A stream of information

Making information flow between the islands is the key to eradicating them.

Some form of information flow will take place in any business, however slowly or haphazardly. In my example of the carpentry business, even in Scenario A information did flow from the customer to Jimmy the office assistant, and from Jimmy to his boss. The stream of information was only just enough of a trickle to get the job done and not to lose customers.

But a properly planned information flow will increase effectiveness. This can only be achieved by taking a strategic decision to look at the business holistically and to work out where the important information points are. Tactical solutions may fix a short-term problem but in the long term they don’t work and only create more islands.

So what are they key information flows in a business? Well, for most service companies the major drivers are communicating effectively with clients, and then delivering on promises. Most of the drivers come from the following:

1. What the customer wants.
2. What we already know about the customer that will help us to communicate with them.
3. Our ability to deliver what the customer wants (and do it profitably).
4. How and when we are going to deliver.
5. How we keep the customer informed of progress and handle any problems.

There are also lots of communication and information flow points around sales and marketing that are more externally focused. The focus here is on operational information, which tends to be internal. It doesn’t take a genius to see that once you start handling your internal and customer communication better, then sales and marketing becomes much easier.

Let’s look at the above points in turn.

1. What does the customer want?

As I’m sure you already know, customers don’t always tell you what they want, and often don’t really know themselves. If your marketing is right, that’s why they’ve come to you, for your professional expertise. It’s vital that you draw out of them what they want by careful questioning. You need a structured approach to getting this information out of your customer, which is captured in a way that promotes its flow to those who will actually carry out the work. If you get this wrong, you risk failing to deliver and losing all your profit through poor estimation and planning.

2. What do we already know about the customer that will assist us in communicating with them?

This is the difference between Jimmy in Scenario A and Scenario B in Post 2. Access to information about previous projects not only helped Jimmy to make the customer feel valued and build a rapport with him, but it also had huge practical benefit in helping to find out what the customer wanted. This will have value right the way through the project.

Too many businesses stop their customer databases at the point where a sale is made; to be fair, a lot of CRM software is very focused on helping make the sale and forecasting a revenue pipeline, but ignore what happens after that.

The sales process, and the systems that support it, needs to be heavily integrated with the delivery side of the business. The two should feed each other, enabling both to be more effective. If your customer database contains a complete log of the work you’ve done for each customer, how you performed and how profitable it was, then you will be far better at making a profit out of those customers when they come back for more. You’ll also be able to tell from more than gut feeling which are your nightmare customers who keep changing their minds and cause a lot of hidden costs, then you can raise your prices in future with them so they either become profitable or go away and bother someone else!

3. Are we able to deliver what the customer wants (and do it profitably)?

Time and again, I see a battle between sales and operations, with sales making promises that operations teams struggle to deliver. Having a background in delivery, I admit to a little bias towards the operations side in these arguments; but while it is certainly true that salespeople are sometimes guilty of chasing commissions over the best interests of the business, more often than not they are just doing their job of making sales – they don’t really have the correct information to hand to make their promises realistic. If they don’t have an easy way of estimating projects (or a capable colleague) and can’t see your team’s availability, of course they are going to say ‘yes’ to win the business. However, if they can easily and quickly find out that a project of type X takes a week, and that there is no availability until next month, they will be able to say honestly to the client: “We’ve done hundreds of projects like this and they typically take about a week. I can see we have a slot at the beginning of next month – obviously I’ll come back to you with a full proposal but would you like me to book you in provisionally?”.

This is all about information flow between sales and operations. If the flow is effective, salespeople have everything they need to make an appropriate sale, and will love it if they can make provisional bookings, which are halfway to closing the sale. And operations will no longer find themselves exclaiming “You promised WHAT?!” at the sales team.

4. How and when are we going to deliver?

This is partially covered by the above point, but let’s look at it from an operational perspective. The key thing here is that when a contract is signed, you either have a very good idea of what the client is expecting, or you’ve sold a piece of scoping work where this will be defined properly. If you know this, then you should be able to estimate the time and people required to deliver it. But project management is not our focus here…

A knowledge base of your company’s experience on these sort of projects will be a massive help in estimating the project, and the information that is absolutely vital here is your schedule. Who is doing what and when, and where are your gaps? Quite often, smaller businesses will have this in a big spreadsheet somewhere. The problem with this is that only one person can access the spreadsheet at any one time (unless it’s a Google Spreadsheet of course), and it’s fairly difficult to present in any other way than on a spreadsheet. Salespeople can’t check it from a client meeting, and you have no linkage to your customer database or time tracking. It’s a proper information island. This information needs to be made available to everyone in the business and linked to customer and project information.

5. How do we keep the customer informed of progress and handle any problems?

Keeping your customer informed of progress will depend on the nature of your work. If you’re building them a home office, it’ll be pretty obvious to them how you’re getting on, but for other projects there may be key metrics about the project that you want to share or that the customer demands. If you have information islands, how are you going to give that information to the customer? The answer is most likely that someone spends an hour every week compiling a report for a single customer, manually collating different bits of information. Maybe they get good at it and it only takes half an hour, but wouldn’t it be better to click a button and the report is automatically emailed out? Or better, give the customer a web portal where they can view key data?

