Features Training vs User Training On Software - They Are Not The Same

Let me guess, you just got new software in your agency – to manage your agency. Everything from job forms, SOW, and briefs to project management, collaboration, accounting and billing .You were trained in a two- to five-day session and now you’re LIVE!

Oh, for cripes sakes. More software? Please. Shoot. Me. Now.

Do you remember anything? Was there so much thrown at you that, now that it’s up and running, you don’t even know where to start with that great Agency Management and Productivity Solution?

Maybe you were trained on all the features, but not how you actually should use the software specifically for your workflow.

Way back when, there was someone in your agency who decided it was time to get out of email, Excel, Google Docs, Basecamp, a free timesheet app, and whatever accounting program you were using – and use one comprehensive program – that is more efficient by gathering everything in one database.

But to make the software really work for you, it has to be customized to your needs, and training absolutely must be tailored to your particular workflow.

That’s how training sticks. It needs to be relevant to your needs, the way you do things, and addresses the pain you endured.

In other words, it has to fix stuff. Make life at work better.

Every agency is slightly different, in structure, roles and responsibilities, culture and . . . compliance.

Merely buying, installing, getting an on-site (or online) overview (aka training) of everything the software does is fine – but that brief approach is the path to workarounds, maintaining old systems (just in case), low adoption and worse, software implementation failure.

Change isn’t easy. Giving up old ways is hard if the shiny new thing doesn’t relate in any way to the way you work.

Your workflow may be entirely screwed up, or non-existent – then you need a structured solution to get you on track. But that doesn’t happen via plug ’n play.

The best way to ensure success is to clearly define problems, review roles and responsibilities, map out your current workflow, review current documents, then find a solution that will work for your agency. Some tools are replacements, and some introduce new processes. It’s all designed to get you on track and make you more profitable. At the very least, you should emerge from training with a real sense of which tools to use, and how to use those tools for your specific workflow.

Need help? Contact me. The first call is free.

Quit Your Damn Lying

I can’t even believe I’m saying this. Quit your damn lying. You know who you are – the driven, talented creatives and strategists who offer up to a client – “sure, we'll get that to you today” – and you haven’t checked to see if there is anyone available to get that revision done, and it’s just a quick fix anyway, and you’ll just go to the designer and sit over their shoulder while they ‘knock it out.’

For only $25.95 you can get this shirt from Zazzle to wear to client meetings. 

Or perhaps you go into a client meeting with absolutely no idea how much that awesome creative will cost to produce and say, “sure, we can do that for ten-dollars apiece” – because you’re too arrogant to accept the fact that the client had a ten-dollars-apiece budget, but they should never do anything that cheap because it – in your opinion – doesn’t fit the “brand.” Then you get to do it all over again, and you wasted a big chunk of time chasing your dream to get in CA.

Give me a break. It makes everyone look like idiots. You are not a hero for giving your client something on a RUSH, especially when they didn’t even ask for it right away. You are certainly not a hero for presenting something to a client they cannot – or will not – pay for.

Get the client excited for amazing and fast, then give them mediocrity.

I have seen this happen repeatedly in agencies and marketing departments. There is no excuse for lying… except for the fact that the individuals who lie have no spine, no ability to be creative on a budget, no idea how to work with a client, do not care about the agency as a business, and actually think they know better than everyone else.

Those people are not talented, driven, creative or strategic.

Those people cost your agency tons – in time, money and reputation.

Those people have tiny. little. balls.

The Best Place To Work - Or Is It?

I answered a post in a LinkedIn group about a Fast Company article about companies finally getting into the the Best Places To Work list. 

I was the first to post, and I admit, I'm jaded. So this was my response. (please note that I used Great instead of Best - my bad. I followed with another post to correct it. But it all means the same thing. Or perhaps Great isn't as good as Best. You decide.) 

Here's the post: 

Oh my, I'm going to sound like a kill-joy, but I have to go with what I have experienced... 

I truly believe in a great place to work. I have worked in great firms, and then I worked in firms listed as “great places to work.” The two are not the same.

There is a significant leap made by the author equating a rise in stock price of a firm to that firm being “a great place to work.” There’s correlation but not necessarily causation.

I have no doubt that a great place to work does in fact nurture employees who then turn out amazing products and services. But what is the definition of “a great place to work”?

It can be an awesome brand with high visibility and employees are driven to innovate. The leaders of those companies can be relentless in their pursuit of perfection. Excellent ideas, lead the marketplace, cool place to work, awesome on the resume – and can lead to serious burnout.

