Picture it; sitting pool side with a cool fruity drink.  Your family is with you, the sun is out, and the temperature is 75 degrees.  It’s a beautiful picture, isn’t it?  But let’s look a little closer, as you look around the pool, half of the people are staring at their Blackberrys checking email and clicking away.  What happened to being able to unplug while on vacation!?

I recently took a trip and was able to let it all go, without stressing out that the world was ending back at the office by just doing a couple simple things:

Set proper expectations

Make sure that people understand when you will be out of the office and what types of things that they should contact you for.  It is almost as if we feel like we have to apologize for going on vacation these days, so we tell people to call us if they need anything.  The fact is if we have the right people working with us, the world should be in fine shape without our wisdom for a few days or a week  - so only emergencies should be sent in your direction.  You might even want to define what an emergency is in your organization so it’s not up to interpretation.

Set your out of office on voice mail and email

When you do this, don’t say you will be checking messages or have limited access.  Tell people that you will be unavailable.  It’s OK for you to go away for a few days, you should be able to enjoy it without having to check messages.

Use Outlook rules

Since it is hard for some of us to unplug and not check messages on our iPhones and Blackberrys even when we set good expectations, you can create yourself a rule in Outlook that only high priority emails will be sent to your phone.  Let the other stuff build up in a folder somewhere to be cleaned out when you return.  A friend recently offered a great thought: “Email is like wine, it ages quickly”.  Most of the stuff in the folder will be out of date before you ever see it.  You’ll be able to delete it when you return.  To setup a basic rule to move normal importance mail to a different folder than the inbox, do the following in Outlook 2007:

1. Click on Tool, Rules and Alerts
2. Click on New Rule and the rule wizard appears
3. Select “Check message when they arrive” under the “Start from a Blank Rule” section, Click Next
4. Check “Marked as Importance” and when it appears at the bottom, click the word “Importance” and select “Normal” from the dropdown.  Click Next.
5. Check “move it to a specified folder” and when it appears at the bottom, click on “specified folder”.  Select the folder you want to move mail to or create a new one for this purpose.  Click Next.
6. Continue through the wizard for any other exceptions you want and to name your rule.
7. Remember to turn the rule on when you go on vacation.

At the end of the day it all comes down to expectations.  If you set the expectation that you are available, people will treat you that way.  With these quick tips, you can also control your urge to check messages every time you see the number of “new” ones increase.

Let me start by saying that we strive to go beyond being “vendors” for our clients by combining our expertise and experience in technology with their expertise and experience in their industry and their organization.  That combined approach allows us to be a “technology partner”.  Be careful of the “technology vendor” who is more focused on their quotas and sales spiffs than they are on listening to your needs.  I don’t mean to get off topic here, but this is an important distinction to us!

As far as the relationship goes, there are some keys to it being successful and they all start with trust.  You need to trust that we are truly working on your behalf without some hidden agenda and we need to trust that you have given us all of the information necessary to make our engagement a successful one.  Nothing is worse than getting halfway through a project to find out that there were requirements that we hadn’t considered.  All we really want is to have the project go flawlessly so we can call it a success and you can go on improving your business.

Unfortunately, a flawless technology project really only exists in a utopia so I have written this short 5 point download about ways to mitigate those things that will go wrong.  I hope this helps you manage your future relationships with your technology partner.  If they don’t want to work in this framework, maybe they should be called a vendor.

I started my business in 1997 with the same basic mantra we use today; provide technology solutions to support business goals.  While the technology has changed, the attitude hasn’t.  Do what we need to do to satisfy the customer and bill them for an honest amount of time to do it.  Well as we have grown that has become more difficult.  More staff, more clients and more personalities has caused us to have to put more procedures in place to make sure that everyone is treated fairly and we still have the possibility of making a (small) profit in the end.

Now in comes the Massachusetts data security law and we have another entire set of issues for not only us but all of our clients.  We have checklists for them to follow so they are not liable for potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.  Plus we need to have an acceptable use policy (AUP) , a written information security policy (WISP) and now they are talking about PCI compliance because we come in the vicinity of credit cards numbers!  What ever happened to “my word is my bond”?  I would so rather spend time helping people figure out what makes an effective website, how to handle their technology planning and budgeting, or how to determine the ROI of installing a network server.

No question that running a business in today’s high tech/high risk environment is different than pre-Y2K but I never thought I’d spend more time reviewing internal policies than getting out and helping clients with their businesses.  At least we get the opportunity to help our clients create some of these policies too!

Without a doubt, the answer to the above question is THE BUSINESS!  But it’s amazing how often we forget this when looking at new technology to implement in a business.  Far too often, a cool new technology noticed by a business owner or the desire of their IT company to play with a new technology drives the decision for an implementation.  While there may be merits of the technology, the decision to affect a business’s production environment should be driven by a business need.  For example, we have clients come to us all the time saying something like, “Shouldn’t we be upgrading to Windows 7?”.  Our reply is usually, “Why?  Do you feel that one of the new features can help with a business problem you are having?”  While the answer is sometimes yes, most often it is because they have a friend who got it or saw a good ad on TV.

As a technology partner for our clients, we use the mantra that business needs should always drive technology implementations, not vice versa.  To help our clients make the best use of their technology investments we will work to understand their business so we can help them make informed decisions.  Some of the things we want to determine are:

• Is there a business problem you are having that is driving this?
• Have you considered all of the costs of this implementation?
• How will this affect your interactions with your clients?

By working in this fashion, we believe it build good long term relationships as we are not simply looking to book every billable project we can get our hands on.  In the long run it is a win/win.

We have compiled a more thorough list of the things we evaluate when helping a client determine if a new technology is right for them.  Download our “10 Reality Check Items to Consider in any Technology Implementation“.

Being in a service business providing computer support and web development, our product is our people’s time.  As our technical staff work on many projects and clients within a week, time planning for their weekly schedule is critical to ensure the best possible use of their time as well as the proper availability for emergencies that crop up.  To manage that in our world, we have implemented a categorization process for the types of work we perform and track what percentage of our time goes into each type.

To begin, we examined the work we did over a 12 month period and determined that the work was either recurring scheduled, planned projects, or “pop-up” work that occurs during the week that we didn’t know about ahead of time but had to handle.   I’ll refer to those types as Scheduled, Project, and Pop-up for the rest of this article.

As expected, the scheduled work we had a pretty good handle on and could calculate how much of our week would be dedicated to that.  The piece we had the least control of was the Pop-up work as these types of requests would come from our clients as they had issues or needs that couldn’t wait until their next scheduled visit.  While that was unexpected work, we found that on a week to week basis, the percentage of our time that this took was fairly regular.  So now we had two of the three variables somewhat accurately calculated.  But what about the project work?

In a client oriented network support and web development business, it is unrealistic to expect that your technical people will be 100% billable unless that are working on long term projects or placed full time at a client.  We use 80% as a target for our people which helps to account for vacations, personal time, internal meetings and training.  With that target, we need to figure out how much Project work we need to fill the gaps between the predictable Scheduled work and the peaks and valleys of the Pop-up work to hit our billable goals.

In planning the workload properly throughout the week, we have increased productivity of the individual engineer’s and developer’s as well as managed the workload to avoid missing SLAs or burning out our staff.
Additionally, proper management of the different work types has led to higher billable ratios and happier workers.  All around, it has been a win-win.