When I started working, my response to any directive was: YES SIR.

On CNBC the other night I saw yet another ‘instruction’ for business owners on the need to provide the ‘new employee’ with (I swear to God), breakfast cereal in the morning and free buffet lunch, a game room, afternoon naps, daily grades and praise sessions, and “meaningful emotional connection” to every “request.”

I’m not big on turning the workplace into kindergarten…and the first person to skateboard through my office would be shot on sight.   I do not believe this is the right path. This seems to me something being packaged up and sold via media and fad-gurus-of-the-moment like other liberal, fantastical ideas. The workplace is not called the amusement park or the sports bar or the gymnasium or the playroom for a reason. Further, I don’t see this stuff going on in most successful businesses – it seems province of California-weird public companies awash in Wall Street investors’ capital, and such companies have a funny way of rising to ridiculous over-valuations than dissolving and imploding.

You have to go to great extremes to surround yourself with productive people – employees, vendors and associates – who do not require back rubs, peppermint candies and coddling as if you were their nanny. Hard-driving, high-flying, in-a-hurry entrepreneurs need to find and surround themselves with particularly thick-skinned people who are “about” getting the job done. I rather doubt Donald Trump needs to give George Ross free manicures and Pop-Tarts, applause, and “emotional connection sessions” with every negotiating project put in George’s hands. And I rather doubt George is dispensing such new-age niceties to his subordinates either. Yet they do seem to be running very successful businesses and minting money.

Of course, the first person you must hold ruthlessly accountable for self-directed, self-motivated, consistent high performance behavior is: you. If you need a boss (or nanny), you can’t be a leader.

Here’s a simple thing that remains a mystery to many throughout their lives: achievers are all about achievement. Non-achievers put a long laundry list of other things before achievement. A dog needs a belly rub. An achiever does not.

Here’s a big tip for you project managers and marketers out there. Lean close…”plastics”. Ok, only funny to a handful of you.

One of the things I talk to my fellow consultants about is communicating on a steady, recurring basis to our customers – both when on an engagement and when we are not. Here’s how it goes:

Probably the smartest thing we do on our engagements is the creation and issuance of weekly project status report. It helps lowers the anxiety of our clients, fosters communication, and is a consistent tool that all parties involved can count on to track progress and to communicate issues.

The key is having the mechanism in place as part of the project infrastructure. The timing of it must never change, once set – it then becomes an accepted part of the project ‘tools’. It can be used to deliver less-than-thrilling news about the project, particularly when there are under-performers involved.

The key phrases, with regard to project communication, that I continue to hammer home to the consultants at Lupine are the words ‘recurring’ and ‘inviolate’.

The same argument and concept can be made about marketing your business. (See page 1 of this newsletter.) Contacting your customers only after they have jumped ship does not help you more quickly achieve your goals. The contact with them should be recurring, expected, and intentional.

From time to time, I am asked how I went into business for myself…how it got started for me.

It started back in 1990…I was in desperate situation at the time – I did not have a job, I was 2 more bad breaks away from being homeless and had custody of two young children. I really needed the job I had applied for with First Gibraltar Bank.

I got the job and began my recovery. I learned a lot working in an Information Systems department (was called MIS back then) and added it to my other wanderings in real estate, publishing, and the CPA world. I found that I had a natural gift for working on systems – both as a business analyst, project manager, and in solving the actual technical problems.

One of the last things I did for First Gibraltar was to lead a team that was assembled to select a software management system for the real estate group. We ended up choosing the most well-known package at the time. This was March, 1991.

After First Gibraltar made the selection, I started (covertly) dabbling with the software, but because I was ‘management’, I didn’t really get the opportunity to dive into the details like I wanted. My bosses always reined me in. My first use of the software while still employed at FGB was on a government-backed real estate portfolio project with very strict reporting deadlines. The deadlines came and went because the software did not work as warranted. I spent a lot of time with the President of the software organization trying to work through the problems and trying to keep First Gibraltar from losing the large government contract. What really struck me at the time was how poor and apathetic the support from the software company was. They treated me as if the problem was of my creation and that I was an idiot. I remember thinking – I could do this for a living and certainly do a much better job of it.

