do it again - almost the same way each time. The questions may vary from session to session, but they all tie back to the journey he wants to take us on, and he knows how to respond to each and make sure we get the lessons learned he set out to impart on us. Each one of us left the one-and-a-half hour sessions with a key lesson learned and a desire to purchase his book, talk to our colleagues, or hire David for more one-on-one assistance...not a single PowerPoint.

I realized in this session that PowerPoint is a great tool, but I often hide behind it. While I know I can use PowerPoint to build my story boards for the discussion I want or have been asked to facilitated, but I don't have to show them. Although, I almost always to. (David had notes or slides on his iPad, which never far from site.) By choosing to keep the slides to himself, David quickly connected with his audience and invite Q&A a long the way. If you have a deck, you expect and are expected to present the deck. This puts you in the role of "speaker." As a consultant or a consultant who sells, though, the more you are talking, the less you are listening and learning, and less likely you are to assist this customer in asking and answering their own questions (from Peter Block).

David could have shared his slides with us, talked through them, and before moving on to the next slide, asked "are there any questions." Having taken that approach time and time again in my career, I suspect it would have been a much less dynamic conversation and the "ah ha" moments may not have happened so quickly.

Be prepared for the meetings you facilitate, for sure, but try stepping out of your comfort zone, closing your laptop, and have a conversation. If you need to jump up to white board a concept or an example...go for it. (I keep a set of dry erase markers in my work bag for just those occasions.) If you know there are certain topics that warrant a visual, practice your "impromptu" white board often so you can get it right and appear as though you are thinking on your feet (which you are, since you will only jump to the white board when the conversation lends itself to you doing so).

10 Things You Can Do to Be More Effective In Getting What You Need Internally

Two weeks ago, I wrote about ways in which I have worked with sales to build stronger relationships and effectively protect my business, team, and clients. In so doing, we had fewer projects that we couldn't support and a stronger ability to plan resource needs. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than the Wild West scenario that I described toward the end of the post.

As promised (although a week late), I want to share 10 things I have done in the past to ensure I had or was able to get the resources I needed when I needed them. With that said, there is no silver bullet. Your ability to get what you needs is dependent on a lot of outside factors. Things like:

• Economic Environment: The Services business may be killing it, but sales overall may be down; Management may impose a hiring freeze across the board, and you have to get it done with less.
• Product Development Cycles: You may have a need for a member of the Engineering team, but they have a critical release and can't step away. You have to figure it out on your own or delay your client.
• Corporate Philosophy: Let's face it, not all departments are created equal, and if you work in an organization that pays lip service to the value Services provides, you will have a difficult time getting what you need, no matter what you do. (I've been there!)
• Perceived Role of Services: If Services is perceived first and foremost as a profit center, almost every decision will be made based on the impact it has on margin, regardless of the impact elsewhere. That is not to say you can't get what you need, but you need to understand this fact and position your business case in this context.

So, here are 10 things I have done in the past to get the resources I need when I need then.

