This is part two of a three-part article series. You can see part one here.

Staffing is the most critical part of creating a winning technical support team. If you make mistakes with the steps discussed in my first article but excel at hiring and managing your people, you will succeed in the end. If, however, you do well with the mechanics and make mistakes with staffing, you will certainly fail. 

Your Staff Today 

Even if your current staff is doing a good job, you will still have to bring new people in to help you rise from the ashes. I know you don’t want to fire the people you have today—that can be unpleasant—so give it some time and the problem will probably resolve itself for you. Your current staff will naturally turn over when they get tired of listening to complaining and blaming. Your task will then be to hire better than you have in the past.

You might compare technical support to a team of jugglers. It requires a lot of communication and teamwork to be able to handle flying bowling balls, knives, flaming batons and pianos. For instance, you will need to know when a baton or knife is heading your way, or who will be able to catch the piano. There are three big processes to put in place in order to facilitate the communication required to do this juggling.

• Decide on 3-5 levels of case severity and decide on service requirements for each (how quickly you intend to respond and fix). If you already have priorities defined in your maintenance contracts, try to use them. Discuss the plan with your team and make sure they understand that top priority cases must be addressed first, so someone must pay attention to incoming cases and prioritize them immediately.
• If you find that you don’t have the time to fix a problem so the customer never sees it, an alternative is to publish the solution in order to allow them to solve problems themselves. If you don

There is a lot of disagreement about what the phrase Web 2.0 means.  Let’s clear that up. 

One answer is that Web 2.0 refers to the propensity of recent Internet applications to be more collaborative and provide for a richer user experience.  Web1.0 was a Web site that looked like a brochure or a resume.  Web 2.0 is a blog. Web1.0 was your newspaper’s classified ads, just webified.  Web 2.0 is eBay or craigslist.  Web1.0 was Netscape (i.e. here’s some software). Web 2.0 is Google (there’s nothing to install but it’s powerful).

Web 2.0 is about harnessing collective intelligence and eliminating the software release cycle – it’s about providing services, not products.  It’s about trusting users as co-developers of content or even of technology. As an example, Amazon.com does this with its user review system.

A more cynical definition of Web 2.0, found in the blogosphere in Europe, (where they tend to be more conservative about technology) is

As with most companies, we store the bulk of our data internally on our network here at the corporate headquarters, but we also store a fair bit of it at our datacenter. We have software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications which we host for our customers, as well as for ourselves. We have our web site, of course, which must be up and running 24x7 or my CEO calls me up in a panic. We have an FTP server for support, as well as one for the public, etc. You get the picture. We’ve got resources that are needed by our remote employees as well as our customers. In essence, we need a reliable 24x7, redundant, fast way for our people and the world to access our data. If this sounds familiar to you, you might be in the same boat that we were in. We needed a datacenter. 

I’m oversimplifying our needs a bit, since we are a hosted service provider for literally hundreds of organizations around the world. You see, with the software that Journyx creates, you can either host it locally on one of your own servers, or you can ask us to do it for you, taking away that overhead. Since we host our customers

When payroll executives implement time and attendance systems to automate payroll, they often miss the chance to facilitate greater profitability throughout the entire company. These executives are, of course, payroll experts. They are usually not, however, experts at project management or billing automation.

The time data they collect, if collected appropriately, can also be used to automate project management, project costing, project tracking and project estimation improvement, as well as for internal, external and reverse billing automation. Most payroll and HR executives know little about these subjects, but increasingly, they are being asked to rise to new challenges.

These new challenges are being caused by the tectonic shift from capital businesses to people businesses. This is a shift of valuing time as much as money.  About 50 years ago, when most people twisted bolts in a factory, workers were not considered volunteers, they were not empowered, and managing the money of the company (i.e. the capital) was much more important than maximizing the time and knowledge of the worker. Such businesses are called capital businesses because power and wealth flowed from the capital.