Shortly thereafter, Bank of America purchased First Gibraltar Bank. I was offered a job with BofA and a job with the remaining bank – First Madison Bank. Instead I finagled a consulting contract with First Madison as they viewed me as irreplaceable. I sold myself as a software expert.

I started Lupine Partners on February 1, 1993, as an independent consultant performing software consulting services.

I had one client – my former employer.

My contract with First Madison ended 9 months later in October. I will never forget the night in October – about 2 weeks before the engagement ended. It was a Friday night and I was sitting in the bedroom watching a basketball game on TV. And it hit me – I did not have any jobs lined up. And furthermore, I did not have any prospects in the work, because I had not done marketing or selling during the previous 9 months. I had felt, and I am not making this up, that it would be disloyal and dishonest to look for other jobs while engaged by a client. This horrible feeling of stupidity is one I will never forget….

I had a rough 6 weeks…but finally, I caught a break when I received a referral from MRI to perform a 2-day training for a client in Denver, Colorado. (Thank you again Chris.) The training went very well – and they called me back 2 weeks later to see if I would be interested in leading a nationwide conversion of all 100 of their remote locations. I told them I would have to check my schedule, which of course was completely empty, and would call the next day.

I landed the engagement and never looked back. I never again put myself in the position again of not having substantial work either sold or in the works.

I can clearly remember in May 1995, sitting at my desk when it hit me. I had a client base of about 15 by that time, was busy every day, was marketing very little, and the phone rang frequently for more work. What hit me was that I had made it. I had actually created a little small business for myself that was based on some very simple principles. I think of them as the 5 customer service truths:

1. Say please, thank you, and your welcome.

2. Over-manage expectations. Or said another way, do what you say you are going to do.

3. Don’t make your problems your client’s problems.

4. Return all client communications (written, verbal, voice, e-mail) promptly. Thank you again Governor.

5. Show your appreciation for their business. Say it.

A man was suffering a persistent problem with his house. The floor squeaked. No matter what he tried, nothing worked. Finally, he called a carpenter who friends said was a true craftsman.

The craftsman walked into the room and heard the squeak. He set down his toolbox, pulled out a hammer and nail, and pounded the nail into the floor with three blows.

The squeak was gone forever. The carpenter pulled out an invoice slip, on which he wrote the total of $45. Above that total were two line items:

Hammering, $2

Knowing where to hammer, $43

Answer: Maybe.

Consider hiring a consultant to be your project manager when:

• there are no obvious candidates within your organization
• your organization is “tight” on resources and you don’t want to overload staff personnel
• you want an independent third party to be your project leader

Don’t discount the value of having somebody outside your company run the engagement. On numerous occasions over the past fifteen years, clients have said to me, “Would you go talk to Person X? He will listen to you.” Or, “You and I say the same thing but because we are paying you the high hourly rate, they listen to what you say.” Another nice side benefit to having outsiders come in is that we don’t have to care about company politics. We do our job, get paid, and go home. Sometimes an internal project manager is stuck running the project in a manner not totally to his liking because of the realities of his particular organization. In other words, he wants to keep his job.

How large should the team be? What is the optimal size for a software acquisition team? My preference is five to seven people. That usually covers all the functional areas of most organizations and allows for the meetings where everybody can be heard but that do not go on too long. As number of participants grows, so does the length of time to conduct a meeting, particularly if the meeting is poorly run.

I was hired to manage a software acquisition project for a large East Coast property management firm a few years back. The leaders asked for volunteers to serve on the evaluation team and they got eighteen responses, fifteen from the same functional area). All eighteen people ended up serving on the selection team. It was big-time overkill, and it made conducting the planning meetings and the subsequent vendor demonstrations very difficult. There were reasons why my client did it—over my objections. The ultimate selection was not “better” because the selection team was this large.

