Oct 10, 2012

A long time ago, I used to work for ADP doing pre-sales.  We had great relationships internally with services and implementation, but nonetheless it always seemed to come up that we didn’t always sell with the full lens of reality.  On the other hand, I’d say that we came up with some pretty cool solutions to some pretty tough problems.  In today’s...

Sep 13, 2011

I started my day on Monday at 4am when my cab picked me up to head to the airport.  As he missed the airport exit (how does that even happen?) I thought to myself that missing my plane would cause me to miss a series of 4 conference calls in the afternoon.  Given that it was a 5 hour flight, that would also mean that I’d wind up on the redeye later in the...

Oct 20, 2010

My road bike is a custom titanium racing frame.  It was made by a guy in Montana who is probably the cleanest welder of titanium bike frames in the world, the guy’s work is just impeccable.  I don’t really need a custom bike – it’s not like my body proportions are weird or anything.  I’m a pretty average guy apparently – or so my builder (Carl...

Aug 2, 2010

So you’re going to implement new job codes, or department codes, or whatever.  Someone in the organization has a great idea:  “let’s make the codes smart!”  I mean, what better idea to manage the information within the code than to implant attributes within the code itself.  So you go down the road:  Job category will be digit 1, job family will be...

Apr 19, 2010

In cycling, one of the core concepts when you are trying to maintain good “form” is the maintenance of cadence. Basically, a cyclist is most efficient when the legs are spinning at around 90 to 110 cycles per minute. The idea is that for each pedal stroke, a certain number of watts must be generated to propel the cyclist forward at any given speed. If you...

I feel like I always talk about change management and adoption.  When implementing a new system, I can definitely say that over the last few years I’ve seen a marked improvement in the diligence of internal implementation project managers in stressing the importance of behavioral change and end user adoption.  It is honestly so easy once you get into...

Jacob Morgan wrote a piece about adoption a while back, and he had a pretty interesting concept around supporting business process as opposed to change management.  This is really quite new to me, as we’ve always talked about change management and behavioral change as opposed to a softer concept of “support.” You need to speak in terms of “supporting”...

I’m not sure who first coined the term “shelfware.”  Most of our IT departments have all sorts of stuff we have purchased that we intend to implement but just haven’t done so yet.  Or we have implementations that we have abandoned, or we have technology and strategy roadmaps that are mid way through because we ran out of funding, or got stopped by a...

We always end up talking about employee adoption whenever we are implementing anything whether it’s technology, process or anything else.  When we talk about adoption, we’re really talking change management, and in that we are talking about changing both behaviors of people as well as attitudes.  We want to convert both their minds as well as their actions...