Author: Tom Gillies

Wheels within wheels, plans within plans, but we do need action!

A week ago I shared the front page of the strategic plan for my business with you. Plans are all very well but what we really need is action, but of course we need controlled action which is moving us towards the objective.

With this in mind, I created what I’ve described as a “Tactical Plan” which I’m going to share with you. The tactical plan sets out an objective and some projects I am going to be working on for the first 3 months of 2015. I’ve included a redacted plan below. I first heard the word “redacted” in association with US Government documents. I think I would probably use the word “censored” instead. By-the way the Russian word for “editor” is “redactor” (редактор). I’m not sure if that is one of the little tricks laguages play on us, or whether it tells me anything about the Russian attitude to editing.

That really is all there is to the Tactical Plan. It is pinned to the wall in my office and it reminds me what I am achieving at the moment. It helps me to focus and keeps me from getting distracted. Of course, there are more detailed plans as well.

As you can see from the redacted plan, I have an objective, an end date and three projects. The three projects are addressing areas which I know need work: Product and Marketing are hardy perennials and in this case I felt it was time to do a bit of spring-cleaning in the thing I use for the detailed plans and tracking. I may show you that some time in the future.

It’s always good to have a plan!

This is the time of year for reviewing what we have  done and thinking about what we are going to do. It is the time for making plans. The month of January is supposed to be named after the Roman god “Janus” (although there is some dispute about this)

Janus is depicted as having two faces and was the god of doorways and gates. He looked both inwards and outwards, forwards and back. In my opinion Janus is a good character to bear in mind when writing plans and reviews.

In the middle of 2014 I decided that it was high time that I wrote a “Business Plan” for my little business. I’ve done this sort of thing before for other people, but it feels a bit different when it is for yourself.

As it says at the bottom of the front page: 

“Duhallow Grey Geek started without a clear business plan. This document rectifies that. It summarizes the current situation and identifies options. It identifies how tactical plans will be created and provides an outline for the next one to two years.”


Before you start writing (or even researching) any document, it is a good idea to decide who you are writing it for. In this case the answer was: for ME! That’s right – for myself! Of course, I may want to present it to potential investors or business partners but I am the person making the largest investments in terms of effort, time and life. If I think I am going to be wasting my time and effort, I want to find out now, so I can do something more rewarding.

There are plenty of templates for what a business plan should contain, so I won’t share the detailed table of contents. In fact I found myself adding things to the standard contents. Some of the things I included (which you may, or may not, think are “standard”) are:

  • Motivation – Why was I doing this? Why was I excited about it?
  • The current position of the business – In terms of product and sales.
  • Product – What is the product? 
  • Market – Who buys the product?
  • Industry – What is happening in the industry I’m involved in? Where is the growth?
  • What resources and capabilities do I have access to?
  • Constraints – What are the restrictions that I want to apply to the business?

While I was mapping out the contents, I made a list of the questions I wanted to answer and used them as the basis for research. In the end I produced appendix material on:

  • The economics of the industry I am working in (on-line training material)
  • Sales – past performance and future projections
  • Marketing options
  • Alternative sales channels
  • Successful competitors

Predicting future sales is always difficult. In the end, I didn’t try and make predictions. Instead I projected the past performance into the future and then identified the ways I could improve it. I also identified high and low levels which I could use to plan potential investments. 

The “Strategic” document I’ve produced, documents the facts and identifies the options. On the basis of the information available, I’ve picked some things I am going to do (in fact, I’ve started doing them already) and created what I term a “Tactical Plan” for a fixed term. I’ve going to “do the actions” in the Tactical Plan and monitor the results. Towards the end to the period of the plan I will review the results and decide what to do next. 

Wash, rinse, repeat….
  
Is it all going to work? I don’t know. What am I going to do? That would be telling! Keep watching and you’ll find out.


Mind maps and SQL

In a recent discussion on LinkedIn, I mentioned that I use Mind-mapping. I generally prefer pen and paper or pen and white-board, because I don’t like to be constrained by what the tool wants to do. I do use Freemind sometimes, and I said in the discussion that I what I sometimes do is:

  1. Create the mindmap freehand
  2. Transfer that into Freemind – which consolidates the thinking and gives me something with is tidy and easier to maintain, and then
  3. “Print” the map to pdf – which is easy to distribute and can form the basis of discussion at a distance.

I thought I would illustrate this with an example:

A recent project of mine has been creating an introductory course titled “SQL and Relational Databases for analysts”.

The objective of the course was to give a basic understanding of SQL to Business and Technical Analysts.
It was intended to use MS SQL Server, but not be a course on SQL Server. The reason for this was to make the skills learned as portable as reasonably possible.