At what level of the organizational chart should the team members reside?

They should be in the middle, neither frontline staffers nor the executives. We want people who know the organization and are used to working.

Everybody tends to know who these folks are; they are the ones doing all the work! Ambitious types who want to serve just so they can say they served should be avoided. These guys will not work and will make the others angry and resentful as they have to pick up the slack of a noncontributing team member. Having said this, I have had people on all places of the org chart be successful on a team. They have to want to work, though; that’s the key characteristic.

What is the motivation level of possible team members? Do they want to serve… are they TOO eager to serve? What I am talking about here is bias and/or ambition. We don’t want people who are bucking to select a certain vendor because they worked with the package in advance or because they want to advance in the organization by the kudos that might be granted by being a part of a terrific software choice. (By the way, that goes two ways.) A vendor that was great for one company might not be the best match for another. Steering committee members, be cautious of somebody who wants to be on the team too much.

You want reluctant warriors.

I’m not sure which presents more pressure to me these days – the clock or the calendar. Incredible as it seems to me, we’re already at the halfway mark in 2008. I’m pleased to say that I’m personally slightly ahead of financial targets; on track or ahead with about 7 of 10 significant projects or initiatives for the year; managing only a very short list of unresolved, nagging irritants.

Still the calendar has sped by, is speeding by, and it seems to me unreasonable to already be at the half. I am, at 50 (also very optimistically) at the halfway mark of my life calendar – more likely past it by some unknown measure. Makes you think when you let it.

During my long motorcycle journey to Baltimore and back…I had a LOT of time to think. And I thought: gee, why aren’t I doing this more often? Later I had a conversation with a client that made me think about how much of our time and energy is wasted and frustration manufactured by insisting on striving to create what no man can create, to attain that which is fundamentally unobtainable: perfection, in something or anything. The perfect relationship, the perfect place, the perfect business. Too often, we use ‘successful’ as a sloppy synonym for ‘perfect’, purchasing misery in the bargain.

The very idea that there are ‘successful businesses’ is delusional. Looking at a business from the outside, it’s easy to make this mistake; to view it as ‘successful’; to envy it; to judge yours and yourself inferior. Consider Disney. Did Disneyland start as a success? Not at all, its grand opening was a hurried, patched together, under-financed mess that might have sunk the ship before it sailed. Ah, but today. Well, today’s not that different. Recently, the company licensed to operate the Disney stores filed bankruptcy. Disney had to step in and take back a troubled retailing operation, and is rushing to close 98 of the poorest performing stores, requiring breaking leases, negotiating settlements with landlords, wiping out thousands of jobs and racking up losses.

This is the reality of all businesses.

The best have successful people continuously making and cleaning up messes, buying their way out of problems of their own creation that inevitably and naturally occur in the aggressive pursuit of opportunities, winning at some attempts, converting some adversities into opportunities, living with the bruises and wounds from adversities that yield no immediate or apparent compensation opportunities, and getting up tomorrow and doing it all again.

From a distance, every pasture looks greener. None are.

Taking some pleasure in your own obviously imperfect pasture is the trickiest of all the mind and personal management challenges connected to professional life. It is our dissatisfaction that produces our achievement – what others are easily willing to accept as unchangeable or inevitable, we are not.

But this same source of power can often also be a source of grossly inaccurate thinking of delusional belief that somewhere, somebody has gotten in completely right.

Defining the scope of the Software Evaluation project is the first critical step. Do not assume that everybody is on the same page.

