Dear Readers,

We are please to announce that we are soon going to re-vamp Caethaver Intl, and all its products soon.. we believe that its time that Caethaver Intl took its true form.

Regards-

Caethaver Team

Item 1: My eldest son is an IT consultant based in Palos Verdes, California.  Like most pros who work in this sector; he is very comfortable using the best resources and tools available for the particular project.  Wherever created, and as long as it was developed legitimately and honestly, if a new tool can do job in a better manner, he will use it.  Son #2 lives in Japan.  The organization he’s with thought that Japan was where he’d make the best contribution to their goals.  Although he doesn’t yet speak Japanese fluently, my son is studying it, adapting to life in a country with very different attitudes and customs.

Item 2: Over the past months my client list has included a woman who moved from New York to Hong Kong to get a new job doing what she loves and another client in New Jersey who quit one company to join another at a more senior level based in Vancouver, Canada.  I was asked to help an executive based in London as he decided to relocate to Sydney, Australia.  Another client, this time in the TV broadcast sector, decided it was time to move forward in her career.  To do so, she’s linking up with a new organization based in Florence, Italy.

Can you smell a trend?

These people represent, to a large degree, the way the world is evolving.  A recent article in The New York Times, described this career shift,  and evolution, particularly well.  Called, “Shut Out at Home, American Graduates Find Work in China”, the piece describes the new reality for careerists who want upward mobility and employment that meets all their needs.

Item 3: I was recently contacted by a project manager who was seeking a move. She wanted to stay within the IT sector but had been unsuccessful for about six months.  Every job she went after was being flooded with applications.  Feeling unable to score a new job on her own, she asked if I could give her any advice, tips or tactics.

Based in Montana, she said her current assignment was boring, low paying, and likely to disappear after the next department budget was finalized.  I asked about her background.  It was clear that the woman had a good education, competent and conscientious.  She seemed clear-headed about her job prospects in the western states, noting that she was prepared to move anywhere to get into a role that energized her, increased her compensation, and moved her into a more senior, challenging role.

This lady also represents, to a large degree, the way the world is evolving - but seen from another side.

Item 4: A guy I’ve known for decades recently relocated from Winnipeg, Canada to Cairo.  Nearing retirement, he wanted one last great adventure before he left the company.  He doesn’t speak the language, hadn’t traveled a lot in his life, and knew very little about life in the Middle East.

But he knows the company and how it works.  And that was all the brass needed to offer him the opportunity to spearhead a new initiative overseas for two years.  In their opinion, someone with a solid understanding of “how they do things,” their systems and procedures was exactly what was required to get things started.  They’d deal with hiring locally once business was up and running.  The near-retirement guy gets a great challenge and an adventure to cap off his career.  He’ll be a strong mentor for the local hires.

Baby boomers aren’t moving aside as fast as was forecasted just a few years ago.

Regardless of industry, if one is in the IT world, they are going to feel this change increasingly as time passes.  If you’re serious about a career, and “young” (physically or mentally), it’s time to broaden your horizons.  If not, you may end up stuck in a job which is neither fulfilling or well paid.  You can do better.

Information technology departments are overloaded, missing the consumerization wave, and failing to use new developments to cut their budgets.

Those are some of the takeaways from a Gartner presentation at the IT Symposium in Orlando. The spiel by Gartner analysts David Mitchell Smith and Tom Austin revolves around the state of IT departments as technology is rapidly being changed by their users. How exactly did IT become so crotchety?

Here’s the scene setter:

Most IT professionals want the world to proceed in orderly, incremental fashion, with no massive overnight changes and with plenty of time to adapt to external change. Significant discontinuities are the stuff of which nightmares are made. For example, when assumptions about the useful life of an asset shift early in a project, plummeting from several years to several months, investors can get ruined, and people can lose their jobs and more. We see five major intersecting discontinuities on the horizon. They amplify each other. Any one of them can upset the balance of power between users and their IT organization (or between vendors in a segment). Put the five together and let them amplify each other’s dislocating impact, and there is major trouble looming.

