Thinkervine

During the last few months, on a recurrent fashion basis, there has been a topic surfacing every now and then as it hurts our business: planned downtimes.

This said, all global companies, working round the clock, with a presence on all continents, all working on a single global system/infrastructure will face the same problem.

So how do you manage the planned maintenances which, obviously, will impact the daily activities of your workmates, as they do not understand why, in 2010, you still have to stop the systems to carry a maintenance.

Even today, IT/IS is seen as a cost center, barely, as a profit center. In this case, this becomes even more true as it impacts the productivity of the enterprise. Still you need to ensure the consistency of your systems, of your data, do some housekeeping in order to ensure proper performance and sometimes you’ll even have to apply some patches.

So, in the complex landscape that are so typical to the SAP world, how would you manage a proper lifecycle management of your applications and infrastructure without disturbing the business ?

1. Communication

People are able to organize their activities around a downtime, provided they know when it will happen, with enough lead time. A month in advance would be barely enough to allow the proper organization of everyone around the globe. You have to take into account that this might not just affect your colleagues but also all your business partners (customers and suppliers).

You should look forward to publishing a quarterly/yearly calendar with all major activities. Make it online, accessible to everyone so anyone, who has doubts about the planning, can refer to it.

You may also use some marketing and explain how the major operations (e.g: upgrades, support packages) will benefit to their activities.

During the maintenance, you may provide a status to the users to let them know which applications are available. Social Media has great tools for that (blogs, micro-blogging, status pages).

And in order to avoid anyone forgetting there’s a downtime next week, do not hesitate to send a friendly reminder a month and/or a week before.

For all your communications, you will need to target the right audience and have your direct network transmit the information to their teams.

2. Process

Efficient management of planned maintenances is barely a question of technology. Of course it helps, and we will discuss it later, but it only comes as a support.

In order to enhance your maintenances and minimize their length, have a detailed plan of the activities, ensuring that all the dependencies are fulfilled, and that the required skills are available.

After the downtime, review the activities and draft your lessons learned: What should be avoided next time. Use this in your plans for the future.

Periodically, review the last months maintenances. Review the planning and see what can be improved: bundling the activities differently, testing more carefully some items in the test environments before applying them into your production. Among the tasks that have been planned, see which could be planned online with limited impact on the systems/users.

Make sure you manage core and sensitive components differently from the others. While a longer downtime of your intranet might be acceptable, it would harldy be the case of your ERP system. In order to manage this, for each task and system you need to define the criticity and the priority. You will end up building a matrix defining what should be done first and what can be postponed.

Define a rollback plan. Worst thing is to be taken aback. For each task, make sure you identify the risks and your rollback plan. The latter should be planned the same way you would do for any other task (priority, duration, dependencies, resources).

3. Technology

Technology can help you lots in limiting the impact of your maintenance on your business, and you should leverage it.

High availability will be one of your toys to pet. Make use of it. You have invested lots for your DRP plan. But HA can help you otherwise. If you need to carry a maintenance on your hardware for example, you might just switch to your mirror infrastructure and bring the applications back there while you’re working on your primary site.

This is also a good opportunity to test your HA infrastructure and potentially your DRP process.

Virtualization has matured over the years and is now able to provide a high degree of flexibility.It creates a greater abstraction between the different layers. Adaptive computing lets you rebalance your resources between components. As a preparation task for your maintenance, you might look forward making temporary changes in your configuration to avoid a complete disruption of the service. Keep in mind that these changes (and reverting them) need to be supported by a detailed documentation.

Monitoring: Planned downtimes are great but they need to be supported by a rationale which will help you define which activities need to be planned. A proactive monitoring of your systems should allow you not only to get the proper alerts but also to identify the trends and thus identify the key actions that need to be undertaken.

Planned maintenance could easily shift from a pure technical topic into a political one whenever it has an impact on the business. IT, in its state of art, is designed to service the business. Thus, make use of creativity and fine analysis in order to provide the best of breed service to your customers.