As described in my book “Software and Vendors and Requirements, Oh My! – A Project Team’s Guide to Evaluating Business Software”, I start all of my software acquisition planning and implementation meetings asking for the scope of the project. More than half of the time, there is disagreement in the room. Know this: You cannot implement a moving target. Write the scope down, and then read it out loud. Keep doing it until everybody agrees. If there is not agreement, then this will be the first item that you will run up the flagpole to the Steering Committee.

“What is a scope document?”

The scope document defines the boundaries and limits of the project. It is a clearly written description of what the project is. It should include the items in scope as well as those that are not in scope. For scope definition, consider:

• areas of the client’s organization
• package or modules of a package to be evaluated
• descriptions of enhancements to be evaluated
• business functions or processes
• affected or replaced systems or subsystems
• relevant hardware platforms
• contemplated or required interfaces
• features or functions of a piece of software to be evaluated
• work that must be done to complete the project

Beware of a phenomenon known as “scope creep,” the changing of the previously agreed-to scope during the course of the engagement. This is not unusual in systems projects and if you do not handle it correctly it can derail all of your hard work to date. When this project poison rears its head, the project manager must address it immediately.

Do not assume that everybody knows when a change in scope occurs or that they agree with it. For example, a project is kicked off with a scope of evaluating accounting packages, and then it is agreed that point-of-sale packages should be evaluated as well as part of the ongoing process. This is scope creep. It’s now a new project with a whole new set of considerations. At this time, the project team and steering committee can decide to:

• let the point-of-sale project be its own project with its own selection team or
• expand the scope of the accounting acquisition project. If the project is just kicking off, this is probably fine. If you have software vendors coming in the next week to show their wares, you are most probably starting the entire process over from scratch.

When scope creeps rears its ugly head (and it probably will at some point), act on it immediately by putting the steering committee and project team together.

One other comment on scope: There may be times when you want to cut the project scope back. If the “bite” of the project is too big and will strain limited human resources to the breaking point, go ahead and reduce the scope. It’s better to have a smaller success than to have a larger failure. Knock out the smaller project and live to fight another day.

“Why do so many software projects fail? Has anyone learned lessons that will help my project to avoid failure?”

While there is no one “right” way to purchase software, there are many wrong ways as I have described in my book “Software and Vendors and Requirements, Oh My! – A Project Team’s Guide to Evaluating Business Software”,

There is definitely strength in knowing what not to do.

Several times over the years I have stopped meetings and said, “You remember when we started this project and I made you all sit through my ramblings of why projects fail?”

“Yes,” they say.

“Well, we are doing some of them—and we have to stop.”

Saying this works, because we had the discussion in advance and because we were intentional in our efforts to curb dysfunctional project behavior. The list I am going to provide is not necessarily the entire list of behaviors and actions related to project degeneration. but they are the ones I have seen in working with close to one hundred clients in matters related to business software.

Here’s the list of major offenders:

• Lack of executive or managerial buy-in
• Projects that take too long
• Organizational inflexibility to change
• Poor resource allocation
• Negativity
• Lack of a plan
• Lack of understanding that the organization is buying both product and vendor
• Bias
• No method for identifying and resolving issues
• Lack of project leadership
• People not doing what they say they are going to do
• Decision remorse
• No defined project end date
• Lack of a realistic project budget
• Team members’ objectives not in alignment with the business objective

Lack of executive or managerial buy-in. The software acquisition process must work from the top down. This is a large effort in any organization and requires hundreds of hours across all functional areas. If executive buy-in has not occurred, then people on the team may not give their best efforts and the leaders of the company will not respect or support the hours and dedication it requires to get a software match. I put this lesson on the top of the list because it is the number one reason for projects “gone wild.” Think about it: your organization is going through a major effort to investigate new business software. You are going to invest major time and money in doing so; shouldn’t the top managers and executives be on board and engaged? It is tough to get past poor leadership and do a good job on these types of projects.