1. Working with Sales to Manage What Is Sold and Understand Your Pipeline: I discussed this first action in depth in my last post. In the end, you need to be perceived as part of the sales team, helping to close deals, but you also need to clearly articulate your constraints and the impact of bad projects on the clients and the business. Its a relationship play - start now.
2. Effective Project Estimation to Understand Your Pipeline and Backlog Better: How many of us really feel confident in the estimates we put forth? Do we really have the information we need from the client? Do we understand all the risks, and have we mitigated them effectively through contingency? Have we taken the time to assess past projects "like this one" to ensure that we have historical information that supports this estimate? If you miss the estimate by any significant margin, your capacity planning will be wrong and you may not have the resources you need when you need them. In one role, my team and I developed a five-day "jumpstart" engagement. We sold it for $12,500 as a standard offering. We assumed five days of effort for pre-engagement planning, execution, and post-engagement wrap up. We sold more than I can ever guess in this model. We eventually went back and evaluated the time sheets of these engagements and found that no engagement was actually completed in five days. For every day of client-facing work, there was at least 1/2 day of non-client-facing work we needed to do. Our five-day engagement was really eight days. We adjusted our time estimate and our pricing. In so doing, we increased revenue, improved our margin, and had more effective capacity planning. We had the resources we needed when we needed them.
3. Using Earned Value Analysis (EVA) to Assess Project Trajectory:  I feel like I am aging myself with the EVA reference...does anyone use EVA any more? Well even it if it is not used formally in this agile development world, I think the concept still holds true. At the most basic level, EVA is an assessment of the likelihood a project will complete on time on budget based on what has been completed to date. Are you 50% complete with the work but have consumed 60% of the budget? If yes, your EVA would indicate a cost/time over run. Likewise, if you are 50% complete with the work but have consumed 40% of the budget, the EVA would indicate on-time, on-budget (or ahead of schedule) delivery. Now, we all know that past performance is not a promise of future performance, but it is an indicator you can use to determine if resources are likely rolling off projects when initially planned. You can then start to think about whether you have a scheduling conflict with another project for which you need the same resources or if you will be able to start a future project sooner or crash a schedule by adding additional resources since they may be available.
4. Setting Project Managers' Expectations on the Importance of Project Plan Updates for Effective Backlog Burn Rates:  I have seen too many times a PM running to a resource manager in a panic because he didn't communicate that he needed "this" resources for two more weeks, and the resource just casually mentioned that she will be in Tuscan next week starting her next gig. Like it or not, the PMs hold the keys to ensure that the right information is communicated early and often so that adjustments can be made earlier to avoid strain in the system. As project managers (PM) are assessing a project's status, using EVA and other tools, they should be expected to make updates to project and resource plans in what every system you use (PSA, Spreadsheets, Staff Meetings, etc.) to effectively communicate to management capacity needs on a project. Without the input from the PMs, resource managers will be in the dark about what resources are needed when. Setting PMs expectations on what happens when they do or don't communicate schedule changes is key to making it happen. 
5. Use Monthly Capacity Planning Reports and Meetings with Finance: Similarly to the post on working with Sales, Finance holds a big key as to whether you get what you need or not. The more they understand your business and trust your models, the more confidence they will have in the business cases you put forth and, barring any external factors, the more likely they will be to go to bat for you if you need something out of plan. I have found that providing regular reports to finance on revenue, margin, and capacity (existing vs. planned) ensures that the right level of regular communication is happening and provides a forum when you need it to ask for more. Again, there is no silver bullet, but if you have a regular mode of communication and a relationship with Finance, they are more willing to listen when you need their help.
6. Managing "Product Quality Issues" Internally: Embedded Services Organizations often find themselves doing work to overcome a bug in the product they support rather than doing the consulting work they were hired to do. In some cases, the level of product quality issues (PQI) is fairly benign. In other cases, services is working with a difficult product with a lot of bugs and issues. In one organization that I managed, the amount of time we were spending addressing product issues in our projects was having a dramatic impact on our ability to complete work on time, which affected customer satisfaction, practice revenues and margins, and our ability to manage our resources and project schedules. The solution? We added a "PQI" task to all projects, set some ground rules for how/when to use it (including some governance to avoid abuse), and reported this time regularly to our Product Management and Engineering partners, as well as to Finance. This allowed us to 1) more easily get the engineering resources we needed on projects where PQI was an issue, 2) include enough contingency on projects where we expected to have significant PQI time based on historical projects - allowing better resource planning,  and 3) improve employee satisfaction since we gave utilization credit to the consultants for this time. Product management also had more visibility into the issues that were causing the most pain for Services, our partners, and our customers and could prioritize their sustaining efforts accordingly.
7. Measuring and Managing Goodwill Work: Similar to PQI, Services is often called upon by Sales or Executive Leadership to deliver what I call Goodwill Work (free consulting or significantly discounted consulting) to make up for a misstep by sales, support, marketing, or a product issue or to ensure we get that "big deal we really need to make our number this quarter." These requests are often unplanned and urgent, which is a huge problem when we are fully utilized with a 6-8 backlog of work to get done. It is important to track the amount of Goodwill Work you and your team are delivering and reporting that back to management. I have even gone so far as to use historical numbers to budget a certain percent of my teams billable time to Goodwill Work and to develop a model with Sales and Executive Leadership on how it can/should be used, what approvals are needed, and what happens where the budget is fully consumed. Reporting on Goodwill Work gives you a leg to stand on when you need more resources to support a project. Planning and budgeting for it makes the issue transparent and forces the organization to make difficult decisions about when to use it and when not.
8. Mantra: Services Can't Outpace Product: In some cases, I believe that custom services can be used as "paid R&D" where a customer wants a new product feature, it is not on the roadmap, and services has the capability to build it for a fee for the customer. The conversation can go like this, "That feature is scheduled for Q2 next year. You can either wait until then, or we can develop a custom SOW and have our Services organization build it for you now. It will cost you $500,000 (or what ever), and will be made available to all customers as soon as it is fully tested." Some customers will feel it is worth the money to get the feature now. Others will simply decide to wait. In some organizations, the Services team does not have the skills to take on such an effort, and the mantra must be "Services cannot outpace product." In other words, sales cannot sell custom development of any kind without knowing that Product Management and Engineering, not Services, is prepared to support the effort - for a fee or not. (Please see last week's post on working with Sales to get what you need.) Assuming this mantra is communicated and well understood, and the right Services Engagement processes have been defined and are followed, surprise custom engagements should be few and far between.
9. Marketing and Sales Can Influence But Cannot Define What Services Will Deliver: Years ago, I worked for a small, but fast growing product company. We came out with a new product and Marketing, in a vacuum, developed a "packaged offering" that includes five days of Professional Services. Every time a sales rep sold this new product, Services was attached. Awesome...? On one hand, I was very pleased that Marketing and Sales understood the need and value of Services and included us in the package. On the other hand, I was scared to death when the Sales team was educated on this new package and I had never been brought into the discussion - what exactly are we expected to do in five days? As I dug in, my biggest fear was confirmed. Marketing designed a five-day engagement that could never, ever be delivered in five days. Their number one concern was developing a packaged offering that met a price point that Sales could sell, but they built something that could not be delivered in the time they committed. My margin would be impacted, I'd need to adjust my pipeline/backlog model to include a multiplier to ensure we captured the right resource needs for scheduling and capacity planning, and customers would be very disappointed when the work took 10-15 days and their deadlines were missed. A few failed projects and unhappy customers later, and Marketing learned why they needed to engage with Services when defining new offerings. From then on out, no Services offerings were defined without input and approval from Services.
10. The Role of Services Must Be Understood Across the Organization: Are we a profit center? If yes, no PQI, no Goodwill, no discounts...period. Every decision is made based on our ability to drive revenue and margin. Alternatively, Are we an engine to drive product adoption and satisfaction? If yes, we need ground rules for all the items listed above, but we focus less on driving margin and more on the overall contribution Services makes to the corporation. The challenge comes in when Finance sees Services as margin business first, and Sales/Marketing wants and needs us to drive adoption and growth within our customer base. My philosophy is that Services Organizations in product companies have to understand that we are a product company and everything we do should be to drive adoption of the product. I believe that Services should be profitable, don't get me wrong, but you won't get 40-60% profit margins AND address PQI and Goodwill on a regular basis. 15-25% is much more likely.

