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Breaking through bottlenecks
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If you could save your company money, complete projects ahead of time and increase profits, where would you need to focus? Do you know where your biggest bottlenecks or pain points are occurring — and better yet, how do you fix them?
According to the Project Management Institute:
— Organizations waste $109 million for every $1 billion invested in projects and programs.
— In 2014, only half of projects finished on time and 55 percent finished within their initial budgets, according to the 2,800 project management leaders surveyed.
Whether it’s developing a website from scratch, project management, or even creating written content, we invite you to learn from leaders in each of these fields.
Q&A with Tyler Woerner, Founder/Owner of PixelBrush, a web development agency based in Lafayette, Louisiana
Q: At the end of last year, you launched a new service called Daysite, a more streamlined approach to web building and design. How did you come to this idea?
A: Building a marketing website is just sort of a pain for many of our clients. Technology is advancing so rapidly across the web, and yet the process of doing a website professionally was an antiquated process. No one had really revisited that workflow since the beginning of websites. When I came into the industry in 2008, I did it like everyone else did. I designed a page with placeholder copy, then built in a content management system. Once all of the backend was done, the client would fill in the content. And, that’s when things would fall apart. After a couple years of pretending the problem was on the client’s end, I thought, “There has got to be a better way to do this.”
Q: Where was the breakdown occurring?
A: I took an honest look at the workflow. Where we may have only spent 10–12 man hours on an actual site, it could still take three months to get completed. The traditional web design process degraded the product. The design was compromised as soon as the content came in, and so forth. By the time the project was done, we didn’t have anything that people were excited about. So, we flipped the process on its head with Daysite. We literally build and launch a site from scratch in one day. When a client is with you all day during this process, you get instant feedback.
Q: What are the main bottlenecks or pain points you were hearing directly from customers?
A: Companies know they need a website, but they aren’t sure about what to put on it. You may be surprised that many small to medium businesses don’t have a formal marketing plan, and it’s not uncommon for a smaller business to have never thought about how to present themselves. You can even have a fairly well thought-out plan and still run into roadblocks with messaging — lack of direction or trying to serve too many masters. It’s our philosophy that your website should be a reflection of your marketing plan, so we help businesses strategically develop this.
Q: How exactly does Daysite work (i.e., can you truly build a site in a day)?
A: We can do this around the country. We have an agenda we set, and then every Daysite gets better. Ronny Wiltz is both a web developer and a graphic designer, and she takes the lead with preparing the client for the day. I also play a role, but she facilitates the entire day. There are various problem solving tools depending on the client, but the integrity of the experience is the same. However, not every customer is a good fit for this service.
Q&A with John Thompson, Co-Founder & COO of Exepron, a project management software solution based on Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints
Q: Tell us about your background in working with the Theory of Constraints?
A: The theory was created by Eli Goldratt, author of the best-selling business novel, The Goal. About 20 years ago, as a family, we were invited to the U.S. from South Africa by Eli to work at the Goldratt Institute in Connecticut. When Eli retired 18 years ago, I left to create a successful consulting business after spending five years with him at the Institute. The Institute provided the opportunity to work with many different industries, from marketing to production, distribution, project management, etc. It was here that I met the other co-founder of Exepron, Danny Walsh, 18 years ago. Danny was a regular participant at the Institute. He is an experienced executive having run multi-billion dollar companies and conducted multiple business turn arounds. We worked together, on and off over the years, before cofounding the company.
Q: What are the main bottlenecks you were hearing from customers?
A: Construction, healthcare, aircraft, shipbuilding, biomed and drug development — the biggest complaints we hear from our clients in these industries is that they haven’t resolved how to address uncertainty and variability. Efficiencies must be in the 90th percentiles, or you’re not in business in most industries. And yet, if you look at project management data, 50 percent of projects are either compromised by scope, due dates or budget. That’s double the cost and double the time. It’s unacceptable and unnecessary. So how do you better manage a system then? At Exepron, we take a wholistic view of the system, end to end, and identify the strategic constraints. In projects, the constraint is poor networks and the lack of real-time visibility of slippage, and this results in poor behaviors. Exepron makes what was invisible visible, predictive, and therefore manageable via our project management software.
Q: Can you give me some examples of how industries are using TOC and what your software does to improve productivity?
A: A shipbuilding company used our software to deliver a complete ship on time. Their customer commented it’s the first ship in 45 years that they had seen delivered on time.
Q: Tell us about the process of developing the software that Exepron offers companies? How long did it take to develop, and are you still fine-tuning it?
A: Exepron has matured after six years on the market, but we’re never finished. We are adding features all the time. The basic methodology is still there, but it’s become faster, quicker, aimed to provide Critical Information at the right time. In the past, we have used every sort of project management software out there. From that experience, we decided to build the PM application that users need. With Exepron we believe we’ve built a system that provides critical intelligence — current information and future information. So that’s what we did. Exepron looks into the future to provide the user with an early warning system. Our software applies predictive algorithms to accomplish this. We have also exploited short learning cycles by leveraging technology. This includes rapid training and installation.
Take an advanced motorcar, for example. Do most people want to know how exactly it works? No, they just want to get in and drive. Our solutions are as obvious to drive as an advanced motorcar, easy to use, requiring no further interpretation. So we work very hard to keep all the complexity behind the curtain for the user. “Intuitive” is our guiding principle for Exepron’s interface. People use our software and say, “It can’t be that simple.” Yes, it is. We’ve made it easy to use and manage complex IT development and integration, biomed, aircraft MRO, construction, shipbuilding, manufacturing and fabrication, and much smaller projects in the event management and business development space.
Q&A with Shift Key’s Jan Risher. Shift Key is a content marketing and PR agency headquartered in Lafayette, with additional writers around the country.
Q: What sorts of organizational bottlenecks does Shift Key address?
A: Content creation is often a bottleneck, and Shift Key is a B2B agency to help alleviate that. “The website is ready to go. We’re just waiting on three paragraphs on three different pages.” This may sound familiar to a lot of businesses. Maybe it’s not the website. Maybe it’s for a brochure or cover letter or fill-in-the-blank here. Shift Key’s new “writer for a day” service is aimed at removing the content bottleneck for organizations of all sizes.
Q: Tell me about this “writer for a day” concept.
A: Deadlines work for everyone, especially writers. We’re trying to use the deadline technique to help a business remove its content bottleneck. For $750 a day, we send a writer into a place of business to write what needs to be written.
We hesitate to say that we can write everything you need, but in most cases we can do just that. It’s that lag time in waiting for approvals that takes up so much of our time. We want to help our clients get the most bang for their buck, and we want to get the work done as efficiently as possible. Clients usually get closer to $3,000 worth of content written delivered to them in a single day. Of course, they have to be available to us. We need access to sources and the approval matrix to make it work.
Q: How did you come up with the idea?
A: We typically bill blocks of 30 hours at the rate of $75 an hour, or $2250 total for clients and agencies. I just wanted to give everyone the opportunity to get the content created that they need — $750 does that! And to be clear, it’s not just a single writer sent to fend for him or herself. We back up our writers with a team of other writers and editors. So, with this program, clients get access to a team of expert writers and editors.
Q: Since a lot of your written deliverables end up on the web, how does content marketing factor in to SEO, and do you get into that with this service?
A: There’s so much hubbub about SEO formulas and theories. I won’t go so far as to say that those are phooey, but I will say that well-written content about the subject at hand is what the algorithms value. If your piece isn’t well-written, it’s not going to present your organization in a good light. If it’s on brand but also tells a well-written story — with a strategic direction and keywords of course? Well, then, you’re going to win the SEO game too.
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