How a business reacts to problems shows customers how committed they are to customer service. Do you call customers saying there was a problem but you resolved it before they noticed, or that you are working on it and here’s the timescale and plan for resolution? (This is GOOD information flow).

Or do they call your customer service department to report it, have no update when it’s still outstanding a week later and they receive their bill because no one told accounts about the issue? (This is NO information flow, just islands).

The next post will examine how to achieve this.

Typical Information Islands

As we looked at in the previous article, information islands are easily created, but linking them leads to improved work processes and customer service. The first step to becoming an information-conscious business  and connecting your islands is to understand what islands you have. Below are some typical ones from service businesses, but product-based companies will have a similar list, with the addition of stock and logistics but less in the way of scheduling and planning. Often, each of these headings will hold its own islands!

Customer/contact information (CRM)

Names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, websites, Twitter names, blog URLs, sector and demographic information, contact history, sales pipeline.

Client deliverables

Plans, designs, documentation, client reports. These are almost certainly documents or drawings of some sort, unless you're a software company. Also linked to this is your portfolio.

Telephony

Inbound and outbound calls, whether from your mobile or your landline, should be logged in your CRM. Are they?

Marketing collateral

Website, blogs, case studies, brochures, business card designs, mailshots (linked to CRM), portfolio (linked to client deliverables).

Planning and scheduling

Project plans, task estimations, team availability, allocation. How does this connect with your sales pipeline to ensure you have the resource to deliver your upcoming work?

Billing information

Time and materials, other billable items, contracts, sales orders. If you bill by the hour or day, how do you get from your schedule to an invoice?

Supplier information

Price lists, catalogues, contracts. If you need to purchase items for customers, how do you link this with your sales pipeline to ensure you're estimating the real profit from your upcoming work?

Finance/accounts

Invoices, purchase orders, expenses, banking, tax, payroll. This is the actual financials of the company: billing information is the information you have which enables you to make an entry in the financials. There is a subtle difference.

People/HR

Employment contracts, holiday entitlements, reviews/appraisals, skill profiles. Is the latter tied in with your scheduling?

Email and mobile

Ah, email. Our kids might not use it, but it’s been amazingly resilient for a technology developed in the 70s that is inherently cumbersome and not very secure compared to modern proprietary messaging tools like WhatsApp. Email is an island of information in its own right that crosses all functional areas (it often separates your contact history from your carefully crafted CRM system). It is fundamentally unstructured, with often just a name, a free-form subject and a date: no categorisation, no central access to all the attachments emails contain, just some free text you can search on, and unless you're very disciplined and organise your email into lots and lots of really specific folders, you can often find yourself scrolling through ambiguous subject lines looking for that vital piece of information.

Not only that, but when people start sending different versions of documents to each other by email it can become the worst document storage system in the world. It’s also a personal medium: imagine an example business, where client relationship managers Mark and Helen work together closely but have their own mailboxes. One day Mark is called away to a client and Helen has to pick up on a project he was working on, only she struggles because all the client communication is locked away in Mark's email, he's stuck in meetings all day and she can't get hold of him. Sound familiar?

Phones

Connected smartphones can create a personal information island. Primarily this is around contacts – does your mobile sync with your main company contact store? And if so, how do you make sure personal contacts are kept that way and business contacts are available both in your desktop email and on your phone? For small businesses, just getting the synchronisation in place is the big thing; for medium-sized businesses, ensuring the right business contacts go to the right people is the next challenge. To be information conscious, you need to be thinking about synchronising phone and email contacts with the client database so that everyone has access to all customer contact details and every customer interaction can be tracked.

Identifying your islands is the first step to becoming information conscious. The next article introduces the process to do this that you’ll find in the Exercises.

Stranded on an Information Island

Any company, from the largest multinational down to the smallest one-man band has lots of different sorts of information that it collects. These are often grouped around different business functions, such as sales, project planning, finance and so on. All these different sorts of information are qualitatively different, and although they may share certain characteristics (an invoice and a proposal will both have a client name, for example), they are in no way linked. The system for accessing each one might (or might not) be very efficient and streamlined in itself, but combining them can be a nightmare.
Information islands appear as a growing business adopts tactical solutions to fix individual problems. These separate clusters of information mean that trying to get an overview of a particular client, for instance, can feel like paddling against a current from island to island.

Imagine…

Your carpentry business specialises in custom-built fitted furniture for the home. A year ago, you did a project for Mr Jones. He was very pleased with your service and referred you to a lot of his friends and contacts. Now, he's started working from home and wants his office fitted out, and calls your company. You've recently hired a new assistant (let's call him Jimmy), who's never heard of Mr Jones. Jimmy takes the call. What does Jimmy say?

