More than just checklists….

I wrote last week about the importance of checklists for all aspects of your business. Expanding on that I learned a valuable lesson at the weekend in the most unlikely of places, in a hospital.  Our youngest son has had some medical challenges which started before he was born, he was given a 1 in 10 chance of survival when it was first diagnosed. However, he didn’t let it hold him back and battled on growing stronger each day. By the time he was finally discharged from hospital he had been an inpatient for almost 3 years, but he is unique. This means that he has to be managed much differently to any children with ‘similar’ ailments so much so that his consultant has made oxygenation plans, care plans, flow charts for his care etc. Last night we had to take Danny in to children’s A+E as he had a bad chest infection. When we got there we explained the situation to the nurse and then again to the doctor. I explained that his oxygenation plan states that unless he is in 3lts of oxygen he should not be admitted. We also explained that there are certain procedures as to how Daniel is dealt with in most situations and he should consult the PICU unit to get more information.

To cut a long storey short the two key things happened that sealed our fate to 6.5hrs in A+E and a lot of stress and arguments. The first thing was that the doctor did not contact the people we had clearly told him to speak with to get more information. Instead he just rang the on-call person which mean that the wrong information again was fed back. The second was that the carefully written procedures for handling Daniel and the care & oxygenation plans were not made accessible to all people that may be in contact with him. This mean that he was given all of the wrong treatment.

So what has this to do with my IT life? Simple.  The first lesson is when you are dealing with a client, new or existing, the most important thing to do is LISTEN. Let them talk, make notes and ask questions. This simple step alone can save you hours in wasted time and if the client is on a flat-fee contract this means money saved. Second lesson is as you begin to create business processes, checklist and procedures to run your business smoother make sure that everyone that needs to know they are there..know. After all you could have the best product/service on the planet but shouting about it in the middle of a dessert is not gonna do a great deal of good is it.

So to summarise; Stop, Listen then Talk….in that order then you can’t go far wrong.

Any thoughts? I’d love to hear them.

- Rob

A checklist for everything

When I first started in I.T I was young and able to absorb everything I read and memorised it all. Then as the years passed by I learned more about processes for performing regular tasks in my work and they became my own. So much so that they were engrained within who I was and I never needed to look this type of information up.

However, as I have gotten more involved in the business of running a business and not just owning a job it has become much more difficult to remember this so fluently as I used to. This gave rise to processes. Many people have come across Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) which are common practice in large organisations but not so in small businesses, why? The reason is quite simple; In order for a large business to run fluently and in the way the creator designed it there must be an SOP as he/she will not be there to train every role in the business.

I am currently in the process of creating a whole raft of checklists for tasks which are undertaken at a clients site along with business processes for things that must be completed within our own business. So what needs to be documented? Anything and everything…..this sounds like a mammoth task but it isn’t. The reality is that you need to document anything which needs to be done but should not require you to perform it yourself.  For example my topic this weekend is ‘SBS2oo3 to SBS 2008 migration checklist’. This is simply a checklist to tech’s to following when they are performing this type of migration. It is not a full migration manual for SBS but it is a ‘crib sheet’ to help job the memory of a training technician so that something important is not forgotten.

Does your business need checklists and procedures? Maybe. Would it benefit? Definitely.

- Rob

Error running Active Directory Users & Computers in SBS2008

I ran into an issue on a new SBS2008 server at a clients office recently. Whenever I tried to launch Active Directory Users and Computers on the SBS2008 server it would come up with a Visual C++ Runtime error and the message read:

“The Application has requested the runtime to terminate it in a unusual way. Please contact the application’s support team for more information”

The first job was to install all of the available updates which did not resolve the issue so a search of the usual online communities was in order and after a short search I came across someone with the same issue here.

The suggested resolution was to open Active Directory Sites and Services which in my case was not affected, then go to ‘Tool’ and on the ‘Disk Cleanup’ tab click on delete files. The issue seems to be caused by the installation of third party apps, however there is nothing unusual installed on this server but in this instance the AD tools were not happy. No the less simply following this method the issue was resolved and I hope this helps others.

- Rob

Power of Community

My experience of the IT community up until running my own business was..well inbred to say the least. The company that I worked for previously bordered on almost grooming you to distrust other IT companies as if they were the ‘enemy’.  To my shame this was a feeling that was exaggerated in some of my future engagements after leaving there and setting up on my own. However, about 2 years ago I joined the BNI which is an international business referral network which brings different businesses together to allow them to pass business once a certain rapport has been made. I will always remember the first meeting I went to was at Woodborough Hall in Nottingham on a dark November morning. I arrived there at 06:45, that’s right 6.45am, to a room full of people that I had never met. I mean talk about a fish out of water, I don’t think I could have been more uncomfortable if I had been stood there naked!