These five amplifying developments are:

Software as a service;

Open source;

Cloud computing;

Web 2.0;

And consumerization.

That list isn’t all that surprising but Smith and Austin do capture the conundrum well.

More of the argument:

There is a fundamental mismatch between what enterprise IT is good at and what is happening on the Internet. For investment projects, IT organizations typically spend six to eight years from initial conceptualization through selling, planning, testing and implementation of the first release.  Project cycles, life spans and frequencies of Internet-related developments (and consumer-related product or service introductions) are radically different.

Gartner Consumerization

How do you provide enterprise class technology that’s secure while catering to the masses and letting the users innovate?

Gartner argues that IT departments have to assess what they’re good at and farm out the rest-to their users. Does IT really need to issue smartphones? Probably not. Instead of supporting worker laptops at $2,500 a pop, give them an annual stipend of $1,000 and let users buy their own PCs. In a nutshell, IT departments should split themselves and give users what they want (and make them buy it too). One side of the IT department will be a top-down dictator and the other will depend on bottom-up free markets.

Now Gartner has been on this user-provided IT pitch for a while now-the research firm equates the company laptop to the company car in the 1970s-and the prediction hasn’t exactly become the norm. However, the move to let employees bring their own gear increasingly makes sense. Why? Employees are already bringing what they want to work anyway. Exhibit A: The iPhone. Exhibit B: Google. Exhibit C: Facebook. You get the idea.

Here’s pitch for shifting IT to the users:

Gartner - Shift Cost

The choice for IT departments is relatively clear. You can deny that guerrilla IT has exploded in your company (the sales team’s use of Salesforce.com and WebEx without central approval). Or you can embrace the digital natives and run with it. If you do the latter, Gartner recommends hiring college interns just to learn from them.

Gartner adds a few examples of security issues and building an architecture that can straddle the control vs. free user market line. However, the case really boils down to developing two separate IT approaches.

“I’ve had a successful career.  I’ve outlasted a lot of people who started at the same time I did.  And, I make a lot of money.  It boils down to this - I succeed because I behave in a certain way.  Anyone else who wants to be successful only needs to follow my example.  Just do what I do.”

The guy who said that was wrong.  Simply copying his behavior would have been exactly the wrong thing.  I’ll explain why in a minute, but before that I want to share five approaches and tactics that, if you’re serious about your career, you need to avoid:

1. Always chasing the brass ring: Many execs, and companies as well, are constantly looking for a big win.  When they find these “awesome opportunities” they throw resources at them in the hope that this success will fix a lot of existing mistakes and problems.

However, while going after the brass ring, they often starve many of the smaller initiatives or operations which have been plodding along successfully for a long time. As a result of lost resources, these little successes consequently founder. They may fail. When the big win doesn’t materialize — and they usually don’t — the organization is left with less-effective pieces that can no longer provide enough juice to continue.  Adding to the loss: Ultimately this approach of always going for the brass ring can demoralize even the best performers.

2. Failing to spend time on the practice range: When it comes to sports or new hobbies, nearly everyone understands the importance of repeated practice to improve performance.  But for some reason, leaders often fail to practice on the job. They apply new techniques, style changes, or business approaches without the necessary testing. For some reason, many leaders think that all they have to do is read or hear these new approaches and they can they go out and put them into action. Consequently, they blow it.  At that point they may decide this new way is no good and abandon it too soon.

New approaches — physical or mental — require practice. Accept the idea that during your first few times of trying something new, you’re likely to stub your toe. Learn from your flub: What could you have done differently for a successful outcome? Then try it again. It’ll come. Soon it will become a part of your management style repertoire and your game will improve.

3. Failing to be tough-minded when it comes to people issues: Intellectually, everyone knows that having the right person in the right job is critical.  And yet…

Many bosses will leave a weakling in a role for too long. They often attempt to justify their lack of action (”Chuck’s been with us for years. Sarah’s still learning,” etc.), but regardless of their reasons, this mistake can cause a lot of problems. Good people will leave, or at the least, simply become less engaged. The wrong person in the role may miss opportunities that another may have seen, he / she may create more problems because they are in over their head. Being soft isn’t generous, or thoughtful, or kind hearted. It’s just dumb.  I’m often told by the recently terminated that they kind of knew, in their heart of hearts, that they should have been more proactive.

