In Praise of the Chrysler Town & Country

We’ve had our Chrysler Town & Country for five and a half years.  It has over 117,000 miles, and it is still a great car.  We just completed a week trip from San Diego to the Russian River (an hour north of San Francisco) and the Town & Country ran perfectly.

There is so much storage room inside the car.  I’m always surprised at how much of our stuff we can get into it.  And the ride is smooth.  It’s easy to drive, and the passengers enjoy the ride as well.  The leather seats have held up very well.  With a little cleaning, they’d look close to new.  And the DVD player which I thought might work for three years, is still entertaining the offspring.  Beautiful.

Does this matter to anybody other than me?  Probably not.  But it’s been a great car for me, with little repair required.

Two Experiences of Excellence

I just returned from a week-long trip to the East Coast with my son’s 8th grade class.  There were about 76 kids and 20 parents, plus the tour guide, history teacher, and two other responsible adults.  On this trip I experienced two things of excellence.

The first was the product of World Expeditions of San Diego, and its owner Steve Ewalt.  Steve put together an amazing itinerary and executed it flawlessly.  We visited Boston, Philadelphia, Gettysburg, Lancaster, PA, New York City, Washington D.C., and took a delightful river raft trip down part of the Shenandoah River.  The itinerary was deep and interesting.  We were moving from about 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. every day.  Steve provided air flights, hotel rooms, bus travel, day tour guides, museum and attraction tickets, breakfasts, and dinners.  It all was executed with grace and purpose.  Steve is excellent!

My second experience of excellence was a big surprise.  While we were in NYC, we went to the Broadway Musical, Mama Mia.  I saw the movie and quite frankly, it was one of the most painful experiences of my life.  When I saw the event on the trip itinerary, I was not happy.

Big surprise:  It was very good! The part of Donna Sheridan was played by Beth Leavel, and she is fantastic.  She has the strongest voice in the cast, and uses it magnificently.  The entire show is very enjoyable.  The boys in our group even liked it.  The girls especially liked it.

Malwarebytes

About once a year, my sons’ computer becomes infected with a malicious piece of ad-ware.  It’s so annoying, but I’ve found that the free download at http://www.malwarebytes.org/ is a great tool to get rid of it.

This week I was trying to get rid of a particularly pernicious variety of ad-ware called “Virus Protector”.  This virus wouldn’t even allow me to do anything with Windows loaded.

I had to boot in safe mode and look back over 15 years to tap my ancient knowledge of DOS commands.  But I did finally get rid of the virus.  It took a few attempts.

I tried some other pieces of software to get rid of it, but they all assumed I could still use Windows to do things.  I couldn’t.

I downloaded the Malwarebytes program from another computer onto a thumb drive and then was able to load the software onto the infected machine from the DOS command prompt.

If you’re having a problem with ad-ware or spy-ware try it out.  McAfee didn’t stop the virus from infecting my machine.

Another Neat Thing

This is not a new thing, but it is great.  If you need to process small payrolls, you must look into Paycycle.  It is absolutely fabulous.  It’s easy and thorough.

I use it to process payroll for the person (yes, that’s right.  one employee) that provides after school childcare at our home for our two sons.

I set up all my employer and employee information on their website, and then process a payroll every week.  It calculates all the taxes and prints out a paycheck stub.  I can even pay via direct deposit.

I can also easily print out all tax forms with all the data entered in the form.  There is also a “To Do List” that keeps your up to date with timely filing.

It’s easy. Check it out.

Three Neat Things

In the past several months I have come across three pretty neat things:

Wells Fargo can accept deposits at its ATMs without a deposit slip.  You can just stuff the checks into the ATM.  It will read the bank coding and scan the checks for the dollar amount. This is great for me because I always delayed depositing checks because of the need to get a deposit slip.

I have been a long time Netflix subscriber.  I recently purchased a ROKU device for $100 that lets me stream movies from Netflix to my television instantly.  You don’t have to wait for the mail, and if you’re already on a 3-DVD plan with Netflix, there is no additional charge.  Not all the movies are available this way, but if you want to watch something, you can check it out on the Netflix site; and if it is available, you can see it immediately.

I switched to Vonage for my phone service about a year ago.  With their “World” plan you can call almost anywhere for $25/month.  But the neat things is that there is a voice mail box that will answer and receive messages for you, and it will transcribe the message and e-mail it to you along with an audio copy of the message.  That’s pretty neat.

Inspect What You Expect

“Inspect what you expect” is a fairly tired saying; but no less true than it ever was. I manage a team blog that my co-workers and I regularly contribute to. Last week I noticed that our traffic from Google Search had fallen dramatically. This is a concern because organic Google search results are free traffic to our website, and they had suddenly disappeared. So I started investigating, and learned a lot.

But why is this important to you? It illustrates the wisdom of the earlier saying. If a process or an activity is important to you, you probably have expectations about its outcome. And you can’t assume that the outcome will just naturally result. You have to monitor and manage the process or activity to ensure that the results are what you expect.

I work with about one hundred organizations every year, and I am amazed how many of them do not develop operating budgets. It seems like a simple thing to do, but people don’t do it. And if they do have a budget, it is regarded as a historical document; rarely to be examined or referenced.

On the other hand, the most successful business people I know, create, revise, monitor, share, and analyze their operating budgets on a weekly and daily basis. I once worked for a daily newspaper, and the business manager planned the size and advertising space for each daily paper a year in advance. He analyzed the advertising content of each daily publishing and compared it to his expectations throughout the year.

As a Controller for a company with huge working capital requirements, I modeled customer cash receipts on a daily basis, months in advance. As the company went about its business, I could tell in the first week whether I was going to have a problem, instead of waiting for week four or five of the month. This gave me a big advantage in managing the business.

