There was a day, not so long ago, when most business software was bought from the likes of SAP or Oracle or Siebel Systems.  It came on a disk that needed to be installed on a server with a whole lot of customization by some very high priced consultants.  Sit back, take a deep breath, relax, and take a walk down memory lane with me.

Let’s just say, for example, a CIO of a big manufacturing or services business led a committee that decided to buy SAP as an ERP system.  He and his team commit the company to a 7 figure purchase price and 2-3x that again in consulting fees.  Something like a year passes, and this company is rolling out SAP.  Finally going live.

What do you think that CIO says to a couple of operations-types from the warehouse or manufacturing floor who knock on his door and complain that the screens are quite busy and complex, that the work-flows are unintuitive, that they can’t figure out what to do even with the user manual (roughly the size of phone book) right in front of them?  He tells them to pack sand, only not so nicely.  He says, “Suck it up and figure it out.  We just spent $7 million on this package.  Either that, or try not to let the door slam your gluteus maximus on the way out.”

The times they are a changin’

I remember as a CRM sales guy in the late 1990s Siebel Systems touting 135 screens in their marketing literature.

Oh, what a great software concept – confuse the crap out of your user community.  Can you imagine any software-as-a-service (SaaS) company marketing like that today? It wouldn’t just be slitting the company’s throat.  It would be the VP of Marketing filling entire office building with jet fuel and then grabbing a smoke.

What has changed?  Seven million handcuffs were removed, that’s what.  The massive upfront lock-in costs are gone in SaaS.  The business buyers pay as they go, a month at a time.  The software has to perform its function well, very quickly, and it has to be extremely intuitive.  If it’s not, the user community really does hit the road.  They vote with their feet, and fast.

Online scheduling driven by the user base

A couple of years ago, I was preparing to meet Shiftboard’s founder, Bryan, for the first time.  I was doing my homework on the online scheduling market which was new to me.  I have studied a fair number of markets in my day, and I figured I had the big picture of this one.

Somewhere in the first 15 minutes of that meeting, Bryan says, “Most scheduling software is built from the scheduler out.  But Shiftboard was built first and foremost for the users, the workers checking schedules and picking up shifts, in other words designed from the worker in.  Because in online scheduling software over the next decade, the users will ultimately have the biggest collective say in what software is used.”  I was off my game.  That nugget of information got under my skin.  I thought about it a lot over the next couple of days.  I met him a couple of more times, talked to some customers, laid awake at night chewing on it.

Here was the product manager of the future, not the past.  Here was a guy who designed the product around ease of use above all things.  It didn’t take me too long.  I decided to get on the train . . . pushed all my chips to the middle of the table . . . because I knew from more than a decade in the business that his kind of software product design was where the whole software industry was going.

See what you think about our online scheduling software – literally tens of thousands of users who have logged in for the very first time and figured out what to do without a lick of training.  There ain’t no 135 screens, I can promise you that.

– Rob E

Developing requirements for a business purchase?  Don’t become the main course.

When is the last time you bought a car?  Do you remember walking into the various dealerships?  What were you looking for?  Let’s forget about what you looked like to the salespeople working the floor, because if you are anything like me, you likely resembled a mouth-watering, medium rare ribeye steak on two legs.  (If you are having trouble with the visual, watch the last 20 minutes of the movie “Madagascar” for a good chuckle.)

Now why would I look like that to a salesperson?  Because I don’t buy a car very often, like once a decade.  That’s in a good decade, since the person with the brains in my family runs the finances (i.e., my wife).  So when we get to the point of being ready to make the leap, I am READY.  I have sat enviously in other people’s  new cars for at least the past five years watching the latest technology pass my old wheels by.  Everyone else is driving something even cooler than Starsky & Hutch’s Gran Torino.  Mentally I feel like I’m driving the “Blues Mobile” just before Jake & Elwood pull up to city hall and it disintegrates into 728 parts.

So I walk into that dealership, and I am some meat.  I want to hear the latest Bose speakers with windows down at 75mph.  I want the onboard computer to brush my teeth and make me a cappuccino on the way to work.  I’m asking how I can get the “Himalayan Offroad Sherpa” and “Daytona 500 With Afterburners” Editions packed into one vehicle.  Every salesperson is drooling, because no matter what brand I am checking out, they have 45-50 bells and whistles to show me.

Back to basics

Do you want to know how to switch from that ribeye to a hammerhead shark in under 5 seconds?  As you are sitting in that car on the showroom floor sliding one hand across the leather steering wheel and dialing up the stereo with the other, nonchalantly ask the salesperson, “Can you tell me very quickly why this particular car is the most cost-effective option to get me from here to there every day.”  Watch closely, because you’re gonna see some folks swallow their tongues.   Oh, and have your checkbook ready for the one salesperson in twenty that can answer you concisely without thinking very long or hard, because she and her product line are focused on what you need.