4. Believing that behavior causes success: The guy quoted above was showing signs of being superstitious, never a good personality trait in an organization’s leader. Like most winners, in any game, he was successful because he did more of the right things than he did of the dumb things. But he did do wrong things too. Almost everybody does at certain times.

His delusion regarding his success kept him from constantly upgrading himself, fixing his mistakes, and building on the really good things he did. Like many corporate high-flyers, he flamed out, crashed, and burned.

5. Being a constant fixer: Some people are naturally predisposed toward helping people fix their problems.  If you’re in trouble, you may welcome his or her stepping-in to help correct your issue. But many times, you don’t need that person to come and tell you what to do. Then, their help is seen as interference.  And it can make you pretty cranky.

If someone is thinking aloud with you, resist the urge to jump in. Don’t interrupt them to provide “the answer.” Let them process it on their own — it will make them better and more self-sufficient.  And, as a bonus, you may actually learn something.

On the other hand, when another individual comes to you with a great idea, just tell them it is. That’s all.  Don’t add anything. Because by adding, “that’s good, why don’t you add this to it,” you devalue both their idea and their thinking. That’s demoralizing and frustrating. So, keep this in mind — for the most part people don’t like fixers.  Just shut up, let them own it, and tell them they’re doing good stuff.

In all the talk about the economy, one term that comes up more and more frequently is something called “the new normal.” I like this phrase because it speaks to the fact that economic reality has undergone a fundamental shift over the course of the past 12 months.

So what is the nature of this shift? After years of economic expansion fueled by unrealistic rates of consumption and unsustainable levels of private debt, the global economy has reset at a lower baseline level of activity. Today, people borrow less, save more, and spend with much greater caution.

This is the new normal and it will be with us for some time to come. The issue now is how to respond.

I believe the new normal requires a new kind of efficiency built on technology innovations that enable businesses and organizations to simultaneously drive cost savings, improve productivity, and speed innovation.

Because you are a subscriber to Executive Emails from Microsoft, I want to share my thoughts with you about how information technology can enable organizations to operate more efficiently, more effectively, and more strategically as they respond to the new normal by moving toward the new efficiency.

THE NEW EFFICIENCY: WITH LESS, DO MORE

In the new normal, one thing is clear: cutting costs is extremely important. But cost cutting by itself is not a long-term winning strategy. To build a sustainable competitive advantage, companies must ultimately do two things-increase productivity and find ways to deliver new value to customers.

The issue, then, is how can organizations take costs out of their operations, increase productivity, and expand their capacity for innovation all at the same time?

For years, we’ve talked about how information technology enables companies to do more with less. But during this economic reset, IT provides business leaders with the answer to a slightly different question: Can my company with less, do more?

Other trends give this question even greater urgency. Workforces are more distributed and employees are more mobile. Government regulations are increasing and compliance requirements are mounting. Data security is more important to preserve and more difficult to maintain.

At the same time, companies struggle with legacy technology systems built on incompatible and disconnected applications that limit access to information and impede collaboration. The complexity of these systems forces IT departments to focus too much of their time and too many of their resources on providing basic services and protecting security.

Today, a new generation of business solutions is transforming IT into a strategic asset that makes it possible to cut costs without crippling customer service or constraining workforce creativity and effectiveness. A new generation of business solutions is eliminating the barriers between systems and applications, and automating routines tasks so IT professionals can focus on high-value work that is aligned to strategic priorities. These technologies can help organizations reduce risk, improve security, and drive down support costs.

This is IT how achieves the new efficiency with less.

At the same time, these technologies streamline access to information no matter where it is stored and enable people to work together securely no matter where they are located. This new generation of business solutions also provides improved mobile computing capabilities so people who work in a branch office, at home, or on the road can be as productive as employees who work at corporate headquarters.