If you’re devoting your time to a business, you really need to develop an operating budget and monitor your actual results against the budget.

Every business will have its own business drivers that should be budgeted. It’s up to you to identify what they are and how best to quantify them. And a budget does not have to be tracking just money. You likely have non-monetary business drivers that affect your business results, such as new client sign-ups, lost clients, employee turnover, etc. Budget these items as well.

It’s up to you on whether you want to share the budget with others. But my experience is that a budget becomes a much more effective tool if others are involved.

Finally track your actual results against the budget. Do it on a daily basis, if that makes sense; it probably does. Analyze the results. You will find variances that are unanticipated results, and variances that indicate inadequate expectations.

If you determine that your expectations are incorrect, change the budget. There’s nothing wrong with that.

If you plan and monitor your business activities you will find that it’s much easier to manage your business and reach your goals.

A Bit of Folly

A Spanish Language teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.

'House' for instance, is feminine: 'la casa.' 'Pencil,' however, is masculine: 'el lapiz.' A student asked, 'What gender is 'computer'?'

Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether 'computer' should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation. The men's group decided that 'computer' should definitely be of the feminine gender ('la computadora'), because:

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic;
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else;
3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later retrieval;
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

(THIS GETS BETTER!)

The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be Masculine ('el computador'), because:

1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on;
2. They have a lot of data but still can't think for themselves;
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem;
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better model.

The women won.

Waited Too Long on QuickBooks

I talked with a prospect yesterday about migrating to Dynamics GP. I talked to the CFO, and their company does well over $20 million in sales per year. They wanted to sell the company last year and had an interested buyer. But the buyer balked when they learned that the company was using QuickBooks. In the buyer's eyes, this indicated that the company didn't know what they were doing.

I dug down a little bit and found that the CFO was concerned with the fact that QuickBooks does not have an adequate transaction audit trail. Quickbooks claims to have an audit trail, but apparently all it does is keep a record of who changes a transaction. Most mid-range accounting systems will not allow a user to delete or change a posted transaction. This allows good transaction control and leaves a solid transaction audit trail; allowing the books to be audited.

In this case the buyer was scared off; not to return.

In my practice, if I come across a prospect that is doing $20 million in sales and they're on QuickBooks, its easy to move them into a mid-range system. If you just look at the control and reporting aspects alone, its an obvious move.

Running Parallel

Once in a while a prospect is planning to, “run parallel” when they go-live with a new system. I almost always recommend against it for these reasons:

• The systems I work with are very mature, have thousands of users, and are stable.
• Generally the business processes that are being managed in a new system are fairly standard and well covered by a standard implementation.
• The end-users would be greatly impacted by essentially having to double the amount of time they devote to using their systems.
• The process of comparing results from the old system to the new system takes a lot of time, and therefore doesn’t get done; thus defeating one of the main reasons for running parallel.

If a new system implementation is well planned and executed, system and report customizations are properly tested, and users are adequately trained; there should be no need for running parallel. Just do it.

Test Upgrades; To Do, or Not

My colleague, Doug Pitcher, provides a nice review regarding the question, "Are test upgrades really that important?"

Buy a New System, Already!

I just received a requirements document from a large, successful company. Their current system dates back well into the past century. These are some of the problems the business analyst noted with their existing system:

• There is no audit trail of the transactions processed; making it difficult to identify the source of errors
• The report writer is limited to two reports and is very difficult to code.
• Any other required report must be done in Excel or requested from the IT Dept.
• The system does not have an invoice aging function.

These are basic issues that are now solved in almost all mid-range systems. If these are the type of issues you're having with your system, you should be looking for a new one now.

The Missing Portable Hard Drive

Great tool. I use a portable hard drive to store my VPC images I use for demos. Our developers use them to store large databases and development projects. They’re cheap and easy to use. Oops. Don’t lose them. We’re now frantically running around trying to find a missing hard drive that a former employee used to store development source code. Do you think we’ll find it? Do you think we have a backup?

Take the Next Step

I met with a new prospect yesterday. It’s a 500 person construction company. They have a variety of systems, but are interested in further developing their SharePoint implementation. They had started with a simple InfoPath form, linked to a SharePoint list. They have been experiencing problems but have not earnestly pursued resolving them. Their use of SharePoint is almost nil.

Here’s the point: They are licensed for MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) and are not using it. MOSS is not cheaply licensed. For a 500 person company, it’s a pretty big deal. They came across a fairly small roadblock, and stopped. MOSS offers so much functionality in respect to reporting, business process management, document management, and enterprise search, that it is a waste not to take the next step and, 1.) fix their minor problem, 2.) get some expert assistance in further developing and rolling out functionality.

A lot of the Microsoft technologies are delivered in a form that requires some development to take full advantage of them. If you’re going to invest in the licenses, you need to take the next step to develop and deploy.

Macro Mania

I discovered another mis-use of Excel this week. We have a client that receives a transaction download from their bank. They then import this into Dynamics GP to create general ledger transactions.

The problem is that several years ago someone crafted a nifty Excel spreadsheet to format the data in order to facilitate the import into GP. In the spreadsheet there is a hefty reliance on macros to organize, edit, and fill the source data. It may have worked initially, but now it does not; and is not worth the trouble to fix.

We will most likely develop a simple SQL Server / program code application to do the work. It will most likely take less time to deliver, and cost the client less.

Excel is a wonderful tool for analysis, and reporting; and for modeling business processes. It is not a good tool for reliable, well controlled business transaction processing.

Marketing, Microsoft Style

You've got to watch this:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0