Over the last decade or so, the industry has shifted from customers installing software at their physical locations to renting Web-based software over the Internet on a monthly basis. It’s moving this way because customers want it to, and so do vendors.

Most software companies get their revenue from “shelfware” (software that is rarely used and ends up on the proverbial shelf). Popular programs like Quicken or SAP – for which customers pay the total cost up front – can be complicated, making them difficult to use and achieve maximum benefit from. However, once a customer has paid for these programs, there is no incentive for the company to follow up and ensure that it is working properly for the customer.

But hold on, things might be improving. Newer companies like Concur (expense reimbursement), Salesforce.com (sales automation), Hire.com (recruiting and hiring automation), and Taleo (also recruiting and hiring automation) are turning out to be quite successful in renting software over the Web to their customers.

In the consulting business, your hours are your inventory: lose track of them and they are wasted. If you hit your budget and reimbursable expenses, however, you will move more inventory.

Everyone wants a more profitable company with fewer headaches, happier customers and no surprises.  Often some of the most mundane areas of business execution lead to the highest levels of achievement when done right.  This is true for consultancies—automating your time and expense collection can help you achieve this higher level of profitability in several ways.  Here are the top seven:

Lower Costs and Increase Profits

1.   Understanding Your Costs

If you don't know your costs, you don't know where you’re profitable, so you can't steer your company towards success.  In today’s knowledge economy, project accounting is the best way to understand production costs, but few companies do it well. Consultancies already know the importance of tracking hours better than most companies do, so it should come as no surprise that a thorough, efficient method of time tracking is essential to running a profitable consultancy.

This year’s Microsoft Convergence Show had a record-breaking 10,000 attendees.  During the show, Microsoft showed off its hybrid cloud strategy for their Dynamics products.  Dynamics CRM can now deploy identical software both onsite and in the cloud.  Dynamics NAV and GP will follow suit in 2013, with AX coming soon thereafter.  How can you get your Dynamics product ready for functionality in the cloud? 

Simply put, if Dynamics is in the cloud, you should have all of your add-ons in the cloud, as well.  I’ll use the example of adding timesheet software to Dynamics.  This is a common add-on seeing as how Microsoft Business Portal lacks an essential time-tracking functionality.

Microsoft Dynamics Business Portal lacks data validations and thus is prone to human error.  This is a huge time sink.  If your managers are busy manually checking timesheets, it negatively affects company operations.  Another downfall of Business Portal is the lack of

My company sells employee time tracking software that automates client billing, project accounting and payroll. We have implemented these systems for customers repeatedly where the employees previously were unaccustomed to accounting for their time. Occasionally this has generated some intense emotions. Some people really don't want to track their time even when their managers are very firm.

Why is this? Why do people find tracking time so unpleasant, or even maddening?

And how about you?  Do you like entering data into forms?  Why or why not?  Is tracking time any worse than filling out other forms? 

My experience has shown that it often is for several reasons.

Reason One: Reporting time can threaten status. For salaried people, especially if they’ve been employed earlier in their life in an hourly "time clock" environment, reporting time can make them feel demoted. Conventional wisdom (that I disagree with) is that "professional" people are more trustworthy and less in need of supervision than "blue collar" people.

It’s seemingly impossible to avoid multitasking in today’s busy world. The constant bombardment of emails, phone calls, and appointments quickly begin to pile up, so to combat this we attempt to juggle more activities at once. I instinctively answer the phone as I’m driving home from work or respond to an urgent email while I’m reading a report, but are these the best solutions to my problems?

Mounting evidence suggests that multitasking is the enemy of productivity. Though it may lead us to think that we’re being more productive, we’re in fact thwarting performance ability and significantly lowering quality of work along the way. While we can all recognize how multitasking affects the texting driver, the negative impact of multitasking in the workplace is not as immediately apparent.

A 2010 study in the journal Science tackled this issue by examining just how the human brain handles multiple simultaneous activities. Research suggests that when a person performs a single task, the goal-oriented areas of both frontal lobes work to engage the task together. When an additional task is added, the two lobes divide responsibility and each hemisphere focuses on its own objective. While our two lobes can work collaboratively to accomplish an independent task, they must divide to accomplish anything more fragmented.