Something that isn’t mentioned at all is the process for becoming “a great place to work.” I do take issue with that. It is documentation driven by management and/or the HR department, and doesn’t always completely reflect the sentiments of the majority of employees. I have worked in firms that have been “great places to work” at the state and the Fortune 500 arenas. I witnessed the process of documentation. Therefore I am a skeptic of the accolades. It does give a lift to the firm, it also puts them on notice when they drop in rank – or off the list.

It takes a lot of resources to do the paperwork to get on the list, and a lot of great companies simply choose to put those resources into their employees directly.

So for every firm on the Fortune 500, there are hundreds more that are even better. I say, leave a bad firm – if you can, and if the place you’re currently working in is good, help to make it great. 

So have you worked in a Great or Best place? Was it on the Fortune 500© list? Perhaps your local Business Journal?

Thesaurus dot Com Got Dumbed Down

Just a disclaimer before you read on: although I call myself a writer, I’m not actually a writer. I’m a blogger. Which is a way for me to publish my guidance and opinion to a limited audience who may, someday, become a vast audience. But since blogging is a form of writing, I guess I do, in fact, write. And occasionally, I need assistance from thesaurus.com.

Yeah, I know, that’s where losers turn to when they don’t have an expansive vocabulary. But I work in advertising, so unless you work in digital advertising, where obfuscation is the name of the game (and they make up their words anyway), our vocabulary is limited. Because advertising is now all about Big Data and Infographics.

Headline schmedline.

Anyway, this is about going to thesaurus.com today to get a different word for ‘dichotomy’. And since I was out really late last night, I couldn’t come up with a good alternative. Hence my visit to that site.

Holy cow, I found that they’ve changed it up (Okay, my fault, it has been a month since I blogged and I’m now redeeming myself). And I don’t like the change. Who the heck wants to do all this visual tuning-in nonsense to get a word? So it starts out with Synonyms for Dummies and you can ramp it up to Full Literacy?

I was so taken aback that I didn’t realize at the top there was the “show me the old Thesaurus.com” link.

Instead, I did what any early adopter would do. I clicked on the Tell us what you think! link.

Guess what I clicked? Correct – thumbs-down. I took the survey (which for the record was more than a minute), and the last item was an open-ended “Tell us your thoughts on our new site”. So I did.

Here it is.

I guess this is the wave of the 'future' to make everything graphical. But when you've spent at least (we'd hope) 12 years in school, then another 4 or more, we're all pretty used to using words. So I'd think that for the next 20 years or so, we should have the 'old' thesaurus. Perhaps the generation that is now being created (I'm sure that's still going on and will continue long beyond the many iterations of thesaurus.com) that pictures will serve them just fine. Because they won't write or speak in full sentences anyway. And hieroglyphs will come back in style and be all the rage. Yep. I should be super old by then and as they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Then thesaurus.com can become a one-page site. With a picture or two. Awesome. I'm getting off track here, but I think you guys are probably pretty smart, since you still have all the words in there *somewhere* and know that I like words. Because I write. And I like to write. But sometimes when I've used a word seventeen times in my blog, and I'm ready to post and I realize, "oh, crap! I need to beef-up my vocabulary”, so I go to thesaurus.com and I get completely usable, awesome alternatives to my drab speech patterns. So I'd like to say thank you in advance for returning to - or perhaps giving me an alternative to - this really stupid idea to give me a graph of my word rather than a list of words. Okay. I'm done. I'm sure you'll take my advice. Now go fix it. Again, thanks.

And it only gets better. So I put dumbed down into thesaurus.com. Check it out.

Then clicked on dictionary.com.

I rest my case.

The Dichotomy of Urban Revitalization

I have been woefully absent from my blog about getting your agency organized. So I’ll get right on that – tomorrow.

Today is Sunday, so I’m writing about something else. Weekends are good for My Opinions, and since I live in Las Vegas, I’ll write about My Opinion On Something Happening In Las Vegas.

I’m all about revitalizing the core of our city. I miss having what I had ‘back home’ in Portland (Oregon). A Vibrant City. With shops, restaurants, offices, awesome mass transit, art galleries, cool-hip-bars, brew-pubs, live music (where bands get paid – but that’s for a different post), and a feeling that, “yeah, this is a cool place to live and work.”

Portland was in a sad place in the late sixties/early seventies. Then, one day, the restrictions of urban growth boundaries pushed the revitalization of the core. Portland also had to take into consideration, and work with the displacement of the businesses and residents who couldn’t pay a few-hundred-grand for a place to live and work.

