Murphy is taking over my work day: my laptop has been turned into a brick by the very application designed to save it from becoming one, the Restore program.

My week started looking bright. I had been having problems with my laptop for a while, and I thought restoring it to factory defaults and starting over would fix a lot of issues. Conveniently, my laptop has just the application to do this, in a few clicks. So I make sure to back up all my data, get all my applications' install files and take note of my settings to make sure I could reinstall my work environment in a speedy manner.

As I arrived at work this morning, I got ready to restore my laptop. And Murphy took over.  

At first it felt like my day would be wasted. 

But wait! Some good can come out of this, I promise

It turns out that, like many failures we have to deal with, this laptop issue has a silver lining: My laptop's hard drive is now being entirely checked and […]

When testing a new product interface, we at Websystems have our ears out for comments that sound like "it's complicated" or "I can't figure out how to do this."

For us, when these comments are made repeatedly about a feature or a page in AceProject, it means we've made a mistake in our design. While we work hard on getting good, usable documentation for AceProject, our goal is that our users don't need to consult it when building their projects, updating their tasks, and going about their daily activities in the system. We think is filling out a time sheet should be self-evident.

Moreover, even if it's really difficult for the developer, he will work on making that feature simple and easy for the user once. The user, on the other hand, will use the feature many, many times. So it's more profitable to invest development time once, since it will save a lot of user time in the long run.

Last year, we were contact by our local university to participate in a business development mission to India. We would sponsor a graduate student of marketing, who would go to India on our behalf. We could set any business development goals we wanted. The mission was presented as a good way to learn about this huge market and how we could adapt AceProject to increase sales in India.

We figured this was a great opportunity. After all, India is poised to become one of the biggest economies on the planet. Its growth has been above 6% every year in the last decade. This is a market where we definitely want to be.

We would learn more about India. In fact, we thought, why not actually hire someone in India to do our customer service and sales? We knew one reason why our sales are not spectacular in Asia is the time zone difference.

Hence, we tasked our representative for the mission to not meet with a project management association, explore the feasibility of hiring someone in India […]

As a project manager, we are the team's leader. It's easy to feel that we should have all the answers. 

Leadership is not knowing everything.

Leadership is knowing where to find the knowledge and the answers. It's OK to say "I don't know." It's OK to ask for help from your team. After all, the project team is there to work together with the project manager.

As a leader, admitting that you don't know will make you look more human in the eyes of your team. It will also create an opening for someone on the team to show their value by answering the question.

Saying "I don't know" creates opportunity for creativity. If I don't know how to build an interface screen, it means I have to learn how to do it, to find inspiration from good examples of interface design. This is a great opportunity to work with my team and build something new and fresh.

Not knowing can be leveraged to your advantage.

The opinion one will form of a product will be different along the life of the product. Let's take the example of software.

When you do the first installation, everything is fresh and it feels like the system work perfectly. Once you upgrade (to a new version, for example), you will see the full measure of the product's quality. When upgrading to a new version, the process should be smooth. I am not talking here about an absence of bugs in the system. What I mean is that the system should be able to take the previous version's data (configuration, preferences, etc), and fit them in the new system.

If that process is not smooth – as happened with one of the tools we use at Websystems – you loose the trust of your customers, and they will prefer to stick with the version they have, even if the upgrade brings more usability. If the hassle of the upgrade is too much, there will be an impact on subsequent sales to existing customers.

Sometimes we are so bent on closing a sale that we are tempted to ignore the needs to the clients and push our product. We are focused on the short term (closing the sale), instead of the much more profitable long-term (having a happy client).

AceProject is a great project management system. Unfortunately, it does not contain any feature ever required by a project manager. For example: AceProject does not include any financial data like hourly rates and cost-tracking. While we do plan to include a cost-tracking module in the mid-term, the current version has no dollar signs in it.

Hence, when a prospective client emails us with a requirement to track costs, we have two choices: sell AceProject with a vague promise of implementing those features at some point, or tell the client upfront that AceProject does not fulfill his requirements for cost tracking. We prefer the second option.

Who knows what the future has in store for us? The fact that we plan to implement a feature today does not mean it will be implement […]

In project management, it's easy to confuse urgent with important. When something is urgent, it's usually assumed it must be important. No true. The fact that a specific report is needed in five minutes for the board meeting does not necessarily need it's important. Maybe the meeting can go on without the report.

Since the word urgent makes everyone run a little faster, its vulnerability to abuse – as we discussed already – requires more scrutiny. 

When dealing with an emergency, one should answer the following questions:

• Can the project work around it?
• Can the project be completed without it?

 If the task can be late and not affect other tasks immediately, then it is not urgent, even though it could be important. Also, is the project can live without that task being completed at all, it's not even important. However, if the task both stops the project dead in its tracks and is required for completion, then it's both urgent and important.

Better get right to it, then 🙂 

It's part of my job at Websystems to reply to email enquiries about AceProject. I get asked all sorts of questions, from pricing to features to integration with external systems (via CSV files). I enjoy replying to these emails because they give me a good idea of what our clients are looking for in a project management system. I try to reply to all email within one business day, usually faster. 

Every once in a while, I'll receive an email with the red question mark (!), or URGENT in the subject line. Obviously, I'll look at those emails first, in case there is an actual emergency with this client. Most of the time, there isn't. The sender simply thought she would get a faster response by labeling her message as urgent. She did succeed in grabbing my attention. However, a request for our pricing hardly qualifies as urgent, especially considering that the information is actually available on our web site. Often, once I've replied to those "urgent" emails, […]

Do you consider customer service a "cost of doing business?"

In your organization, is sales at the top of the food chain, and customer service at the bottom? 

How's that working for you?

The sales team will talk to your client up and until the initial sale is made. Afterwards, the most contacts your client will have will be with your customer service and technical support teams.  Once someone is your client, the 'cost' of getting more business from them is much smaller than the initial sale. Your customer service team can make this sale. In fact, since their position is one to help the client, it's even easier for them to upsell that client.

Your customer service and technical support should be treated as heroes. Their job is to save clients from their problems and to improve your company's image in their minds. If your customer service teams feel empowered and valuable to the organization, they will do a much better job winning back unhappy clients and upselling the happy ones.

Investing in customer service pays off […]