What We Look For In People

I was flicking through some old day-books last week, as I was doing some business plan review work for Critical Action. I came across some notes I made on “what we look for in our people” for use during recruitment and helping clients with interviews.

Here were my three “top picks”:

  • Be a miniature force of nature – whether the blast of the hurricane, the constant shift of the tides or the inexorable force of tectonic shift – look for that attitude in someone that says “it will get done”; and look to balance the forces at play across your team to meet all situations.
  • Have the humility to listen, learn and share every day – even when we are bringing our own knowledge to bear, we are always learning – new knowledge, new ways of understanding customer needs, new client pressures, new market developments.
  • Earn and have the confidence to hold the room – our clients often look to us for leadership and to help them arrive at decisions; to do this well, we need to have done the ground work in the years, weeks, hours and minutes beforehand – and then to share our honest thoughts.

Of course, there are always many other role-specific or “technical” areas to explore – but for me, these come secondary to these top three.

 

A Day at the RACIs

One of the big challenges of delivering a project efficiently and effectively, is to get the right people involved at the right time, doing the right things, without turning it into death by committee.

RACI matrices help to manage this. They’ve come up a lot in conversations we’ve had recently, so I thought a few words on them might be of interest.

RACI is an acronym for Responsible, Accountable, Communicate, Inform.

List major parts of your project in one column, headed “Areas” or similar – and add four further columns for the four RACI headings.

Consider which names to write in each “cell” – the columns for each row:

  • Responsible: who will actually do the work which delivers the objective of this area? Can be one or more names
  • Accountable: which one person puts their name to this area of the project, signs it off, and ultimately is answerable for it?
  • Consult: with whom will you have 2-way dialogue to get the best delivery of this area – executive stakeholders, subject matter experts, and so on – who helps define things or cover gaps in knowledge for example? Can be one or more names.
  • Inform: Who needs to be kept abreast of project progress, issues, outcomes and dependencies (like the need for staff training, process change, systems updates, and so on)? Most likely many names, but could be just one.

Once you have defined and agreed the RACI list, make sure people are aware of it, and understand how they fit into it, particularly around Responsible/Accountable (“one name on the ball”).

We sometimes find people in the “Inform” list feel they should be in the “consult” list. If this conversation comes up, we tend to ask what unique knowledge the person brings to need the 2-way conversation, and also seek to get a firm commitment of time they will devote to the Consult work – no commitment = no consulting, in short. That’s not to say that “Informers” can’t contribute to things like initial requirements gathering if that makes sense.

You can also create a RACI matrix with the areas in the left-most column, then people’s names as column headers, with the RACI letters in the “cells” as required – try both formats and see what works best for you. The latter is the more common layout.

GoalStormer – Storm Your Goals!

GoalStormer new look and feel - Desktop

We’re pleased to announce a new User Interface for GoalStormer, our goal achievement web-app and online community for individuals and businesses.

The new look gives you more of a “dashboard” on PCs and larger tablets, whilst slimming down and giving a simpler look when viewed on smaller tablets and phones.

GoalStormer new look and feel - phone

We hope you like the new look and feel!

Standard GoalStormer accounts are free, and we offer a range of paid-for accounts to meet your needs, plus consultancy services for businesses. Please contact us if you would like more information on using GoalStormer for your business; either with your customers or staff.

Get Coding?

Year of Code Moshi GameIt’s great to see recent initiatives such as the Year of Code, the Raspberry Pi foundation, and many others. They are helping get people, especially young people, be curious about what happens “under the hood” of computers, and try things out for themselves.

If you haven’t seen the Moshi Pong coding game/lesson at yearofcode.org it’s well worth a look. It’s main purpose is to introduce the key principles of coding: logic, events, getters, setters, objects and attributes, etc., etc. all with immediate gratification – make a change to the code and the game behaves differently.

Get Analysing

Another aspect I really like is the visual, block-based approach to editing the game – tacitly, this is doing requirements analysis, user experience (UX) design, and visual organisation of needs. We see these as crucial elements of the analysis work we do with businesses when they are transforming processes and gathering requirements for new systems.

We recommend to clients that at least the main user journey and key process flows should be walked through on whiteboards, paper or similar software before even thinking about detailed specs and coding.

Our experience is that time invested early is rarely wasted, and usually identifies several “gotchas” and opportunity to add really valuable new features to the end result.

Keep It Simple and Bold

We hope you like the rebrand of the Critical Action website – we decided to slim everything down, and go for simple and bold. Helping business owners and managers seize opportunities and solve problems in new ways is what we’re about.

We’ve also highlighted more clearly our focus on business/process analysis, objective setting/management, and project initiation.

If you feel you could be getting more out of your current growth or changes, please contact us to have a quick chat and find out if we could help you get going in a new direction.

New Year, New Product

As we enter 2014, we are putting the finishing touches to the first customer beta version of our new product, GoalStormer.com.

Based on our experience of setting, managing and hitting targets, and working with teams and individuals to do so, we’ve designed a collaborative web app to help set and achieve goals.

At the moment, we’re launching the user level of the product; we are also developing a range of business tools to allow you to set up groups of users and goal templates. This helps you add value to your customers by sharing or selling your knowledge, experience and intellectual property.

Keep an eye on www.goalstormer.com for more information!

Highly Commended in 2013 BitC Awards

Commendations in 2012 & 2013

We were delighted to receive another “Highly Commended” in the 2013 Business in the Community Regional Awards in June, following our previous Highly Commended last year.

Last year’s commendation was for our business, this year’s commendation was for our MD, Keith Shering, in the Employee Volunteer of the Year category, reflecting his work as chairman of the Peterborough ProHelp group and for the projects he has taken on and delivered. Continue reading →

In praise of volumetric models

I’ve just been building a volumetric model for a large volume consumer-market website. We wanted to make sure that we sized the initial launch infrstructure correctly, and had an understanding of the cost of growth (of both transactions and data volume).

It’s been a doubly useful exercise – as well as giving us the figures we needed, it has also highlighted an unexpected consequence of (an otherwise very sensible) archiving policy decision. This has allowed us to tweak a policy and create a new approach to one aspect of marketing, saving thousands of pounds per year.

Certainly good anecdotal evidence to support the old programmers adage that “it’s cheaper to fix it on paper…”!