It is inclusiveness that I’m looking for. Revitalization shouldn’t be an endeavor to create an exclusive area reserved for only those who are looking to sanitize first, then layer on that patina of edgy-hip urban decay and call it done. I hope this isn’t where the Downtown Project is headed.

Where am I going with this? Well that link above is to an article in the Las Vegas Review Journal that had the good sense to put the story on the front page of the Sports Section of the Sunday Edition.

You see, there are things that happen when revitalization takes place. Some of the good stuff goes away, because it doesn’t fit in. Or maybe the clientele isn’t exactly the market you’re going for. I’m talking about North Las Vegas Center Ring Boxing which has been at 1020 Fremont Street for the past three years.

I read the story and was inspired. And exasperated. The owner of the facility has been helping kids – all kinds of kids – with back-stories most of us can’t imagine, and getting them back on track. Yeah boxing. A place to go, organized, supervised and a big dose of mentoring for these kids in need. That mentor, who is also the owner, is Jose Banales. He is grateful the Downtown Project has allowed him to stay in the building – which is slated for their development – but time is running out.

Here’s is the part of the article that really gets my goat:
“His [Banale’s] building is among those targeted by the Downtown Project, a revitalization plan that has allocated $350 million to the vision of “empowering people to follow their passions to create a vibrant, connected urban core.”

Well said. Now tell me where a facility that helps kids isn’t part of a “vibrant, connected urban core.”

I’m not a hater of the Downtown Project at all. This city is in dire need of a ‘city’. I love their mission. A real city needs to include the people who make a difference and make it a community.

So help me understand how of this fits together.

Or better yet, contact Jose Banales and donate, help him get a grant, write a letter to the city to designate his facility as a Youth Center rather than a Gym (evidently this makes a whole lot of difference when getting funding); or maybe let the folks at the Downtown Project know that a vibrant urban core includes kids who have a place to go (and people who care) that will change their lives.

Contact Jose Banales at: banalesjoe@yahoo.com or 702-335-0571. Or go to their website: www.nlvceterringboxing.com

Please note that I am referencing an article in the Sunday, August 04, 2013 edition of the Las Vegas Review Journal written by Ed Graney. I must make sure I give credit to the RJ because they are sticklers for these things!

You’re Gonna Poke Your Eye Out!

You’ll break your neck! You’ll wind up crying! Someone’s Gonna Get Hurt! You heard them all. If you have kids, you’ve probably said something like that.

 The scene of the crime is also the scene of rehab.

When it happens at work, we just laugh it off and go back to work.

It happened to me, and didn’t involve getting hurt, losing an eye or breaking my neck.

During a morning activity in the office, there was a bit of a ball-toss game that was fairly controlled. But boys, being who they are, really got into the game. Then the Diet Coke that is a regular fixture on my desk became a victim. Then my Blackberry became a victim.

In all the scrambling to get the ball, my beloved Diet Coke – which was full – became up-ended over my Blackberry. My glasses sitting in a case got doused, but they are fine. Thank you.

So the rush to blot up the soda was on, as well as getting the battery out of my phone before it fried.

After cleanup and a Google search to find the best way to dry out a phone, the pieces are sitting nicely on my desk.

Thanks to Ben for the inspiring game; who was also kind enough to use his dry phone to immortalize the rehab.

How can I hold it against him when he has introduced me to the best tacos in Vegas? 

Thank God he didn’t bring in the John Deere today.

DNR - Do Not Resuscitate

This term was recently used by a wonderful and harried colleague in an agency. She meant to say NDA.

We all know what an NDA is – Non-disclosure Agreement.

But given the amount of paperwork required to get things done in some agencies, I think she was right. DNR.

How many bureaucracies do you have built into your system? Are there dozens of unnecessary steps, paperwork and processes?

If there's more than a step or maybe two, it’s usually because someone somewhere made a mistake. Something was overlooked. Someone skipped a very important step. And it cost your agency in time, money, relationship with your client, or reputation.

So little by little you add requirements, forms, approvals; send memos and this grows to layers of paperwork and eventually ultimatums.

All these little things add up to one big bureaucracy where you just can’t get anything done. On time. Without extraordinary support of administrative staff.

It’s time to get rid of that crap because we can’t resuscitate a bad system.

I highly recommend a DNR for bureaucracies.

An NDA should be simple. Don’t disclose our valuable info or we will sue you.

Now go forth and let bureaucracies die!