Microsoft has always been brilliant about garnering mindshare from smart developers. But now they're losing them. 

Developers are opinionated.  They're not always as unbiased and scientific as they think they are, so they're susceptible to philosophical wars: Mac vs. PC, Emacs vs. VI, Perl vs. Java... the list is endless. Once you get developers on your side - and Bill Gates has done a good job of this - they'll defend your position to the death. 

But now many of those developers, especially the youngest and the smartest, are going off and participating in open source work. It's easy to get passionate about open source because the stuff just plain works.  For example, our products at Journyx are built on Postgresql (a free database), Python (a free language), Apache and Xitami (free web servers) and are built and run on Linux & FreeBSD (free operating systems). But they also work with proprietary databases and operating systems, like Oracle and Windows. Our support costs are the lowest when our customers are on Linux.

According to a Gartner analyst firm report, 15% of all IT projects failed that year because of high cost variance, while 18% were unsuccessful because they were substantially late. [i]  This means that in 2008, 1 in 3 technology projects failed.  Why such a dismal success rate?  Such projects primarily involve the management of human resources in order to accomplish the target schedule, cost, and quality, so it is safe to assume that poor resource management played a large role.  Unfortunately, without effective resource management processes, such organizations are left asking questions like:

• “Who is working on what?” 
• “How do I get this project back on schedule?”
• “How much more work will it take to finish?” 

The Problem with IT Projects Today

Resource Management

            IT project teams are made up of knowledge workers who are categorized by skill types or job functions.  For example, a project team might require business analysts, developers, team leads, project managers, architects, or database analysts.

The Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), under the authority, direction, and control of the United States under the Secretary of Defense, performs all contract audits for the United States Department of Defense (DoD). DCAA also provides contract audit services to some other government agencies.

Today, the DCAA consists of approximately 4,000 people located at more than 300 field audit offices throughout the world.

The purpose of the agency, simply stated, is to avoid the purchase of $300 hammers and $1,000 toilet seats. Business services companies, such as software and management consultancies, that sell project management and other services to government agencies need to comply with a number of DCAA requirements if they want to avoid failing an audit. As taxpayers, we should all be thrilled that our government has put processes in place to avoid overpayment and being defrauded. 

As business owners selling to the federal government, however, these procedures complicate the process for winning and performing on government contracts tremendously, especially for smaller firms.

When times are tough, every company looks to cut costs where they can.  Yet how can this be accomplished without eliminating key projects and people?  It is actually quite simple if you have the right data in hand.  With the appropriate per-customer per-project profitability metrics, companies can easily shave off unprofitable work and learn how to focus their time, efforts and budget on the profitable work alone.

Cutting with Precision

Do all of the top managers at your company know which of your past projects were successful and which were failures? Do they know how many employees worked on these projects or how much time was invested in them? How about which of your clients were a drain and which ones were profitable? Without this information, you certainly cannot cut costs without risking the loss of projects and people that bring in the most revenue. 

Implementing profitability metrics might sound complicated, but it is often easier than you might think.

It’s not easy being a payroll professional today.  You are responsible for making sure that your company’s financial processes run smoothly, which includes gathering all of the time data throughout the organization, ensuring that everyone is paid correctly and on time, and preventing errors from finding their way into your records.  In fact, many payroll professionals struggle with these areas needlessly because they do not realize that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions can be leveraged to create seamless, efficient payroll processes.

The Benefits of SaaS Technology

• Less Work

Automated systems for processes such as time, expense and project tracking save payroll professionals an enormous amount of time and effort.  They often replace inefficient, obsolete manual or paper systems, and can also prevent double data entry by integrating with other solutions.  Not only that, but if the system is offered as SaaS, your IT department does not have to lift a finger.