None the less the first person to that came to speak with me was Adam Harris from Bear-IT who came over to speak with me and discuss what I did. This totally opened my eyes to the fact that maybe, just maybe, those other IT companies were not so evil after all and that maybe, just maybe, there could be synergies between seemingly rival businesses. After this Adam invited me up to meet with him to discuss things further. I was told by another IT company that I was working with at the time not to discuss software and tools etc as they should be a closely guarded ‘secret’. However, once I started talking with Adam I found that we all do the same things, same tools, same software just a different business with different faces. So I reciprocated the openness that was shown to me.

Fast forward on to the beginning of this year when I was approached by another IT consultant and fellow business owner from Birmingham. Richard Tubb from Netlink IT contacted me following some posts which I had made on Twitter. After reading Richard’s blog it seemed clear that he had travelled the business path which I wanted to embark upon, making the move from being ‘self-employed’ to being a ‘business owner’, so we began to talk. Once again I was astounded at the openness of information that was being afforded to me by someone I had only known a short time. Things such as the type of tools to use, how to deliver the best customer experience, service management and delivery, all of which is normally hidden information within the IT trade. So why was all of this being given free of charge, without a catch or clause? Because Richard believed in the community and the power of working together instead of against each other. Now all of this collaboration what highlighted when in May 2009 I was drafted in by Richard and some of his peers to assist in a massive nationwide upgrade project for one of their clients, you can read all about it here. All in all there was 8 different IT businesses working together under on collaborative umbrella which meant that what was a massive project which included over a dozen servers, 200+ desktops across 13 sites was all made possible by the IT community working together instead of against each other.

It was once said by John Donne “No man is an island”, and no truer word has been said. For those that run businesses it can be quite isolating but there are people out there who are willing to work with you and help you so don’t be afraid to ask.

If you are interested in developing a strategic alliance with myself then please feel free to contact me at rob@potter-tate.co.uk. Alternatively if you have a storey you would like to share about how the community has helped you then send it over as it would be great to share.

- Rob

It’s been a while

It been some time now since I last posted something up. Part of this is because I have been very busy trying to develop the business and grow it which as those of you who have businesses know it takes some effort to do. Also in doing that I have been a little disorganised, while I make no promises as to how organised I am now what I can say is that I am always trying to improve on this.

What I have learnt over these last months is that I have spent most of the last few years just “getting on with it” without actually knowing what ‘”it” is that I am trying to achieve. Through the introduction that I had made to a book called “E-Myth Revisited” I have learnt a great deal about small businesses and why they succeed and more importantly why the fail, I would encourage ANY business owner to read this as there is something for everyone in there.

However, what I did learn was that I did not yet have any specific goals in my personal life or my work life, both of which are absolutely critical if you are to succeed. After all if you have no goals what have you to gauge success against? So I set about working out what my goals would be for the next year, while the book encourages ‘life’ goals I felt I needed to take smaller steps.  Once I had finished writing them down the list to be quite honest felt almost overwhelming and I felt a little lost with it.  That feeling has been lurking around for some time but recently I had what some would call an epiphany which has changed my perspective a little.

I have always been a keen cyclist but about a year ago my road bike was side-lined due to mechanical problems which I just didn’t know how to get sorted. But thanks, and that’s a BIG thanks, to my dad he took it and managed to get it sorted out (thanks dad!). So about a month and half ago I started back getting up at 6am and cycling. At first I was doing 7 miles in the morning and soon moved on to 14 miles which was a really great feeling. This weekend I stepped it up to 18 miles which was no big deal but along the way there is a hill, not too steep, but it is about a mile long. So here I am 6:30am going up this long dragging hill in the lowest gear at just 5mph. I looked up the hill to see yet more hill and thought I need to walk, there’s no way I can get all the way up there.  It was an all consuming and overwhelming feeling that I felt I had no way of overcoming. Then it suddenly dawned on me and I thought, “if I walk this will hurt, if I cycle this will hurt and while I cannot manage all that way I CAN get just 1 metre further”.  Now logic may well be screaming “all those 1 metres all add up to the same distance you moron”, my heart is saying “I can do 1 metre more”.

So I continued up this hill completely and totally focused on just 1 meter ahead with the occasional look up the hill for any obstacles ahead until I hit the top, where I relaxed and just pedalled on. The strange thing was all the hills on this route after this one was so much easier by comparison and they really did feel much, much easier.

Without realising it I had broken down this insurmountable goal of climbing up this long drawn out hill to much smaller, manageable steps of 1 metre chunks.  By focusing on a ‘micro-goal’ and making sure that I kept looking ahead to check I was on the right path with no dangers I was able to achieve my goal.  I have now applied this same logic to my business goals and suddenly they don’t seem too insurmountable anymore I just need to take one step at a time.

To some this may be obvious as some people work this way naturally but to others it isn’t always and if this has been of use then please let me know. Or if you have any better ideas on how to make goals more bite sized then let me know as I am always interested in new ways of doing things.

- Rob