Most important, a new wave of IT technologies offers advanced tools that enable employees to transform insights into innovations that address unmet market opportunities and meet unfulfilled customer needs.

This powerful combination of greater productivity and improved capacity for innovation is how IT enables businesses to do more.

SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS FOR THE NEW EFFICIENCY

This year, Microsoft is introducing a wave of new software created specifically to enable businesses to tackle their most pressing challenges and strengthen their ability to deliver innovation to the marketplace.

It starts with Windows 7, the newest version of our flagship PC operating system. Windows 7 simplifies tasks and lets people get more done in less time with fewer clicks. Ready to deploy now, it enhances corporate data protection and security, and increases control to improve compliance and reduce risk. Part of our Windows Optimized Desktop solution that includes Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, Windows 7 streamlines management of PC environments, making it easier to reduce costs, improve performance, and enable end users to work anywhere.

These and other enhancements are the result of close collaboration with millions of customers and thousands of IT professionals who participated in testing programs and provided suggestions about the capabilities and improvements they wanted to see. Thanks in large part to their help, Windows 7 is the best PC operating system we have ever built.

We’ve also just released a new version of our server operating system. Windows Server 2008 R2 is designed to increase the reliability and flexibility of server infrastructures. It provides a productive server platform that offers cost-effective virtualization and business continuity, great power saving capabilities, and a superior experience for end users.

Later this year, we will also launch Exchange Server 2010. The cornerstone of Microsoft’s unified communications technologies, Exchange Server 2010 provides a great email and inbox experience that extends from the PC to the phone to the browser and it helps companies archive and protect information efficiently. It also enables companies to reduce costs by delivering a built-in voice mail solution and providing low-cost storage options.

ACHIEVING THE BENEFITS OF THE NEW EFFICIENCY TODAY

Organizations around the globe are already deploying these solutions and reaping the benefits.

At Intel, for example, Windows 7 is providing improved performance, greater application responsiveness, and a better platform for mobile workers. Ford is taking advantage of Exchange 2010 and Windows 7 to streamline communications, improve decision making, and boost productivity. Continental Airlines expects to save more than $1.5 million annually in hardware, software, and operational costs through the server virtualization capabilities of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V technology.

At Convergent Computing, an information technology consulting firm based in California, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 will eliminate the $40,000 in annual spending that was needed to maintain a virtual private network for the company’s 55 employees. In addition, employees can now access the company’s corporate network instantly and download files 30 to 40 percent faster than before.

Another example is Baker Tilly, a London financial services firm with more than 2,000 employees and a network of partners in 110 countries. One of the first businesses to deploy Windows 7 on a company-wide basis, Baker Tilly expects to save about $160 per PC by reducing deployment, management, and energy costs. And because Windows 7 improves productivity, it offers the potential to increase billable time for mobile workers at a rate of nearly $600 per PC. This could return the equivalent of one-half of one percent of the company’s current gross annual revenue to the bottom line.

Businesses aren’t alone in their struggle to respond to the new normal. Governments must figure out how to deliver more services on budgets that are sharply constrained by falling revenue. As part of its response, the city of Miami deployed Windows 7 and expects that it will save nearly $400,000 a year in reduced security, management, and energy costs.

IDEAL CONDITIONS FOR AN ERA OF INNOVATION AND GROWTH

Despite the challenges posed by the global economic reset, I’m optimistic about the long-term opportunities that lie ahead.

I’m optimistic because there are encouraging signs that growth may resume in many parts of the world during the course of the next year.

More than that, I’m optimistic because I believe we are entering a period of technology-driven transformation that will see a surge in productivity and a flowering of innovation.

The new efficiency will not only help companies respond to today’s economic reality, it will lay the foundation for systems and solutions that connect people to information, applications, and to other people in new ways. The result will be a wave of innovative products and services that will jumpstart economic growth as companies deliver breakthroughs that solve old problems and serve as the catalyst for new businesses and even new industries.

This too will be the new normal-economic growth driven not by debt and consumption, but by rising productivity and new ideas that provide real value to people throughout their lives. Information technology will play an important role. I look forward to seeing the progress that results.

