Journyx Project Management Blog

Think downsizing will solve your company’s financial woes? Before getting out the ax, take a look at what experts and researchers have discovered about the unexpected consequences of layoffs. These harsh realities may make you think twice:

1. Significant indirect costs often wipe out the direct savings of layoffs.

While layoffs may seem like a good way to cut costs in the short-term, the direct and indirect costs of downsizing can paralyze your company’s long-term revenue-generating streams. “The books look great for two or three quarters, and then things don’t get done,” says Jonathan Phillips, managing director of Houston-based executive search firm Magellan International.

The direct costs of layoffs from outplacement services and severance pay can add up initially, but indirect costs — like losing experienced sales and marketing employees who have strong relationships with clients — can cause lasting damage to a business. Phillips saw this phenomenon first-hand when he worked in various management roles at Shell in the late 1980s. “They let a lot of senior executives go, mostly out of sales and marketing, which they thought was a marginal activity until their clients didn’t want to buy from them anymore.”

Read the other reasons at BNET.com, and for a better alternative to layoffs, download the PDF of Journyx CEO Curt Finch’s PM World Today article on cutting costs the smart way.

It’s been a tumultuous year, and IT professionals have not been excluded from the heart-stopping excitement. What has surprised me immensely in the past month, however, is a sudden shift to pessimism. People’s concerns about the companies they work for are melding with worries about 401(k) performance and mortgages, all amplified by the sense that the world is falling apart. “We’re all freaking doomed!” has become the cry of the day.

How much of this worry is justified?

First things first. A lot of companies are in trouble. They’ve been having funding difficulties, and a second wave of budget cuts is starting to build. More major names than you might suspect have been on the brink of not making payroll as commercial credit has dried up. Contractors are being laid off as projects are shelved, and permanent staffers are worried that they’ll be next. For some, that’s true — and finding a new job won’t be as easy as it might have been a year ago.

But a fair number of companies aren’t in trouble. That old saying about a rising tide lifting all boats seems to have an asymmetrical corollary: An ebbing tide drops each boat individually. If you work for a company whose markets and operating cash requirements are sound, your job is probably safe. One less worry.

Second, if you’re an IT manager, pay attention to what’s happening with your employees. They’re probably stressed out about the same things you are: credit card balances, investment performance, mortgage payments and real estate values.

One way to handle stress is to begin sorting out your work ahead of cutbacks. Pull back from the 20 or more projects that your area has been working on and focus on just a few, the ones that will result in cost savings or potential revenue. That’s a good way to hold onto funding.

Read the rest at ComputerWorld.

Okay, maybe your employees don’t have nightmares about tracking their time. Perhaps they don’t wake up in a cold sweat, clutching the pillow and moaning, “I can’t remember what I did on Monday at 2:30. I’m sorry! No, don’t demote me!” And yet, it is probably safe to assume that they don’t look forward to timesheet submissions with a twinkle in their eye either. Over the years, time tracking has come to be viewed as a necessary evil that everyone loves to hate.

Who can blame them, really? Some employees think that being asked to fill out a timesheet means that their boss doesn’t consider them trustworthy. They might worry that they are being viewed as unprofitable and on their way to a layoff. They also might fear that a manager is going to make decisions on promotions and bonuses based on hours spent, which is really no way to effectively gauge productivity.

The fact remains, however, that in such a competitive business climate, you simply cannot run a project-oriented organization without time accounting. If you don’t bill accurately or know which projects are profitable, you are bound to fail. The question then becomes, how do I get my employees to embrace time tracking without the groans and eye-rolling?

There are several ways to do this. First of all, clearly explaining how time tracking boosts your organization can be helpful. Hopefully your employees care deeply about the success of your organization, so letting them know that accurate time accounting saves time and money while propelling your business forward should help. You might also explain that without time tracking, employees can become subject to unnecessary overtime and stressful projects with blown schedules or budgets. Beyond that, you might incentivize your staff with bonuses tied directly to timely time reporting. Whichever path you take, be sure to let them know what their value is - that the company cannot succeed without them and their efforts. Feeling valued is often the best kind of motivation.

- April Boland, Journyx Communications Coordinator

As if the “R” word wasn’t bad enough, the “D” word is apparantly being discussed at more than a mere whisper.

A new poll put out by CNN found that 60% of the American public thinks it’s likely we’re heading into a depression; not a recession, but depression. And I don’t mean the kind that can be eased by Prozac.

At the same time, the Small Business Association (SBA) says small business loans have dropped 30% this fiscal year (which just ended on September 30) from a year ago.

