Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

We have no department for Sales and Marketing.

Though 2 very busy years has elapsed, not much has changed (in that respect) from when I drew this diagram back in early 2010:

It was obvious to us, then, that we first needed to overhaul our department for “Discerning, Developing and Delivering what the customer wants”.

This took some time, but we have done so (as such, that side of the organogram looks very different now). As alluded to here, we’re starting to see early signs that clients are being delighted with product upgrades again.

Given that we’re now gearing up to make our first hire at the top of our department for Sales & Marketing, it was a good coincidence that I happened upon the article “Ending the war between Sales and Marketing” published in HBR back in 2006.

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A few weeks off over the Christmas and New Year break has given me some time to reflect on the year that was, in 2011.

We started that year very wet, and with a few jitters as well (with floodwaters from the Brisbane river threatening our offices).

At the end of the day, our office escaped any inundation (whew!), though we lost quite a bit of productive time waiting for power to be reconnected, and sorting through everything that had been hurriedly packed for the evacuation (still not finished unpacking, to tell the truth).

The important point to note here, however, is that through it all we continued to (seamlessly) supply data feed to hundreds of people around Australia, and across a number of continents – testament to the numerous layers of redundancy built into our processes, and the resilience of our people.

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As noted a while ago, I picked up this book and  found it a very engaging read.

The Book	What we thought
“Who says elephants can’t dance?” by Louis V Gerstner Jr	An enjoyable read - some great lessons too

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What struck me, time and again in reading this, was how the IBM situation Lou describes shows so many similarities to the situation we found ourselves in a couple years ago, when we started our own turnaround project (albeit on a much smaller scale).

I’ve titled this post in a similar way to the one I made 2 years ago following a Google talk as a similar challenge to us to ensure that we learn the lessons from IBM that Lou outlines in his book.

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Noticed this post from Shirlaws echoed through my Twitter account this evening, and it gave me pause for reflection on how far we’ve come in the 18+ months since Shirlaws first started helping us.

It’s a bit of a case of “half full, and half empty” in that we’ve come a long way – but still have so much further to go.

The Shirlaws post is pretty short, but does list the “7 Asset” framework that they use to describe the value of an enterprise.

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Recently, I’ve been finishing off the book “Chasing the Rabbit” by Steven J. Spear.

The book has a passage that provided a much clearer description of something I’ve tried to explain to various people at various times over the past 11 years.

It’s a quotation from a person relating their experience in a personal performance review:

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This may be the first time you have read an article posted on our “Behind the Scenes” blog – or you might be a regular reader.

Whatever is the case for you, you will have formed some kind of impression about our company, and the type of B2B software services we provide.

As such, we’d like you to tell us what you think of us, as this will help us to continue to develop and enhance the services we provide – now into our 2nd decade of service.

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On Friday 5th March, we began a process of brainstorming about what it means (to us) to share our primary value of “Customers First”.

The following Friday (March 12th) we continued this process – to talk about our 2nd Core Value – that being a Relentless Drive^{(see note)} to learn more, to improve and grow as people – and hence to deliver ever-increasing value to our customers.

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Stephen sent me a link to this presentation by Geoffrey Moore at the “Business of Software” conference in 2009.   Thanks for that!

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We were going to attend this conference in 2009, but it clashed with the commencement of our Autopsy 2 process, and as such we had to give it a miss. Geoffrey Moore is a well-known author that I was particularly looking forward to hearing present, and I am happy that this teaser was made available online. Perhaps the 2010 conference (October 4th, 5th and 6th in Boston)?!

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This is the 2nd post on the topic.

The first post was made almost 2 months ago, and remained incomplete whilst I focused on higher priority issues (such as the recruitment of our GM DDD WCW).  In the meantime, we have had several conversations internally with respect to the implicit responsibilities of the position.

This post is intended to be a starting point, from which further refinement can be made once our GM DDD WCW has started with the company.

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I was speaking with someone today, who stated that they had inferred I would have a tattoo on my butt reading “Agile Rocks” (or something like that).

I do apologise for any misconception caused by posts such as this one.

I also apologise for the images inadvertently conjured up by the first sentence.

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