GETTING FROM HERE TO THERE.  Sounds so darn simple, doesn’t it?  Why do I always forget that one?

We are answering a multitude of inquiries every single day regarding whether our software can do this or that for online scheduling or workforce management or management reporting or web services.  There isn’t an account manager at Shiftboard that doesn’t have this response drilled into their skull.  “Whatever you are looking for, if it doesn’t start with EASE-OF-USE, nothing else matters.”

Be sure to ask for what you really need

When you are developing your requirements checklist for your web-based scheduling system or any other software, slip in “How easy is it to use?”  Put it right at the top.  Because if your user community is baffled or frustrated using the system, I unfortunately can make a very confident prediction that your project will not be successful.  Look for screen shots on the websites, because any company that isn’t showing them usually has a really busy, confusing user interface to hide.  Ask the question in the online demos you watch.  See who chokes on the answer.

I had an epiphany fairly recently.  If I can’t hear the music at 75mph, I should probably roll up the windows.  And Starbucks makes a pretty decent cappuccino.  I’ll spend my time thinking about what is going to get me where I’m going, day-in and day-out, at a price point that makes my decision pretty easy.  Someone else can be the protein.

- Rob Eleveld

Now that the recession is officially over, companies have breathed a collective sigh of relief.  Most, however, are still trying to figure out how to do more with less.

One of the pioneers leading this charge is Cali Yost, of Work + Life Fit Inc.  She is an author and a consultant to companies large and small about how to create a process to help you rethink how work gets done.

One of her key points is:

“How do you move the cultural conversation and mindset about work, life and business growth to match the realities of today’s ‘always on,’ ‘do more with less’ global, competitive reality that affects all of us.”

That’s a mouthful, but one that is similar to what we hear often from scheduling managers and workers.  Do more with less.  From the senior team at 10,000 employee companies to the owner of an 80+ person staffing firm, companies continue trying to grow in a tough economy.

Self scheduling

Our company founder often talks about bottoms-up scheduling as one way to do more with less.  If you give workers some autonomy, they will help you get more done because worrying about their schedule will be off your plate – they can do it themselves, quite well.  His idea and question is that as a culture we have gotten used to managing and running our personal lives online, why not our work lives?

People seek to have some control of their work day and in many cases the recession has forced it on them.  They might now choose to keep 2 or 3 jobs, if they can juggle the scheduling of them, instead of having one major job that forces them into a 9-5 pattern.  And one that leaves them vulnerable when that one job goes away in a layoff or company shutdown.

Research to guide workplace decision making

Yost’s site has a research section which I found useful, especially a 2009 Study entitled: 

Flexibility in the Recession

Yost is finding that flexibility is slowly growing as a business strategy and not just some sort of informal perk.  Flexibility is not simply allowing flexible hours or a shorter work week; it is much more than that.  Work Life Fit worked with BDO Seidman on a study of Chief Financial Officers and perceptions about what is often called work-life balance, but perhaps erroneously so because many studies have argued that balance isn’t possible.  More than 50 percent of CFOs surveyed believed that work life flexibility improved employee productivity, among several other benefits, too.

Indeed, Cali Williams Yost named her firm in a way that implies finding a blend of work and life which recognizes that one might win out over the other at different times of the year or over a lifetime.  We are glad we found her work and site.

As we explore and expand new definitions of work and life, we are finding Shiftboard customers recognize that they need online and offline tools to help them in this new frontier, this new workplace.   Tools and applications that are a flexible as they need to be in helping their workers, their volunteers be productive and effective.  Scheduling software is one of those tools.

-TJ M

Not too long ago, in my research around scheduling software and flexible workplaces, I met Leanne Chase.  Leanne is the founder of Career Life Connection and someone who is deeply passionate about helping companies and workers understand the new world of work:  flexible work.  I listened to her on an internet radio program talking with another guest about work-life balance and they insisted that no such thing existed. They preferred the term: work life blend.

Leanne explains that “With 76% of baby boomers wanting to work flexible jobs as they enter retirement and 79% of mothers wanting to work fewer than 40 hours/week it is no wonder that flexibility has become a hot topic in the workplace. Companies that have heeded their workers requests are winning… ”

What this translates into is that workers are more loyal to companies that offer some form of flexibility.  Option like reduced work weeks, telecommuting, job share programs, sabbaticals and generous maternity and paternity leaves.

The part that really struck me was Leanne’s counter point aimed at the employee, which is something not often talked about:  “Flexibility cannot be a one way street…  Employees need to understand that with flexible work conditions come expectations… that work will be completed well and on time, that a reduced salary may be needed in return for reduced hours, and that employees need to be available when they say they will be,” she said.