A. “Mr Jones, OK, have we done any work for you before? Ah, OK, I see. An office in a similar style you say? So what was it we did in your bedroom? Right, I'll need to talk to the boss about that, can I call you back this afternoon?”

or

B. “Mr Jones, let me just find you in our system... Yes, so we built a full length set of units in beech wasn't it? That's right I'm new, I've only been here a couple of months. Looks great from the photos, how are you finding it? That's great news. By the way thanks for the referrals, looks like we've done work for half your street! So, your office. I see we have some measurements here for your other rooms that the guys took because you said you might want a few things doing in future, is it the one on the ground floor that's about three metres square? Great, let me take some more details about what you want... OK, well obviously I'll need to get the boss to give you a call to finalise things and cost the job up, are you free this afternoon? I'll put a to-do in his diary then. Just looking at the schedule as well – we've got an opening in a couple of weeks time that we might be able to fit you into, shall I pencil you in, subject to agreement of course? Great, thanks, is there anything else I can help you with?”

Scenario A is a classic example of a business having information islands that it can't pull together to present a slick experience to the client, and to aid Jimmy, who through lack of information is unable to be of any real assistance. I think you'll agree that it probably won't leave Mr Jones feeling very special or particularly enthusiastic about your business. When you call him back that afternoon you'll probably make the sale, but he'll go away and tell people: “Those guys who did my bedroom, they do a great job but they're a bit disorganised and that new lad they've got in the office is useless”.

Scenario B shows a business that is information conscious. Jimmy has never heard of Mr Jones, but a quick check of the records tells him that this is a valuable customer and to treat him accordingly. Jimmy's able to utilise some information that you thought to collect last time you were there, to get a really good description of what Mr Jones wants. Because of this, you're now able to call the customer with a rough price in your head – and the call will be a lot quicker and more pleasant. The fact that Jimmy's able to pencil in the work helps close the sale and is also great for the customer, who will now tell his friends: “I called those guys who did my bedroom to have a look at my home office – they're growing, they've got a really bright lad in the office there now and they're a really slick operation.”
Which way would you rather be described? Which way would your staff rather be described?

To make things worse, in a Scenario A business many of the islands are only populated by certain individuals within the business who, sometimes through no fault of their own and sometimes out of a misplaced belief that it will protect their position, are the only ones capable or adept at making sense of their own information. I've even seen this happen in very small teams. For example, let's imagine a field service company with an office administrator called Emma. When Emma was hired there was a problem tracking time billed against actual time, so she built a spreadsheet that she's extended and extended as more needs came up and now she's the only one who really knows how it operates. That's obviously a massive risk to the business if anything happens to Emma, she leaves or goes on holiday. But it’s also a massive strain on the whole team who have to ask Emma (who's already got more to do than she has time for) whenever they need to know something about time billed. Multiply up from individuals to whole teams and departments in larger organisations and you can see the problems this can cause.

Information islands are one of the key operational problems that can prevent businesses growing. Clearly, one of our goals in becoming an information-conscious business is to build bridges between the islands, and ultimately get rid of the sea in between altogether. But to do that, we first need to understand what islands we have. Read the next article to find out how.

Progressive Web Apps - what they are and why you should care

Once upon a time there were computer programs (note the spelling is American, not ‘programme’), aka application software, that we used to install on our computers.

Then, two things happened in the 2000s. First, the web became more than just a bunch of dumb (and badly formatted) text pages with a few images in it. We started to see the emergence of “web-based software” - applications that ran on a server ‘somewhere’ and only needed a web browser to operate, no annoying and unreliable installation necessary. We know, we were there, building web applications way before anyone started talking about ‘The Cloud’.

Then, Apple released the iPhone. Now, there had been mobile devices before then (things like PalmPilots and XDAs) which you could install ‘programs’ on. But it was cumbersome, you had to plug the device into your PC and transfer it from there. But Apple made the whole process much easier, creating the App Store (‘app’ was already the Mac name for an application program), and the Android Marketplace (now Google Play) soon followed.

Meanwhile web apps had moved on from being simple forms and lists to have much more engaging and interactive user interfaces, with a lot of the ‘prettification’ happening within the browser rather than on the server.

Progressive web apps, or PWAs, are the convergence of these two paradigms. It is something being led and pushed by Google, which its approach of having an open, cross-platform ecosystem. Apple, who have much more of a ‘walled garden’ approach, are dragging their heels a little and there are still some features that their mobile devices don’t support, but they are catching up.

The concept is simple. Why should app developers have to build one version for the web, one for iOS, one for Android and potentially ones for Windows and MacOS as well? Microsoft OneNote is a great example of an app with versions for 5 different platforms. Since all devices have extremely powerful and capable web browsers, why not make sure all the features available to native apps are available to web apps. Then you only need to build once.

Installing a PWA is just a matter of opening a web link. On Android, the device will automatically spot that it fulfills the PWA requirements (mainly that it works offline and operates over a secure connection) and prompt the user to add it to the home screen, where it will work exactly like a native app. iOS requires the app to prompt the user to do this, but the effect is the same.

This represents a great opportunity both for businesses like us and our clients. Development costs are lower, as are maintenance costs and release cycles as we don’t need to go through the app stores. Clients can push their app out to whoever might need it just by sending a link.

We have developed a framework which takes advantage of the PWA concept to be able to build these cross-platform apps quickly and cost-effectively. It is possible to release these via the app stores, but in many cases, why would you bother?