The Importance of Strategy

Why do we do anything? Generally we've got an end result in mind. It's pretty unusual to do something just for the sake of it, right? Well, that's what I thought before I got here!

The organisation I work for have some really talented individuals. They're passionate about their raison d'etre and they know what they're doing once they get out there into the field. So why am I here? Well, let's just say that planning isn't exactly their speciality!

I was quite shocked at first, but after thinking about it, I can understand how they've gotten to this situation. The organisation is young – 10 years old. They've built themselves up fairly quickly to be running a number of projects at the same time, spread across the state of Jharkhand. As with most organisations, in their early days they will not have been picky about projects – in fact it has probably been a bit of “take whatever you can get”.

Now, some people are probably questioning that approach already. Well, in the UK I'd agree, it can be a dangerous tactic and lead to your organisation taking a direction you don't want. However, in India I can completely understand it. These people left relatively high-paid jobs to start an NGO, they had families and the organisation was created by a group of friends – none of them could afford it to fail. If funding was available, that equated to dinner on the table – not something to be turned down.

Today, it's a different story. The organisation is generally well-funded, certainly compared to its peers. Which leads me (in a rambling way) to my point. Strategy. They don't have one. They're still grabbing at any potential funding they hear about, with little regard to whether it really fits with what they want.

Case in point. An industrial company is running a project locally. They want to do their CSR bit and put out an EOI for bids on a project to promote literacy in the area. Now they want to cut the budget by 80% and the aim is now to enable people to sign their name, not be able to read/write. My opinion – this is a worthless exercise, it's a waste of our time and won't achieve anything sustainable or useful. It's now a small amount of funding and doesn't fit into any sort of long-term strategy for Srijan. In fact, it would probably harm our “brand” to be associated with this project. I'm recommending against the project.

This thought never occurred to them. They were looking at how they could cut costs to meet the new budget. 100% coverage was dropping to 40%. The “educators” were being replaced with cheaper alternatives. Teaching people how to read was being replaced with giving them cards with their name on to learn to copy. My organisation were compromising their principles simply to get some funding that they probably didn't even need.

This is the danger of not having a strategy. You lose track of what you're aiming to do. When you're putting together a proposal you need to ask yourself “does this fit to my strategy?” - if the answer isn't a resounding “Yes!” then this project probably isn't the right thing for your organisation.

Twitter and Trotsky (or why Stalin would have hated the Internet....)

I'm reading a book at the moment that I've been planning to read for a long time – The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. I don't think I even realised what it was about, but it's just one that I've seen in the shops again and again and thought that I'd enjoy. So when I got some Amazon vouchers for the Kindle, it seemed like an obvious choice!

Anyway, it's a good book so far (get it from Amazon here if you're interested!), documenting the journals of a young boy growing up in Mexico who, through a series of events, ends up working for the group of people who shelter Trotsky in the late 1930's after he is expelled from the Soviet Union.

I studied history at GCSE and A-Level, but the Russian history that we examined tended to look more at Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev than Trotsky. I think there was a reference to him moving to Mexico for a while, before he's ultimately murdered (with a pick-axe if my memory serves me). Obviously I haven't reached that bit in The Lacuna yet ;-)

But what does this have to do with Twitter, I hear you ask? Well, in the section of the story I've just been reading, Trotsky is put on trial in Mexico. Up until this point, the dictatorship in Moscow has been able to fabricate charges and falsely accuse Trotsky of all kinds of crimes, most of them blatantly false (e.g. de-railing trains when he wasn't even in the country). It made me think – could that happen now?

We've just seen the power of Twitter with the Egyptian protests. Suppression of the press may still be possible, but it's now incredibly hard to a create a total blanket on information getting out of a country. Even turning off the Internet didn't help the Egyptian authorities. I firmly believe that this can only be a positive thing.

Here's a statistic for you - In India, 11% of people do not have an indoor toilet, but over 85% have access to a mobile phone. I imagine that figure is pretty representative of a number of other developing countries too – I remember even 5 years ago in Ghana this was the case. This prevalence of access to communications makes it so much easier to get information out of and around a country. All of which makes the suppression of “the press” so much harder. You can't just pay off a couple of people now – someone, somewhere, will call you out on it.

Zola (not the former Chelsea and Italy footballer...) “said that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.” - The Lacuna

I don't think in today's age of information freedom that this is anywhere near as true. Wikileaks, twitter, information finds a way to get out into the public domain and once it is there, no-one can stop it.

That can only be a good thing. Unless you're someone like Stalin....

Social Reward Scheme for Check-Ins

Ok, first of all, a hat-tip to Elle, who's original blog post on this got me thinking....

So, we have Facebook Places, which is about to get pretty huge I should imagine. In America they also have FourSquare and GoWalla. All of which allow you to check into venues. What's beginning to happen now is that organisations are able to offer deals based on your check-ins. Lovely.

But what if I want to be a good citizen – am I allowed to exchange this? This “gift” for want of a better word? If I go to Starbucks (ok, I'm a Costa boy, but same difference) and I get an offer of a free coffee, I should be able to pass that onto someone else, right? It's just a voucher at the end of the day...