Steve

Question
I have worked at companies where a program manager was assigned to manage all major development. In these situations, the project manager had little authority and was often relegated to administrative duties, tracking, and reporting. How does this compare with your definition of project management and the role of a project manager? Why doesn’t the literature spend more time describing the role of the program manager?-Dan

Answer
Your question gets at the heart of the relationship between projects, programs, and portfolios. Although companies may describe these terms differently, I am going to describe what I believe is the most common use, which is also the relationship that I’ve seen in companies where I have worked.

In general, you can divide all the work of a corporation into projects (large and small) and support (ongoing operations). Administration may be considered separately or as a part of support. For the purposes of this discussion, I am focusing on projects.

* Projects are how all new work gets done, including new enhancements. Projects are unique in that they have a beginning and an end and have specific objectives and deliverables.
* Programs are used to categorize huge work efforts into a smaller set of related projects, some of which are executed sequentially while others are executed in parallel.
* Portfolios are a collection of related and unrelated programs and projects. The person who manages a portfolio might be called a director or a vice president, since the job typically involves the overall management of the work, people, budget, vendors, etc., many times on behalf of a department or division.

This is all complicated because the terms and roles might mean different things at your company. Consider the project manager role. The Project Management Institute actually defines five major types of project managers, based on the type of organization and the type of project being executed.

Each type has a different level of authority and responsibility in the organization. Each type is also related differently with a different set of functional, or administrative, managers.

At your company (and others), the project manager may, in fact, be seen as more of a coordinator and have few real responsibilities other than administrative. You may use the program manager role as the first one with real authority and project management responsibility.

You may also use the term program management to define the level where you actually control budgets and staff. In other companies, those could all be the responsibilities of a strong project manager.

Projects
All that being said, I think you will find plenty of literature filled with information on project management and the role of a project manager. The key is to see how the information maps into your organization.

It sounds as if a project manager in your organization is more of a coordinator. The role that you consider to be a program manager actually maps into the traditional project manager role that you read about. So, for instance, when you read my columns on project management, you may need to mentally translate project management issues into your role of program management.

Programs
There is not nearly as much information on program management because typically a program is defined as an umbrella organization over a group of related projects. Let’s take an example of a program to send an astronaut to the moon.

The moon-landing program is made up of dozens (or hundreds) of projects dealing with all the specific work required to land a human on the moon over a seven-year time frame. No work gets delivered at the program level. All the work is done in the underlying projects.

The program is there to help set overall direction, help start new projects, make sure the projects are progressing as they should, etc. But all the action (hence all the literature) is still focused on the project.

Portfolios
Portfolios are similar to programs in that they encompass a set of projects, but they are also much broader. A portfolio will typically be the umbrella structure over a group of related and unrelated projects.

The portfolio may also contain support groups. Usually, a portfolio encompasses all the work associated with a specific company business unit or a specific technology. The person in charge of the portfolio is usually a functional manager, reporting upward in the company’s management hierarchy.

However, again, work is not done at the portfolio level. Instead, the work is done on the projects that are within the portfolio.

Generally speaking, all companies and organizations are trying to get better at project management. (In other words, there aren’t any organizations that are purposely trying to get worse at project management.) Though they may not be able to articulate it, organizations recognize that there is value associated with being able to manage projects more effectively.

Then why are many organizations still so bad at project management? What is keeping most organizations from being able to effectively manage projects? I have pondered this on many consulting and training engagements, and I have ranked my top five reasons below. See if you can pick out the reasons why your organization falls short in implementing good project management discipline.

#5: Senior managers think that project management is a software tool.

When you discuss project management with some managers, they initially think you are trying to implement a tool that allows you to be a better project manager. Actually, if it were a tool, you might have more luck convincing them to do it. Even though some aspects of project management may utilize a tool — like the creation and management of the workplan — that is not where the value of project management is. Instead, project management is about skills and discipline. It’s about applying proactive processes and best practices. It’s about using common and understood templates. Don’t get me wrong — tools have their place, but software tools are not the answer.

