I’ve been struggling with whether or not to write a post on culture. I usually try to make my posts be positive and forward looking. And yet, I can’t write an article on culture without first doing a small rant on what I consider the dark side of culture. The sometimes use of culture to exclude people that don’t “fit”. Even when they might have relevant skills and can add value. As a woman in technology, and now an older woman in technology, on the surface I don’t always look like I “fit”. Though, I guess I’ve been lucky. The teams and environments that I have worked in have been diverse, just by virtue of me being on them. And now, I’m at a point and level in my career, where I can positively impact a culture, not just “fit” into one.
Is your Sales Admin also a Salesforce Admin?
All too often, when a company uses a tool, such as Salesforce, the education and responsibility for administrating the tool is kept with to the IT people in the company. While the front-line super-users, the functional administration staff, tend to be overlooked as either not needing training or are restricted from doing things.
Do you truly understand what it means to be Agile?
The Agile Manifesto was published more than a decade ago in 2001. Since then, the industry has sometimes morphed the message of what it means to be Agile. Sometimes confusing or merging it with Lean development, Scrum and Kanban manufacturing (which all add great things to the mix). Though with any real truism, the wisdom in it still rings through today.
Delighting the Customer should always be the higher goal between corporate Silos
Problems occur in the gaps between people. Often issues occur between individual people, teams and silos, companies and customers because of miss understood lines of responsibility and unmet expectations. How often have we all heard the expression that a problem arose because “things fell through the cracks” He then went on to explain that the ideal solution to these problems is not reorganization or rewriting of agreements, but in finding the higher goal that the separate sides would benefit from, and forge a joint resolve to accomplish that goal.
Build a thriving Partner Ecosystem to reach Enterprise SaaS customers
To build the Partner ecosystem you need to start somewhere. As the technology vendor, your responsibility will be to understand how you can benefit partners and attract them. Treat them as customers and gateways to your customers – and understand the mutual value proposition that is the basis of the relationship. Focus on that, and the ecosystem will grow.
Agile – Bringing down the cost of change
For this post, I’d like to step back a moment. Instead of looking at the why’s and how’s of the methodology, I would like to instead consider one of the key benefits that Agile brings to both us as product creators and to our customers. What you might think of as the “Value” with a capital “V” of Agile. This is that it brings down the cost of change.