So what I'm imagining is a marketplace of sorts. I go to Starbucks a certain number of times and because I'm a good Social Media pawn, I check-in lots and get an offer of free coffee. But....I'm also a society conscious SM pawn, so I want something good to come of my latte addiction. I add my “free” coffee to the marketplace. Could be an auction, could be set price, doesn't really matter. Someone else buys this voucher and gets their “free” coffee. Obviously the price would be less than the cost of buying the coffee directly.

So far, so blah. But, imagine the coffee is £1. The website takes a processing cut...whatever it needs to operate, etc. The rest goes to a charity – choice of the original SM pawn. Maybe some sort of link in with JustGiving?

I honestly can't see a problem here. The SM pawn gets to feel that they're doing some good, and all they need to do is check-in to a location they're already visiting. The buyer of the voucher gets some cheap coffee/sandwich/fluffy elephant – woohoo! The advertising organisation...well they potentially actually benefit even more. The original customer is a repeat customer and will keep coming back for the vouchers so they can donate more to charity. The new customer? Well they might not have come in before – there's potential there for a brand spanking new customer. They were already giving the voucher away, so that's a sunk cost...

So now you need to give people an incentive to give their vouchers away (and for others to buy them). Well, you could give away badges. Meh. Boring. Done it. But what about a leaderboard, not of everyone in the country. Not of everyone for that store, but your own personal leaderboard. Just you and your friends group? That's something I'd be interested in seeing. I don't give two hoots if Steve from Grimsby has donated £15,000 somehow, but if my mate Carl is doing better than me, I'm suddenly an interested man.

I don't know if this is something someone is already working on, or maybe there's a good reason it's not possible, but seems like an interesting experiment....

The Consultancy Business Model – Does it need reforming?

Consultancy is big business. I'm not just talking about IT Consulting, the sector I work in, but consultancy in general. Finance, marketing, IT, social media – the consultant is king. Consultancy firms charge huge fees to bring in their expertise, previous experience and support structures to help companies with new projects, restructure their organisation, cut costs or integrate new purchases.

I've only been working with Srijan Foundation for a couple of months, but I'm already wondering whether this business model is scalable. And for once I'm not talking about scaling up. How do you scale consultancy down to the smallest businesses and still make it relevant?

I want to point out straight away that I don't think big consultancy is perfect. Far from it. The charge rates for some people are far too high and there is a lot of wastage, but I think that is true for all large organisations and is unlikely to be a solvable issue. What I think is non-debatable though, is that there is no way a scaled down version of the same model would work at the lower end of the scale.

For one thing, the pricing model is all wrong. Small companies cannot and will not afford the luxury of paying for graduates learning their trade on the job. In large consultancy firms, these graduates are charged at 4x-5x times their cost, to recover the cost of their training. They are the “do-ers” while the higher grades are the decision makers. On smaller projects, the ability to “hide” these graduates becomes much lower.
Large consultancy firms also have large fixed costs to cover. HR, finance, legal, etc. all projects have to contribute to these departments and the associated costs of these rise proportionately.

On large projects there is high consultant turnover and members of the same team have often not worked together before...all introducing additional costs.

Is it surprising then, that most small businesses either forego the luxury of consultants altogether, or simply employ one individual on a short-term basis. While I'm sure these individuals are extremely capable, they cannot possibly have the range of resources and skills that a larger firm could.

So with this in mind, I'm wondering if there is a middle-ground. A small, lean group of consultants (all 5yrs+ into their careers) who work in teams of 3-5 at a time. Projects would be short (3-6 months only) and supremely focussed. The smaller size of the organisation should lower fixed costs allowing the charge rates to be significantly lower than the “Big Consultancy” firms – bringing them more into line with the spending power of smaller organisations. The profit margins on these projects can also be lower than required in the bigger firms.

The central resources, such as finance, etc. will work across all projects, instead of having one per account, allowing costs to be cut there too. The nature of the work reduces the need for large office spaces and the whole venture could realistically be run as a virtual organisation.

There is undoubtedly likely to be an element of “cookie cutter” solutions about these projects. While in larger firms the processes tend to be documented and then ignored, in smaller enterprises these processes are either non-existent or unable to be described.Hence the requirement for short, decisive and focussed projects.
Partnerships with other firms, such as recruitment, market research, etc. would enable cross-selling of services where those are required and outside the domain of the consultants.

I don't know if this is feasible, or even already being done, but I think it's an interesting idea. There must be thousands of small businesses looking for “expert” advice but unable to afford the huge cost of an IBM or a PWC (and let's face it, the profit from these projects wouldn't cover one of their expense bills!). At the same time, the “lone-ranger” consultant model seems to lack a number of the benefits of a consultancy firm.

Something for me to consider when I get back from India ;-) Comments and thoughts, as always, very welcome...

Social Entrepreneurs – driving the next wave of Not-For-Profits?

