Management Through Visibility

By Mary De Frenchi

'Management by walking around', originally ascribed to Hewlett-Packard, is an accepted management technique. It ties closely to the concept of management responsibility and the fact that you can never say "you didn't know" and still keep your job (any politicians reading this?). With increasing globalization coupled with increasing remote working, the "walking around" part is simply impractical for many managers.

Collaboration technology can certainly help here. Let me talk about one example I'm sure will be familiar to many: Sales.

Sales is as much about expectations as results. If I know certain regions are unlikely to reach their forecast early in the quarter, I can still do something about it. Finding out in the final week upsets everybody. Of course there are no shortage of ways to deal with this - regular phone calls, web conferences, and in-person account reviews all help, but for me, it's been something of a revelation to see the power of micro-blogging. I had initially been skeptical of micro-blogging, having looked at some and quite frankly being bemused by most of the content. But in a corporate environment it can be a life saver. Here are some examples from one of my team:

"Just got the contract signature back from XXXX, and I've been told they want to expand the number of users to include all of legal from next month"

"Working on the YYY RFP, but still waiting on Finance to agree the new SOW terms"

What VP of Sales wouldn't want to know that? Good news or bad, I want to know what my people are doing, and choose where and when to intervene if appropriate. If you wait for someone to send you an explicit request for help, it's usually too late. Of course, this use case is a world apart from the usual banalities on Twitter, and of course privacy concerns would mandate a private social network for enterprises.

It's a two-way street though, and I think it's equally important my staff have full visibility into my activities. By sharing my calendar, one of my sales managers was able to take advantage of my visit to relatives in Chicago to catch me and take me to see a prospect there. I'm a strong proponent of management by walking around, but I think this slogan needs to be updated for those with remote workers to "management through visibility".

Let me give you another example where visibility is key. Many organizations (and yes, I am guilty too) approach many repetitive tasks with a people-driven ad hoc approach that saps both efficiency and effectiveness. The problem is that in many cases, these processes are not so much data-centric (e.g. forecasting, and so amenable to existing sales force automation tools), but are people-centric. These rely upon primarily document driven content and approvals, and have been largely resistant to automation attempts. A prime example of this is the RFP process.

There are of course a number of RFP template software tools, but these all focus on the content at the expense of the actual approvals process. Secondly, in taking as their unit of granularity the RFP question, they paint a fantasy world where responding to an RFP is as simple as selecting from a database of pre-approved questions. If only… The reality is that every RFP has a substantial custom element, after all if all the client needed were stock responses, they would not have gone to the trouble of creating an RFP and instead simply reviewed your stock marketing material. Further, I've never seen the same substantial question phrased the same way. Always there is some subtle unique twist, typically requiring not just a rewrite, but also a further approval cycle.

Previously, upon receiving the RFP, it would enter a black hole, ideally remerging when complete, but with little or no visibility of progress to me. Account managers would literally have to walk backwards and forwards between legal and engineering to get approval on a form of words. The final product would be sent to me for approval with a helpful cover note like "this has to go out in the next 2 hours". Thanks team.

We've now implemented a formal process using our own secure collaboration tool, ECX. With no more email chains, real-time chat and video conferencing, product management, sales, legal, and engineering can all agree on the language. Automatic versioning means the latest version is always at hand with no danger of the wrong version being used. The whole process from start to finish is more efficient and this is crucial as it gives my team back time on deadline. I can't stress how important that is. The typical reaction on finishing an RFP used to be "if only we had more time, we could have added…". Now, RFP's are finished days ahead of the deadline - time for a proper review. Time to sleep on it. Time it make sure you really have put your best foot forward.

As an executive I also win with real-time status updates on the RFP which mean I don't have to just hope it will be finished on time, but can intervene if I sense issues or sticking points developing. By putting an automated process in place, I can be confident of higher quality, and better RFP's mean more sales. Sales force automation tools are great and the bread and butter for Sales' data-centric processes. With a secure collaboration suite like ECX, I have that same visibility of people-centric processes.

Biography

Mary De Frenchi, Vice President of Account Management.
Mary is responsible for sales and account management at BoardVantage. She has experience leading sales, account management, and marketing teams to success. Before joining BoardVantage, Mary was director of corporate marketing at Kansia (now part of KNOVA Software) and director of marketing at Interwoven. At Interwoven, she was responsible for large-scale initiatives to facilitate customer acquisition, retention, and growth. Earlier in her career, Mary was manager of channel programs at Genesys Telecommunications (now part of Alcatel), and held marketing management positions at Lockheed Martin. Mary holds a BS in business administration from San Diego State University.