At Shiftboard, we see that requirement on employees translated by companies of all types who use our scheduling software.  They want their employees to have flexibility, but they want them to be responsible for their commitments and their schedules.  Self scheduling. From security guard services to event management companies,  volunteer coordinators to large HR departments scheduling interviews,  the need to offer employees access to their schedules from any place at any time is what the new workplace is asking for.

-TJ M

At the Give-a-Shift blog,  we focus on the positive.  We look at the cool things that our customers are doing.  We glance at the things are competitors are doing (although we don’t write about that…).  We watch the HR, staffing, scheduling, managing people worlds out there on blogs, Twitter, social networks.

The recent popularity and usefulness of the new book:  I Hate People by authors Jonathan Littman & Marc Hershon has become an oasis for workers everywhere who are stifled, put down, weary, or looking for a way out of the corporate craziness.  It offers some funny and creative ways to process the corporate life.  I’ll admit I’ve struggled with the title.  I don’t prefer the word hate.  Don’t like the way it sounds.  But these guys don’t mean it that way:  They mean to give workers a place to find solutions.

This post caught my eye and made me laugh: 

Cubicle Exit Strategy

“On those days when it seems the entire rest of the office is focused on sawing away at the last frayed nerve you have left, the best thing to do is just bail for awhile. Get out. Go for a walk. Grab a cup of coffee. Take a nap in a park.”

We all have days where we need to escape.  The great thing about online scheduling is I can do it from anywhere.  Manage my day remotely.

Part of their book explores the concept of Flying Solo.  Of working for yourself, or as I frequently see — being part of a remote team of contractors.  That’s a growing trend and Littman and Hershon capture the reasons why people are seeking greater flexibility and autonomy.  Some of it is economy-induced, but just as much of it is people seeking a way to manage their work life in a new way.  In a way that reflects the opportunity that new web-based technologies make possible. We see volunteers, nurses, workers of all types leveraging Shiftboard in these new ways to make managing their schedules easier, online.

Here’s to a healthy and profitable cubicle exit, if you need it.  Let us know what you think of their blog.

-TJ M

The Future of Work is one of my favorite blogs around the trends of work, contingent work, flexible work and how it is impacting employers and employees. The team here recently completed a study with a big title:  Flexible Work Arrangements for Nonexempt Employees.

It is part of a large study conducted to understand the rapid change taking place in today’s workforce. The report is aimed at the people who manage or lead employees who work outside of traditional office facilities and who may be a distributed workforce — that is, hourly workers, temp workers, full timers who telecommute from  home. It could be that you have different locations and people clocking in at all different shifts and times and you are trying to find ways to let people share shifts or come in at non-rush hour times. This report (I only read the summary) covers some of the critical information you likely need to decide how to implement a plan of your own.

A number of factors are cited for this remote work/telecommute/flexible trend:

1. Fuel prices
2. A proliferation of connectivity devices
3. Employee demand for work-life balance

Here is the summary on flexible work program trends.  Look to the right for the 2009 Survey Briefs section and the above title and click, “Read It.”

If you want simply to read the summary about this survey, click to the Future of Work blog post on the same topic.

This is a blog and site worth bookmarking.

One Minute Animation Explaining: What Is Shiftboard?

Distilling an idea into words is sometimes easy. Using images, audio, or video is often better.

We felt that one of the best ways would be one mixed with fun and enthusiasm: Animation.

You can go direct to our “Online Scheduling” channel at YouTube. (it is the same video):

Online Scheduling by Shiftboard on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/onlinescheduling

In case you don’t prefer YouTube, we also have the Online Scheduling video hosted at Vimeo.

http://www.vimeo.com/onlinescheduling

Kudos to Lilipip Studios for bringing it all together and making it shine.

Ever felt a little aged in some part of your life?  As I have previously mentioned and got comfortable with a while back, I am right there with Velociraptor and Diplodocus in the Jurassic Period.

And yes, I pulled out some lesser known species to show that I know more dinosaur terms than most people, because like a lot of parents with young children, I have been reading about them during bedtime stories for years now.  “So I have that going for me, which is nice.” (Bill Murray – name the movie).

For hours or sometimes days I manage to forget that I am “middle-aged” (a kind term for everyone who refuses to state just how long ago they passed their 40th year here on earth).  Of course, my kids remind me continuously, but I have grown used to that.  But there is one place where reality hits me like a cold slap of aftershave.  The IMA.  You see, my wife works at the University of Washington.  As anyone here in Seattle will tell you, the best single fringe benefit of “the U” is the family membership to work out at the Intramural Activities facility (IMA). The weight room is twice the size of the largest I have ever seen.  There is a cardio room of at last 20,000 square feet with windows on the 3 sides.  Just driving by makes me feel fit.