Get Smart

Now that I’ve depressed the H-E-double hockey sticks out of you; here’s where technology comes in to help tighten the budget for a bumpy ride. Look for technologies that shave money off the bottomline:

-Software as a Service
-Cloud Computing
-Off-site data storage
-Thin clients

Read more at the Inc. Technology Blog.

Think volatility is confined to the stock market? Of course you don’t — that wild ride is now the defining theme of business for the foreseeable future. That means all bets are off when it comes to IT budgets, IT projects and how much cooperation IT will get from the rest of the business.

Budgets? You’ve been through this before. You knew that charming piece of fiction approved by upper management wasn’t likely to survive the year without cuts. Still, you were optimistic. And hey, that budget lasted all of two weeks into the new fiscal year.

But now you’ll be cutting, and cutting, and cutting some more — just like the rest of the business.

As budgets go, so go projects. Each of your projects has a business sponsor, right? But now, any project’s sponsor could disappear at a moment’s notice. That might mean the sponsoring executive had to cut his own budget, and the project he supported no longer fits into his plans. Or the business sponsor could just disappear because he has bailed out or been laid off.

An empty office means no business sponsor — and that means no projects.

And when it comes to cooperation, forget it. Everyone on the business side will hunker down, run lean and hope they just get squeezed, not strangled. The last thing they’ll think about is IT projects.

Maybe that sounds tempting for IT, too. But don’t go there.

Remember, IT isn’t like sales or manufacturing, where results show up in easy-to-grasp numbers. Even a hunkered-down sales force brings in some orders, and a lean-running plant produces some widgets. They still justify their scaled-back budgets.

But if IT really pulls back from projects, it looks like we’ve stopped doing anything. We haven’t, of course; we’re still performing all those pesky operational things. But networks, servers, phones and applications that keep running — well, that’s just background noise to users. Sure, they depend on them. But they don’t notice them.

Read on at ComputerWorld.

What are you afraid of? Spiders (Arachnophobia)? Snakes (Ophidiophobia)? Chickens (Alektorophobia)? David Bowie (Heterochromiaphobia)?

Ok, I made that last one up. But, it turns out that there are a few folks out there on the internet who confess to being afraid of the Thin White Duke after all. Actually, it seems that most these folks were freaked out by Bowie’s role in Labyrinth more than anything else. Still, once he gets under your skin, it’s hard to shake that off.

Anyway, I digress. I’m not actually here to discuss David Bowie (though, really, that might be more interesting than what you’re about to read). Nope, I’m here to talk about fear as it relates to - you guessed it - time tracking. There doesn’t seem to be an official phobia for that one ( I could make it up, but the Bowie thing kind of took all of my imagination for the day), so let’s look at it as a variant of Tyrannophobia, the fear of tyrants. You could approach it from a Teleophobia angle (the fear of definite plans - I have that, mildly) or Hypegiaphobia (the fear of responsibility - I’m guilty there, too). But in our vast experience here at Journyx it really does seem that most folks are at least disinclined - if not outright afraid - to track their time because they’re just not sure how the folks above them (Tyrants! One and all!) are going to use that data.

It’s a natural fear that those “in charge” are just making you track your time so that they can fire you, or at least yell at you for researching David Bowie when you’re supposed to be writing a blog post. This is called Poinephobia, the fear of punishment. And in times like these, it’s certainly reasonable to assume that if you’re goofing off too much on the clock that you will, in fact, have that held against you. But the other side of the coin, and the one that Journyx preaches and cares about, is that reporting your time - honestly and accurately - actually helps you keep your job.

There are a couple of real points behind this, as opposed to just putting faith in your boss (Tyrant!). The biggest part of this is that if you and your brothers- and sisters-in-arms are all reporting time, the tyrants, er, bosses, can actually see which projects are profitable and which aren’t. Which means that they can assign you to work on the profitable portions of your business - the ones that are keeping you all afloat while the economy seems prone to Acrophobia, the fear of heights. Working on the profitable projects actually goes a long way to shield you from layoffs. Because even the most Sophophobic tyrant, er, boss, has to have figured out that cutting back on employees dedicated to profitable tasks is, well, stupid.

Perhaps the biggest fear we all have right now is Ereuthophobia - the fear of the color red, as in red ink. To avoid that particular hue, let’s put aside any lingering Ergophobia, roll up our sleeves, and let the tyrants know just what we’re doing for them. Time-tracking is a great way to communicate just that.

- Born on a Friday the 13th, Journyx Director of Web Content Andrew Trent is blissfully free of the paralyzing effects of Triskaidekaphobia.

All phobia information courtesy of phobialist.com.

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, how many are statistics worth, I wonder? I have some numbers this week that speak volumes as to why so many companies have green IT on the brain — or why they should.