At the end of the day, and as I mentioned above, there is no silver bullet, you can do all this and more and still not get what you need if the value of Services is not understood or appreciated or if the overall health of the business is failing. Regular communication on items such as those above put you in a better position, for sure. You will often need to create strong business cases based on actual data to ultimately get what you need, but if you find that getting what you need is not typical, you should strive to understand if there is a disconnect between what you think the team's role is and what others think it is. 

You should also find allies across the company to help you make your case. Will Sales, Marketing, Product Management, and/or Engineering go to bat for you? If you strive to build the right relationships across the organization, I believe, you will find allies. Sales will want you to be able to deliver what they sell. Product Management and Engineering will want you to be able to take care of issues without the use of their team members. If you don't have strong relationships with the leaders of those groups, you will have a harder time getting what you need.

Its not going to be easy...good luck!

Getting What You Need Internally - Start with Partnering with Sales

In a lot of ways, it is harder to get what you need internally than to manage a client effectively, particularly in a growth business with a separate sales team. First, with a separate sales team, you have less control over what is sold. It is not unheard of to be handed an SOW with a custom scope that is not supported by your product (in an embedded services organization) or your domain experience and consulting expertise (in either an embedded services organization or stand-alone services business). Even when the situation isn’t that egregious, you still may end up with a project budget that will not cover your margin needs or, potentially, even your costs,  or commitments to the client for start dates you are not prepared to support. Worst case - all of the above!

Second, I have often said that the better problem to have is one when I have more work than I have people compared to more people than I have work. Neither feels good, but at least in the former, I can make an argument to expand my team and not be pressured to reduce the size of my team. The reality is, though, that not having the resources when you need them can cause a lot of stress in the system. Clients typically want to start when they are ready to start - not when you are. Sales professionals feel a strong commitment to the clients and will push for things that feel unnatural to you to ensure they can save face and be the hero. In some cases, the client may decide that waiting isn’t an option and go with another provider. Still, the argument to get more resources or get access to those you need is not easily made leaving you holding the bag.

So, how do you ensure that you have what you need when you need it. Man, that’s a hard question. Let’s start with the sales side of the equation this week. We will talk about other internal pressures next week.