#4: Organizations don’t value the upfront investment of time.

Many people consider themselves to be “doers.” Organizations can be that way as well. If you’re going to be good at project management, you have to understand that the upfront planning process has value. You need to know that if you plan the project well (in other words, if you know what you’re doing before you start), you’ll be able to manage the work more effectively. I have seen organizations that say they want to apply good project management, but then are unwilling to invest the time required. No one wants to take the time to plan. Instead, everyone wants to start executing immediately and then redo all the work later to get it right.

#3: You may have been burned in the past.

A common criticism of project management methodology is that it is cumbersome, paper intensive, and takes too much focus away from the work at hand. Sometimes this is a legitimate concern, caused by not scaling the methodology appropriately to the size of your project. However, project management is not the problem; the problem was a misguided attempt at implementation of project management. If you implement project management methodology right, the results will be outstanding.

#2: Your organization is not committed.

Many organizations say they want good project management, but do the actions back up the words? For instance, the first time you try to define the work, does everyone say “just get going?” If you try to enforce scope change management, does your manager say “just do the work?” Does your sponsor say you are wasting time identifying risks? This disconnect is very common. The words say one thing, but the actions say another.

#1: Organizations don’t know how to implement culture change.

Most organizations don’t know how to manage culture change in general and project management in particular. You can’t just train people and turn them loose. You can’t just buy Microsoft Project and turn people loose. You have to have a long-term, multi-faceted approach to managing culture change. It takes hard work and resources. Most organizations aren’t committed to focus on the culture change long-term, and they don’t want to spend any resources to do it. Is it any wonder then, that six months later, project management deployment ends up in the trash pile of culture change initiatives that have all failed in the past?

Many people use the term “project plan” to mean the project schedule (or workplan). However, the project plan is the name given to all of the project management documents used during the project. This term made more sense in years past when you could envision a physical binder that contained hard copies of the project management deliverables. The term has less meaning today when all of your documents are stored online, and many of them may never be actually printed. The project plan could be the name of the online folder that houses all of these documents.

The project plan specifically includes the following:

• Project Charter (Project Scope Statement): This document describes the project objectives, scope, estimated costs, estimated duration, deliverables, risks, assumptions, project organization, etc.
• Project Management Procedures: This document contains the specific procedures for managing your schedule, issues, scope changes, risks, quality, etc. You should have organization-wide guidelines for these procedures that you customize as needed.
• Roles and responsibilities: Each stakeholder should understand their role and responsibilities on the project. This includes the project manager, sponsor, steering committee, project team members, control board, etc. These should be created at the organization level and customized as needed for your specific project.
• Schedule and Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): Your schedule is definitely a project management deliverable. If you create a formal WBS to help create your schedule, you should save it in the project plan as well.
• Staffing Management Plan: This describes the staffing resources you need for your project, the skills you need, where the resources are coming from, etc.
• Communications Plan: This is a list of all stakeholders, their communication needs, how you will deliver the information, how you will manage their expectations, etc. You may also have a Stakeholder Analysis Plan, which is similar but created at a little broader level than a Communications Plan.
• Risk Management Plan: This is where you describe the project risks, how you rank the risks, how you will respond to all major risks, contingency plans, risk management tools, risk management specialists on the project, etc.
• Project Balanced Scorecard: This document describes the measures that you will use to validate that your project was successful. It includes the project success criteria, metrics that indicate success, targets for each metric, how you will collect the metrics, how you will report the metrics, etc.
• Project approvals: These approvals can be saved with each document, or you can save all document approvals in one central location.

There may be other project management documents that are also included in the project plan, but these are the major ones that might be applicable to your project. Instead of keeping these documents scattered all over the place, it is a good idea to store them in the same area. If you do, you can now give this entire group of documents a name: the project plan.

After an emotional summer, it is now reasonable to forecast that the U.S. government will not succeed in its goal of a new, national healthcare program.

Interestingly, just nine months ago, most Americans would have disagreed with that statement. After all, many new members of Congress, and a new President, had just been elected.  Most of them said they were intent on finally “fixing” the system.