These figures come from management consultancy McKinsey and Company, part of a report titled “Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency,” issued at the recent Uptime Institute’s Green Computing Symposium. If someone at your company is pooh-poohing the notion of even investigating sustainable IT opportunities, some of these numbers might give them pause to reconsider.

$11.5 billion - The total estimated energy bill for datacenters come 2010, up from $8.6 billion in 2007. Driving that figure: The installed server base is expected to grow by 16 percent to as many as 43 million machines worldwide; energy consumption per server is increasing by 9 percent; and energy prices have risen by an average of 4 percent, according to McKinsey. That, of course, means that if you’re feeling some pain now from high energy prices or insufficient power, it’s going to get worse if you don’t make some changes.

25 percent - The amount of the IT budget at a typical company that goes toward datacenter costs. Indeed, the datacenter is expensive to operate, with 17 percent of the costs going to hardware and storage and another 8 percent going toward the facilities that support those machines. Of course, the report notes that not all the facilities costs associated with maintaining your IT infrastructure appear in the IT budget, so it’s conceivable no one at your company is really aware of how much it costs to run, say, a midtier server each year.

You can read more at InfoWorld, and then feel free to check out Journyx CEO Curt Finch’s previous ComputerWorld article on why Software-as-a-Service is a great alternative to shouldering these IT burdens yourself.

Why is it that some groups of people perform at a phenomenal level and are always on the winner’s stand, while other groups always struggle to make it? The answer lies in how people perform their team roles. When you allocate the right team role to the right team player, and ensure that your players are flexible enough to cover all the roles that the team needs, then winning becomes inevitable.

Here are the 9 key team roles that all successful teams need.

1. The Co-ordinator. Research has shown that all great teams need someone whose main job is to co-ordinate all the team’s activities. This person may or may not be the official team leader. Whether they are or not, they are like the team’s compass, a quiet point in the middle of activity. People gravitate towards the co-ordinator to get their bearings and re-fuel.

2. The Go-fer. The team “go-fer” is the person who happily “goes for this” and “goes for that”. He or she is perfectly happy to do all the nitty-gritty jobs that nobody else wants to do and without which things would soon break down. Always highly energetic, the Go-fer doesn’t mind what they have to do. They even enjoy botched jobs just for the pleasure of re-doing them!

Find out about the other roles at PROJECTmagazine.

We were sitting around in one of our super exciting Journyx meetings - you know, the ones with the margarita machine - when someone shared a random trivia question: Where does the expression ‘Mind your P’s and Q’s’ come from? He asked each of us to guess the answer. When it was my turn, I said, “I don’t know.”
“Come on, just guess. Anything that comes to mind.”
“Um… I really don’t know.”
“You’re not even going to try to guess?”
Someone else stepped in and summed me up quite accurately, saying, “She doesn’t like to be wrong.”

Until he said that, I never realized just how true it was. I do have a fear of getting it wrong. Whether it’s missing the mark on a project or saying the wrong thing, no one wants to screw up, right? On the surface, this seems like a good quality, one that will drive you towards perfectionism. Yet the flip side is quite unappealing. Fear of making mistakes often prevents people from taking risks with great rewards. We play it safe so we don’t lose face. But is that really the best thing for us, or for our companies?

Risk-taking is how most successful people get to where they are. It is the only way to combat the status quo and go from the proverbial ‘good’ to ‘great.’ Remind yourself of this the next time you are afraid of change or of failure. Fear will not get you very far.

- April Boland, Journyx Communications Coordinator

Could the current economic downturn be the nudge that pushes software-as-a-service (SaaS) into the mainstream? Some small business owners and software vendors think so.

With major economic indicators dropping and anxieties rising, business owners are looking for ways to cut back on spending, including what they fork over for computers, software, and IT services.

That new-found fiscal conservatism plays nicely into the strengths of SaaS products that are delivered over the Web on a pay-as-you-go, on-demand basis. “The appeal of SaaS is that you get 80 percent of the functionality for maybe 10 percent of the lifecycle cost. How can you argue with that?” says Andrew Hyde, CFO at Speakeasy, a Seattle provider of Internet phone and data services.

Small businesses are moving toward SaaS, says Ray Boggs, an analyst at IDC, the technology market researcher. “It’s a very real minority,” Boggs says. Historically, hardware accounted for a bigger chunk of small companies’ IT spending, but over time that’s switching to software and services, and SaaS is playing into that, Boggs says. Small business owners that Bogg surveyed for a March 2008 IDC report on SaaS aren’t particularly keen on moving applications “into the cloud,” but they are interested in having business functions handled remotely, he says. “It’s almost like a different person was answering the survey,” he says.

Read more at Inc. Technology.