There will always be some kind of tension between sales and services. Sales wants to sell as much as they can as quickly as they can. Its how they are compensated; its what’s expected of them. Services, on the other hand, needs to control scope and expectations, deliver on-time and on-budget, and ensure the client realizes the value they expected when they signed the contract. While it is possible to meet the needs of sales and services (and the client), tension will always be there.

In my attempt to reduce that tension, I have started with forging strong relationships with the sales executives and directors. It is important that they know that you support their mission to close business, but it is also important that they understand the implications to them, their clients, and the business overall if they don’t work in partnership with you to ensure that what is being sold can be delivered. It helps to give a little, but I firmly believe that there needs to be a “give get.” “I can give in on this point for you to help you close the deal, but it is really critical that I get this other point to go my way if we are to have a happy client in the end.”

Individual sales reps will push the boundary set by you and your sales-leadership counterparts, for sure. One Sales VP with whom I recently worked referred to Sales Reps as “children” and the Sales and Services Leadership as the “adults.” As children, sales reps will behave badly: They will exclude you from key calls, they will agree to things they do not have authority to agree, and they will leave you to work miracles to hide the challenges from the client.

Now, I am not saying I agree with the “Sales as Children” philosophy. I have worked with some amazing sales people who, while driven to close business quickly, do not want to close bad business and know it takes a team to satisfy the needs of the client. With that said, even the best sales reps will push the boundaries from time to time. Having relationships with Sales Leadership will be key to having the right checks and balances when it occurs.

Once I have formed the right partnership with sales leadership, I do all that I can to have strong relationships with the reps themselves. This happens in a variety of ways:

1. All those “dumb sales meetings” you have to attend - use them to your advantage. Don’t run off between sessions to call home, check emails, or schedule meetings with your own team. Use that time to meet each and every sales rep. Show an interest in what they are doing. Ask about their business (what’s working and not working). Ask about their families and interests - make it personal. Find out what you can specifically do to help them meet quota faster and then go do that.
2. Educate the sales team on the offerings: The value they provide and the best way for them to engage with services. A few years ago, I was building a services practice from scratch within a software company. Initially, there were two of us - I worked with sales to sell services and co-delivered those services with my one and only consultant. For the first two years, as I built the practice and hired the team, I touched every services sales deal. It was not scalable, and it caused a lot of frustration when people had to wait a couple of days to get on my calendar. As I grew the team, the offerings, and the tools that supported the offerings, I educated the sales team to, first and foremost, carry the ball down the field on their own a little farther. I gave them the case studies and anecdotes they needed to position the value. I gave them the questionnaires and checklists they needed to qualify the customer. Giving them more information about success and failures and the tools to optimize the former and minimize the latter helped to both build deeper relationships, but also empower them to do the right thing.
3. Next, I worked with Sales and Finance leadership to ensure that only I, or someone on my team, could write an SOW, and that I had signing authority, which meant no contract was signed without my review and approval. As my team grew, more were trained to work with sales to scope an engagement, write the proposal, and draft the SOW. I was no longer tied to every deal. We had scale, and I had the confidence that my team was properly trained and would address the needs of the client, services, and sales. I also had a check point before the proposal and/or SOW went to the client to be sure that nothing really difficult would fall through the cracks.  
4. Standardize offerings, with standard proposals, SOWs, and other sales and marketing tools also help. Sales knows what they can sell; we know what we need to deliver. Clients will certainly ask for something different, something tailored or custom, from time to time. When a salesperson can recognize these custom requests and has been trained on how to deal with them (call your regional services manager for help), things start to come together.

I once worked at a software company that didn’t believe in SOWs and believed that minimal project description was the way to sell services: Reduce the barriers in the conversation, shorten the sale cycle, get the deal, and services will figure it out later. There was a lack of partnerships between sales and services resulting, in some cases, in significant animosity between individuals and teams. It also resulted in an unmanageable services organization in which every project was different, there were high switching costs for consultants between projects, we had to significantly over investment in delivery (we did everything the client asked us to do, regardless of what they were paying us, because the client and we had no boundaries), and we had high turnover within the consulting team, which lead to customer satisfaction issues and more animosity with sales. That example is the perfect example of what not to do. We lacked strong relationships at the VP and Director levels between sales and services, no expectations or time to work one-on-one with sales (getting to know them and working in partnership for the best alternative), and no meaningful offering definition and sales training to ensure consistency in sales and, in turn, delivery.   

Fortunately for me, other than that one example, I find that most sales teams truly want to do the right thing. They do not want to sell the wrong engagement to the client, and while they have little tolerance for anyone slowing down their deal, once you get a few successes under your belt, they will trust the system and work with you.