Tag Archives: Technical

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…”!

Planning Improvements – for startups?

Simple Tools...

 In my last blog post, I outlined three key stages we use to help businesses improve, and I covered the first area (Commercial Imperative – the “why do it?”):

 This time around, we’ll look at “Planning Improvements” – how to change the way your people do what they do, and how to give them better tools. These are the old classics of “people, process and technology”.

 
  • Commercial Imperative – what’s the case for doing it – the “why”
  • Planning Improvements – the what, where, how of action/change
  • Taking Action – the who and when to make change happen

 

Hold on. You’ve only just started – how can you improve!?

Well, we believe you can, and should, make improvements every day. Continue reading

Technologies Supporting Business Continuity

Office365 and Windows Server 2008R2Business Continuity is a broad church, meaning different things to different businesses. It’s also very much a people thing; after all, it exists to keep people in jobs, delivering to customers, whatever happens.

That said, we have recently been involved in designing and deploying a fair few technology implementation projects within our process and systems work.

What is clear is that over the past year, and probably in the forthcoming year, there are a number of technologies which have come of age, or are due to have some significant upgrades that should transform them. Continue reading