Time and attendance tracking is necessary for obvious reasons, yet many business owners do not realize that this data can deliver enormous benefits to the organization, aside from payroll.  In fact, having employees track their time against tasks and projects allows managers to develop key performance indicators to measure progress against strategic goals such as increased billability, adherence to project estimates and project profitability optimization.

Key Performance Indicators

A 'key performance indicator' or KPI measures an organization's progress towards a strategic goal.  When leveraged correctly, KPIs can make a huge impact.

First, you must determine what the most important business goals are. It might be increased profitability, reduced number of defective parts per thousand, maintaining a certain percentage of customer satisfaction, or perhaps revenue per store location. Once this is established, you can create a KPI to help you measure your progress. 

Next, you must ensure that your KPI is measurable. "Make customers more successful" is not an effective KPI without some way to measure the success of your customers. "Be the most convenient drugstore" won't work either if there is no way to measure convenience.

On the back of rising volatility in the global financial marketplace and fears of a U.S. recession spilling over into the European economies, stock indices have recently shown considerable weakness. When economic storms loom, smart executives typically start looking for a way to cut costs in advance of softening demand for their companies' products and services.  But what if you could know with some degree of certainty where your company is profitable and where it's not, and figure out a way to do more of the profitable work?  What if you fired unprofitable customers instead of firing the employees who have helped you build the company to its present stature? 

Many companies that successfully slash costs to survive a recession find top-line growth elusive when the recession ends.  Their best people are gone, their long term projects were cancelled and a short term focus is all they have left, resulting in the lack of a platform designed for growth.

The potential benefits of a project management office (PMO) are numerous and well-documented. However, many of the benefits never materialize. Take a look at PMOs over the years and you will see that many have restructured, dissolved, or constantly had to justify their existence during both economic downturns as well as high-growth periods. This is evidence enough that PMOs are not yielding demonstrable positive financial results. This churn often causes years of frustration for both the PMOs and the projects and departments they serve. Changing the way in which the PMO is chartered, works, and is perceived within an organization can ensure that it offers plentiful advantages for the entire organization. 

Two Problem Scenarios… And Strategies to Solve Them 

One: The PMO is spawned by an executive with a big problem 

Let’s consider this example: a client forms a PMO to salvage a huge contract with a customer. A very large project lags, causing late deliveries and missed expectations all around. Department staff is not completely honest with the customer, hoping that they will somehow be able to

What constitutes 90% of the value in recent asset sales on Wall Street by large companies?  The answer is data centers and headquarters.  When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and sold its assets to Barclays for $1.75 billion, its data centers and headquarters constituted 86% of the value. This echoes the JPMorgan-Bear Stearns fire sale, in which Bear Stearns' two data centers and headquarters also represented most of the price.  Why is this so? 

A palatial headquarters generates no revenue for any business, and its upkeep depresses profits, sometimes significantly.  Yet another reason to sell your headquarters and data centers is to switch to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.  Not only is this an excellent financial decision, but SaaS solutions are much greener than hosting your data on a local server. 

• Less Fossil Fuels

SaaS solutions enable telecommuting. This means that you no longer have employees wasting fuel by driving to work and getting stuck in traffic.

Today's article is written by my colleague, Bill Balcezak, and Deborah Kerr, partner at affintus. Learn more about them in their bios at the end of the article.


Successful hiring is one of the key factors to operational success for large and small businesses alike. Executives should approach the hiring process as a means to both improve their existing workforce and to secure a candidate who will add long-term value to the organization. If approached merely as a step toward replacing a lost asset, the hiring process will squander considerable resources and forfeit significant opportunity value from a potential personnel improvement. The mission is obvious, yet, according tobusiness owners, finding the right employees can be an elusive aspiration in a drawn-out process.

The results of the hiring search can be crucial for the future of small businesses and a poor decision can easily cost any organization well into the six figures. Every new hiring opportunity has the potential to advance a business's interests or set them back significantly, and should be approached using the same level of data, knowledge, and preparation required for any critical business decision.