However, despite having a majority of seats in Congress, the goal of making a significant change to the US healthcare system has become less likely with each passing week.  Pundits in both the Republican and Democratic parties now contend that is not the time to make such significant change.  They put forth the argument that the country’s economy has already taken too great a toll on the US budget and deficit and adding new expenses is wrong when the nation’s deficits are so great.

But most of these same people knew last January that the economy was souring; destined to get worse - so what happened?  Is it simply that the economy has taken its toll on this program?  Or are there other reasons behind this change?

I know this is one of those emotionally charged issues.  However, without any political lean either way, I believe this bears discussion because we’ve witnessed some fundamental missteps that are made time and again by new leaders across all organizations and business sectors.  I’ve seen them occur regardless of the entity’s size and activity.  Regardless of your job, role, or organization - and, no, it doesn’t matter what your political beliefs are - keep these 3 management rules front and center when making plans for the future:

1. The strategies most likely to win are the ones that are the easiest to understand. If the situation is complex, figure out a way to make it understandable.  Otherwise, you’ll end up being another one of those really smart people who has no followers, no success stories, and no promotional future.

2. Emotion wins over logic 9 times out of 10. When we get emotional we generate energy and enthusiasm within others.  An emotional team can get a lot done, they’ll work longer hours, and help make converts.  It can beat a larger or better-equipped team without emotional buy-in. You’ll accomplish what you intend.

3. The best deals come together fast. You’ve probably experienced this before like when you were buying a car, or being hired for a new job.  Things just fell into place and everyone walked away feeling good about the deal.  It’s the same for new programs, or changes in business direction:  If you find that the same things need to be addressed repeatedly, it’s a warning sign. It may be time to cut bait.

In many companies, and in life generally, some great projects are shelved while other poor ones get the green light.  We see it with choices for technology and vendors all the time.  Usually such decisions have more to do with how each side made their case, and less to do with logical comparisons of features and prices. It’s often the same, by the way, for decisions affecting who gets promoted and who doesn’t.

Here’s a list of six tricks enterprise vendors use against customers, but the descriptions are mine:

1. The magic demo. Using presentation slides and canned demonstrations, the vendor claims to solve the customer’s most challenging problems. It’s all good, except when there is no real product to back up the promises.
2. Underbid, then overcharge. A beautiful trick often played elegantly by consulting companies and system integrators. These folks neglect to inform the customer that the initial software purchase price does not include much higher associated costs for equipment and implementation services.
3. The customer headlock. One of the cleverest tricks in the book, this one uses high switching costs to lock-in customers. The time, cost, and hassle of swapping enterprise systems mean vendors have their customers by the… well, you know what.
4. The billing “mistake.” Really a utility services game, providers over-charge customers with incorrect invoices, knowing few will notice and complain. Sleaze at its finest.
5. The forced upgrade march. Upgrades make the software business a beautiful thing-for the vendor. The customer’s system may work well, but when vendors tell customers to upgrade or lose support, the buyer has little choice but to play sheep.
6. The clueless customer. Less a trick than an unpleasant fact, remember there are two parties to all these tricks: vendor and customer. Inattentive or inexperienced customers are often their own worst enemy.

The project failures analysis

Strategic enterprise software purchases are complicated to buy and expensive to implement. Since these products automate core business functions, they reflect genuine complexity in the buyer’s organization. Some vendors use this complexity unfairly to manipulate potential customers into making uninformed and poorly considered purchases.

In general, the software itself is not to blame; these are human, not technical, issues. It’s worth noting that some observers incorrectly believe that faulty software causes most IT failures. That perspective is wrong and misinformed.

Enterprise customers should treat software purchases with the same care and attention as buying a home: research the vendor, talk with other customers, and ask objective, third-party experts for advice. Although enterprise software is a minefield, many customers do buy and implement successfully.

The tricks described in this post range from subtle persuasion to outright deception. However, they all rely on aggressive vendors taking advantage of uninformed customers. In the end, caveat emptor applies and education is the great force for achieving success.

Have you seen vendors play these tricks or others? Please share your thoughts!