Branding seeks to increase the customer’s perceived value on your product or services. Marketing campaigns through all different channels (above the line, below or through the line) have always relied on mainly two factors to increase the embrace of the product they advertise: Creating value then let the word-of-mouth game start. And it is well known to all marketers that a satisfied customer earns you 3 others and a dissatisfied one makes you lose 10 more.

Technology has known a disruptive evolution. And a disruptive technology means opportunity and risk. With the appearance of the web platforms and social networks, these rules still apply, though the impact is multiplied by thousands. This is mainly due to the new exposition and virality through which news spread across the web. An upset blogger can, in hours, easily destroy the reputation of your brand or product and force you into a crisis cell to manage this issue. You may well remember the “Failure” Google Bombing against president Bush or the Dave Caroll case with United Airlines. And thing is, word-of-mouth doesn’t remain within the inner friends circle, but as stated Universal McCann, behaviors have evolved, and people started to believe strangers.

To avoid these kind of marketing disasters, it is highly advised to have a proper management of your brand online, at the core of your marketing and PR strategy, and to maintain a reputation in adequation with the standards you’re looking forward off the Internet.

So you’re going to ask: How do I manage my brand online ?

Managing an e-reputation can go from basic operations to a very complex strategy. Whichever the level at which you choose to engage your brand management, there are three points that you will need to address:

• Monitoring
• Engaging the conversation
• Optimizing your web presence

The first step is to monitor your brand and your products, evaluate the perception on the web, what people have to say about it. This search should not be limited to search engines results but to blogs, social networks, video websites, social bookmarking websites, local search sites and forums.

During the monitoring process, you will probably come across dissatisfied customers and customers requiring information on the company or specific products. It is highly advised to engage the conversation, provide additional information. If you encounter a negative review, take the time to understand the reviewer’s point of view, apologize and ask for details on which aspects lead the customer to have an unpleasant experience, ensure that the issue will be addressed. Sometimes, this might lead to the reviewer softening his critic. But at no time should you engage an argument with the customer.

On the other side, you should avoid any posting of a false review or “ad”-comment. Should anyone find out, and usually people do, your brand will lose any credible voice it has gained through your efforts.

You should also think about optimizing your presence. Rather than having a reactive action in order to bury the negative reviews, assert a good positioning of your brand in every media channel you can have a presence in. These channels are pretty much the same as the ones you will be monitoring. You should define KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in order to define whether your brand is gaining in popularity or whether it is diving in the abyss. Having an optimized web presence is structuring factor in gaining loyal consumers.

Identify loyal evangelists, these are your best success channel. One single post by one single person might propel you into the top 10 trends, be it positive or negative. Today Consumer Generated Contents have a major influence on sales and e-commerce. Identify who these people are, what’s their (hi)story with your brand and products, find your allies and create a network. Jeff Bezos (Amazon) said: “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”. To enhance this experience, you may engage your faithful customers into a community and have them help you build your brand’s image, just the way Lego did with Universe or Starbucks with My Starbucks Idea. The authentic passion for the brand allows you to generate a higher and closer customer engagement, to the point of involving them into your product creation (eg: Pepsi Cans design).

Let your employees be your voice, not just executives. Your employees engagement could be a major ally to your brand. Define employees communication/social media strategy, allow them to share their thoughts on the company and the products. People are willing to follow their postings to get an internal insight on the brand.

On another hand, it is as much important to track the competition and keep up 5 moves ahead to avoid the checkmate.

Brand management is not just about PR, unlike what most companies think. It takes a proactive action from marketing with an alignment with the company’s global strategy. PR should be seen as a vessel to carry out the message.

After a full year of down-turn mode due to the recession, companies are starting to see the light again. There are some emerging trends of business recovery, enterprise strategists and entrepreneurs are re-engaging new projects in hope of transforming opportunities into cash.

Being an Entrepreneur or Intrapreneur almost comes back to the same thing. Come up with a bright idea and convince the audience to get sponsporship. Leading the project development to a productized state. Market the product, build a faithful community of consumers. Manage the product lifecycle, spin-off the business plan and enrich the catalog. Be competitive and be able to have a quick-spin reaction to face competitors.