I've been working on a number of proposals for new projects recently. The organisation I'm on secondment to are working overtime at the moment on trying to secure funding for a whole range of different schemes and I've been right in the middle of it.

I've been amazed at how unstructured the process is here. I'm not sure whether this is a cultural thing, or whether it is an NGO thing, or if it's completely singular to the organisation I'm working with, but the approach is completely back to front at the moment. The good thing is that they're very open to new ideas and I'm already seeing some good new behaviours from the leadership team in terms of taking on board my ideas.

It's made me think about this whole issue though...does the social development sector as a whole suffer from a lack of skills in this area. It wouldn't surprise me – what makes someone a good fund-raiser and able to develop social strategies does not necessarily make that same person a good project manager.

I'm sure that there are people who spend their whole life in NGOs and the Charitable Sector who have never been given training on running a project, creating a budget or writing a proposal. And why should they have? I'm not saying that Big Corporations are the only ones who know how to do that – they're not. Unfortunately though, more often than not, it's someone from a Big Corp. or similar who's holding the purse strings, so being able to put something in front of them that they understand is vital in order to get access to funding – the life blood of any charitable organisation.

Which brings me to a term I heard today for the first time – social entrepreneur. I think it's a fantastic thought. The idea that there are entrepreneurs out there, business people, who understand how to make things happen, working to improve society. Yes, you might not find yourself amassing a personal fortune of $7bn like Mark Zuckerberg, but let's face it, if you're reading this post, chances are that's not your aim anyway!

So, social entrepreneurs – let's have more of them please. Let's take the lessons we've learnt as graduates of Big Corp. Plc. and apply them to the problems facing society today. Let's start our own Not-For-Profits and run them like businesses. Let's make them the best NFPs they can be and in the process maybe, just maybe, we'll make the world a better place at the same time.

IT Consulting when IT isn't the problem

For those of you who don't know, I'm currently in the Indian state of Jharkhand, in the North of the country, working for a tiny Foundation based here. Ostensibly I'm here as an “MIS Officer”, but I'm basically taking on the role of “Consultant” - unsurprisingly given my background.

What's interesting for me to consider is how much of what we do tends to take an IT flavour, when in reality the underlying problem is not one of technology – that's just the solution we tend to use. If the only thing you have is a hammer, etc.....

Case in point – the charity I'm working with expected me to come in and provide them with an “MIS System”. Ask them to expand on this and they don't really know what they need. It has become pretty apparent that a one-system-to-fix-them-all approach is absolutely not the right answer here. For a start, I'd be significantly concerned about supportability once I've left!

My approach at the moment is to try and bring up their general IT skills. I'm not looking at specific problems yet, I'm not even really doing anything with MIS. What I want is to generate a culture where their employees are really thinking about what they want to do with the data they are collecting and then try to find a way of doing that. This isn't a technology problem – it's a people problem. And that is in no way a slight against the people I'm working with – they're great people who have just never had any exposure to this type of work before.

It's a lesson I hope to be able to take into my work when I return to the UK. Possibly easier said than done – but surely it's worth, every once in a while, taking a step back and asking the question “is this really a tech issue?”

Knowing what you want

I work in consultancy full-time back in the UK, so I'm fairly used to organisations who aren't entirely sure what they want from me. Normally it's one of two situations:

• They want a system that will do X, Y and Z, while solving global warming, world peace and finding a cure for AIDS, and they've got a budget less than my local hairdresser spends on styling-mousse. Oh, and if you could finish it a week ago, that would be peachy....
  
• You're [insert name of massive, multi-national consultancy firm here] – you tell us what we should be doing. That's what we're paying you for!
  

Even those two situations are fairly easy for us to deal with. Scenario 1 obviously requires an analysis of what is actually possible, but at least the X, Y and Z represent some sort of end-goal that the organisation is aspiring towards. We may not be able to deliver all of that (obviously budget is another thing entirely) but we can start them on the journey.

Scenario 2 is much more difficult, but the strength of working for a multi-national like I do is the past portfolio of work – the “memory” we have of what has worked before in such-and-such situations. This gives us something to build from. Plus, the client invariably knows what it *doesn't* want - so if you get it wrong, you soon find out!

But what about the situation where the organisation you're working with doesn't know what they want (or thinks they do, but when put on the spot is completely unable to articulate it)? What do you do in that situation?

Well, that's the situation I find myself in here. I'm in a culture I don't know, in an industry I barely have any knowledge of, with an organisation looking for “MIS” - without really knowing what they mean by that....

So I'm starting from scratch. I'm trying to assess exactly what goes on in their daily business and basically doing some “first principles” analysis. There's no other way to do it. Sometimes you don't get it offered to you on a plate – a ready-made set of requirements all nicely laid out and categorised for you.

However, I don't think that this situation should be any different to normal. As consultants we should approach every job like this – reflecting on what it is exactly that the client needs and taking the time at the start to agree on what that is. Ultimately this is the only way that you end up delivering on your requirements – and isn't that what we're all striving for in the end?