As it was intended to be an introduction, certain things I would like to have included (like UNION, HAVING and the database catalogue) didn’t make the cut on grounds of keeping the size of the course down.

Anyway, the content of the course was documented in a mind-map which was then discussed with people in different places over a short period. I’ve attached the final version of the mind-map.
Everything in the mind-map (with the exception of the “title block” in the middle) was produced in Freemind.

The mind-map proved to be useful for agreeing what the content and structure of the course was going to be and then as a reminder of scope during the development of the course.

Here’s mind-map (it was intended to be printed, if that ever happened, on A3 paper).

 

Practice makes…?

One of the issues with working from a home office, as I do a great deal of the time, is “education” or “training”. I need to keep up to date. I need to learn about new things. The problem is that very few opportunities come and knock on my door. Of course, the internet is a wonderful thing, but it is like a good public library. If you like reading, you can get lost or even lose yourself in there. That’s where personal recommendation comes in.
Quite recently I found a education site called Udemy. Maybe you knew about it already, I didn’t. I decided to take a couple of courses to find out if I liked the experience: I did, and I do.
One of the courses I took was called “Performance of Speaking” by a man called Tom j Dolan (he writes it like that, so I will as well). I confess, that one of the reasons I took the course was that I was curious about how effective a course in such a subject could be as distance learning. All I can say is “it worked for me”.
I consider myself a reasonable public speaker. I am comfortable addressing a room containing tens or maybe even a hundred people. I haven’t tried addressing a stadium full yet but maybe that will come. Never-the-less I felt there was room for improvement.
Tom’s credentials are excellent and his approach is quite simple: public speaking is a practical skill. It is something which can be learned. He makes an important point: many of us are too critical of ourselves. We demand “perfection” (whatever that is). That is really an unreasonable demand we are making. Instead we should aim for improvement “Kaizen” as the Japanese would have it. Continuous improvement is a better goal than perfection. We can usually improve. The best musicians practice constantly.
There are many skills like this. We can learn the facts, we can answer questions and give the “right” answers, but to become really good at them, we have to practice. We (or at the very least, I) are creatures of habit. When we first learn a new behaviour it takes a great deal of effort. As we practice we get better at the execution of the behaviour, but not only that, we also find that we have more capacity to think about how and why we are doing it. Experience is a valuable thing.
As part of something I am doing at the moment, I need to record and then edit my own voice. Tom’s course has helped me get used to the awkwardness I felt. It hasn’t changed the content at all but it has improved the delivery and also how I feel about the delivery.

My first job (as a bottle-washer)

Just recently the great and good have been telling people on LinkedIn about their first day at work. I don’t want to feel left out, so I thought I share what I remember about my first day at work. Actually, I’ve had several starts, all in different locations and under different circumstances. If you like, this is the “first, first”!

The job was supposed to be a fill-in while I retook an exam to improve on the grades which I needed to get into the university course I wanted . I remember that I had been given no notice of the interview – quite literally I had been asked “Can you go NOW?” and I’d gone – THEN! I had been unkempt and unshaven. The interview was on a Wednesday or Thursday and I must have said the right things, because they asked me if I could start on the following Monday.

The job was as a lab assistant in a small research laboratory. My responsibilities were to be quite varied, basically: do as you’re told by your superiors (which meant almost everyone else!). I thought of it as being “bottle-washer”.

On the Monday, the post arrived as I was about to set off for work. It contained an unconditional offer for the university course I wanted. They said they thought I could cope with the grades I had. So, I turned up on my first day at work and handed in my notice!

In fact, I told my new employer that if they preferred, I would “not start at all” and we could call the whole thing quits. They were really decent about it and said that I could have the job until I was due to go to university. Excellent I thought: relevant experience and two months of pay. Just the start I needed.

My job really was “washing bottles”, and test-tubes and beakers and flasks and all the other paraphernalia of a chemical laboratory. I had to learn pretty quickly that we had some real nasties. I spent at least some of my time working with chromic acid which is really not good to come in contact with. One of the things we worked with was ion exchange resin which came as tiny polystyrene beads. I had to be really careful not to spill any of the wet beads on the floor because when they dried they became like little ball-bearings and on a hard lino floor the effect could be really quite dangerous.

Some pleasant memories are:

  • Being told off because “I walked like the lab manager” and the sound of my footsteps made some of my colleagues uneasy (to this day, I don’t know what they were up to).
  • Playing cricket in the park opposite the lab during lunch break. The wickets were old retort stands and the bat was kept in one of the equipment drawers.
  • And playing cards with the other workers on the wet lunch breaks.

Less pleasant memories are:

  • Doing seemingly endless titrations to get the “break-through point” on a sample ion exchange resin,
  • And the smell of the Amination Room where we kept the fume cupboards and unpleasant materials.
It was a good start!