But what makes a good entrepreneur ? What makes some of them successful and sustainable ? While others have to face failure ?

We are not going to discuss the intrinseque qualities the entrepreneur should behold in order to drive successfully his business. We will rather try to lay down, from a management perspective, what are the good deeds that will lead to a prosperous company.

At the beginning, there was the idea. Then the idea was nurtured, matured, shaped and eventually a product or service came out of it. A market research would then help define the relevance of this idea and how it would be adopted by consumers, which leads to building a solid business model that will eventually convince investors, around a table, to rise funds.

Although this process seems straight-forward, it is rarely the case. First of all, entrepreneurship is scarcely a one-man thing. The entrepreneur needs to define what skills are required in order to  create his inner circle of trustees. The people that will help him through the process, provide him with the appropriate advices and critics, and mentor him. Collaboration is the key word, here. An entrepreneur should not be afraid of involving his friends, family and professionals in order to collect feedback about his product and roadmap thourough the development cycle. This should help him refine the concept until reaching the best-of-the-breed state of release.

An entrepreneur needs to be adaptable. He might come up with a great idea at first but then realize that by the time it comes to the market that it would be outdated or irrelevant. You can take the example of Seesmic, a web 2.0 startup in San Francisco, which started with micro-video blogging and sharing. Recently, its founder, Loic Lemeur, seeing that the market came to a saturation state in addition to changing habits, he decided to give a U-turn to the company and Seesmic relocated around Seesmic Desktop, a tool that allows you to update anf follow Twitter and Facebook status messages. Another example is The Next Big Sound, who realized mid-way that they could come up with better ideas, which they presented to their advisors. This daring move, reinforced the trust from the investors and these guys came out with a genuine concept for signing new musical artists.

For this purpose, the entrepreneur needs to constantly screen his audience, screen the market, aggregate the information and go through a constant decision process. This does not mean he has to turn-ways every dire tides but that eventually it would be about time to come up with the next big idea to reinforce his position on the market. Although processes will help industrialize most of the tasks to handle lean costs, he will still need to be agile enough in order to react to the market.

B2C interaction goes mainly through communication. It is very important for an entrepreneur to endorse his company and his products. Trust in a product and trust in a company go through trust in the person that runs that company. Recently, a study by McKinsey(1) showed a recession in trust in big corporations, due to the lack of transparency and the focus on stakeholder’s interests versus a customer focus organization. The Apple case is good example of how its CEO, Steve Jobs, endorsed every product that was released, demonstrating how this was a break-through product that everyone needed to own. Another example would be the Digg case, where Kevin Rose started a live cast called Diggnation in order to comment the popular stories on Digg. The combination of the platform and the show made a good audience capture in an environment where Digg-like services started to pop-up every week.

The good counter-example of this would really be Facebook. Despite its popularity as a social network, Facebook failed to have a good community management and strong endorsement by its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. This lead to serious crisis management when it came to the privacy terms of service or the recent issues with click fraud. However smart were the moves they have adopted at a later stage, the scars will stick to their skin.

At last, an entrepreneur needs to create an ecosystem around his company. A company should be able to leverage its partnership circle in order to provide by severals means the best customer experience. Reliable partners are key to the success of a young blossom. A partner could either be a managing partner or a business partner (third party service providers).

Managing partnerships is essential in the company’s life. A partner could either be a bliss to the enterprise or a stagnant and dysfunctional strain that needs to be managed on a day to day basis. Due diligence will often help you go through this but before creating a new relationship, you will have to assert the benefits of this relationship. Which value do you get from this new business link ? What are his previous performances and do they serve you right ?

A good knowledge of your partners will not only help you prevent deadlocks but will also allow you leverage at best the capabilities they could bring to you. They will help you assemble this whole set of competencies, services and networks in order to come-up with a valuable service for your customers.

Launching a new project does not only require a bright idea and strong commitment from the entrepreneur, but it is also the right combination of a smart and wise management, risks and taking on the exciting challenges with the appropriate people.

(1) The 10 trends you have to watch – Beinhocker, Davis, Mendonca – Harvard Business Review – July/August 2009 – p. 57