Projects that take too long. Here’s the deal: Most people—and organizations—only have so much endurance and time to work on projects of this magnitude. If an end date is not specified up front or if the project continues to be delayed, the momentum and energy for finishing the project will just dry up and go away. Also, company management will lose confidence in the project team. If the project looks like it is going to be a long one, then break it up into bite-size phases and have multiple projects. Psychologically it is more palatable to all concerned.

Please look for Part 2 of this article describing the major offenders of project failure

As a reader of many different books in many different genres, I have gotten in the habit of marking passages that I find interesting or challenging. As the years have gone on, I have taken this habit and made it worse by typing up some of the passages so I could study them…then the habit got worse with me putting the passages in frames and putting them on my office wall.

For example: “Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Trust is not optional. Neither is gratitude.”

I had a client come to my office recently. He looked curiously at my collage of passages on the wall. He asked about them and then wanted to know where my awards and plaques were. I pointed to my CPA certificate and college diploma to lying on the floor in shame – driven down to the basement by my compulsion for improvement and a need for a different kind of education than I received at the University of Texas in the 70s.

In my opinion, displayed awards are for others…accomplishments for sure, but are based on the past. My office is geared, and sets my mind, for the future. I think it is important to never NEED the accolades. Need for it, just like the need for just about anything, including money, invariably leads to unproductive priorities, decisions, behaviors, and compromises.

Need is evil.

Attention or recognition junkies often discredit themselves, give up the authority or autonomy, waste time and money, and otherwise damage themselves and others. You cannot afford to be always in search of a mommy to put your latest drawing up on the refrigerator with magnets. If there is some particular recognition or publicity that strategically serves your deliberate purpose, effort invested in obtaining it is justified.

But as an end rather than a means, as spotlight for spotlight’s sake, it is embarrassingly juvenile. The highest achievers pretty much concentrate on the work and its results…not on recognition. Appreciate it if and when it comes, but don’t worry about it. Or who else may be getting it.

By far, the best recognition is a private matter; self knowledge of the job well done, the life well lived.

A few months ago I conducted some research – interviewing both clients and software sales professionals. My intention was to determine approximately how often organizations used independent consultants to lead them through the software evaluation and procurement process. Since 1993, I have served as the lead on many software evaluations…have written a book on the subject, and feel that I have a decent level of proficiency in both the art/science of software selection, and of the real estate software market in particular.

I expected the percentage of consultant-led evaluations to be around 5%. My research indicates that the percentage is closer to 25%. In other words, approximately 1 in 4 software procurements have independent consultants having some sort of role in the final outcome.

Over the years I have asked some of my software salesperson acquaintances the following question: Do you sell differently when there is a consultant involved in the sale? To a person, the answer has always been – NO.

To me, this is confounding, and I feel it is a mistake. A big one. As one who sits in the software evaluation jury room while decisions are made…I know how much I have influenced the decisions my clients make. It’s a reason my firm gets hired.

I am going to let you in on some of the secrets that exist in my business. This is information that no other firm in the country will tell you about what goes on between software prospect, software salesperson, and software consultant. And its information you need when there is a prospect-paid consultant between you and your sale.

There is great marketing axiom that goes something like this: People buy for emotional reasons and justify it with reasons that we (sales people) supply them. The fact you need to consider and know is this:

Good consultants take the emotion out of the software buying process

Good consultants realize that software is a tool that our client organizations use to help achieve their stated goals. It is a means, not an end. One of the things we do is to apply prospect-defined requirements against the relevant, material, and existing (and sometimes upcoming) functionality of the software products in question. Boring? – Yes. Effective? Also, yes. In the best interests of our clients? Yep.

Does this tactic make your job more difficult? Does it possibly take some of the ‘sizzle’ out of your presentation? Does it also give you the chance to differentiate yourself by understanding this aspect of the evaluation methodology?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Good consultants will split the evaluation of software products and the software company. And we will utilize scoring mechanisms only for the functional and technical fit aspects of the engagement…leaving intuition as an acceptable part of the evaluation process.