Getting cold in the weight room

When I walk into the IMA, which is best case once a week with my schedule, I’m usually in a pretty good mood.  I have time to get a workout in, and when I get there I feel a little younger remembering back to when I was in college.  Then I get to the weight room.  Quickly I realize that in actuality I resemble something akin to a walking carcass to everyone else there, all of whom are in their teens or early 20s.  Anyone that can be bothered to make eye contact with me is giving me a facial expression that is saying something along the lines of “Sup old man?” or “Don’t tell me you are going to clog up a bench press.”

Of course I try to make little superficial adjustments.  Botox is a little too 1990s.  Instead, I kid myself that my UnderArmor shirts, which I switched to a few years ago, shave off a couple of years.  Ever since my days as a sailor, I have worn some ship’s baseball cap for a workout.  Of course when I was younger and cooler, I wore it backwards.  About 5 years ago, I realized that instead of shaving any years off my persona, it was simply exposing a bare forehead closing in on lunarscape proportions.  So now I wear it straight forward and “locked up” as we used to say back in the day.  And when I walk into the IMA, I feel that little chill that T-Rex first felt, in the middle of nibbling on a drumstick the size of a telephone pole, after the meteor hit earth and the resulting dust clouds began to block out the sun’s warm rays.

Shedding OpEx and age with Software-as-a-Service

That’s the bad news.  But the good news is that when I walk into the office in the morning, I lose a solid 20 years.  You see, here at work I’m watching the inevitable extinction of another era and another business model, that of enterprise / shrink-wrapped software.  Why?  Because Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) can deliver a more reliable, more scalable, more up-to-date product than buying software and having it installed.  Oh, I forgot this little gem.  SaaS can be provided at AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE LESS in cost to your business.  Yes, you read it correctly, ten times less.

Sure, we’re a software company, so we have a development & QA staff and an array of parallel processed, redundant servers over at a bullet-proof data center.  But I’m not talking about those costs, because those are R&D costs, just like if we had a manufacturing plant.  Instead, what is an apples to apples comparison with any company or P&L out there is our business infrastructure.

Want to know the cost of the business-IT infrastructure to run our administrative & finance teams (G&A), sales & marketing teams, plus customer support?  Get ready to flip your hat around and peel a generation off your operation.
•    Our financial package is Quickbooks Online from Intuit.  Cost: $54 per month.
•    We share all our files and manage our tasks via Smartsheet.  Cost:  Less than $100 per month.
•    Our sales, support and contact management is brought to us for a couple hundred bucks a month all in from Salesforce.com.
•    Email?  We all use Gmail from Google here.  Cost: free.

It’s all SaaS, all hosted software.  Our team can access any of those applications anywhere 24×7 from a browser.  Setup costs, if there were any, were less than a month of service in all cases.  There were no big upfront costs or cash hits.  Rather, everything is a monthly expense item.  We have some part-time IT help because we don’t have to run a bunch of internal file servers or Exchange Server or whatever.  We let our SaaS vendors above worry about the hardware and the backups and the redundancy.  Including T-1 and phones, we still pay maybe 15% of what I paid at LastCo to run a business-IT infrastructure for 50 people.

If you make a change, bring Kleenex

Those numbers above are “bring tears to a controllers’ eyes” type line items.  If you are not sitting up in your chair right now considering an 80% reduction per month of IT infrastructure costs and potentially not needing an IT headcount for your department or small business, then luckily you weren’t running a P&L five or ten years ago.  Because back then you could not have touched this type of business and software infrastructure at these price points without big upfront commitments.

I will tell you more later.  But yeah, I’m lot younger at the office, both mentally and more importantly when I review our operating expenses each month.  Let’s just say that being warm-blooded and not laying eggs feels pretty good.  Especially compared to chewing on trees and shivering a little more violently every day as the temperature continues to drop.

–Rob E

I want to get after that list of interesting factoids about staffing from my Let’s Talk Staffing post.  What is a factoid, you ask?  According to a favorite operations professor of mine back in the day at business school, a factoid is an interesting piece of information which, if it were true, would be a fact.  He constantly cited factoids from Business Week, which he thought had deplorable articles in terms of depth and research.  I am getting side-tracked here, but factoids are certainly front and center in this blog, so you need to know the definition.

I thought I would work my last list bottom up – starting with #5, just for kicks.  Hey, it’s Father’s Day, so I’m calling the shots.  This whole notion of the footloose nature of a staffing firm’s assets is more than a little unsettling to any number of small business owners and larger firms with whom we work.  And the tricky thing is that the issue is the same if you are staffing caterers in the hospitality industry or highly trained physicians in healthcare staffing.  Why is that?  Well, start by getting under the hood of anyone who works at a staffing company.  Working at a staffing company is inherently less stable employment than having a steady W-2 job at a company.  So virtually everyone at a staffing company, any staffing company, is trading off stability and taking somewhat higher employment risk for some other reason.  What reason?

FLEXIBILITY.

That is my premise after 18 months of talking to hundreds of staffing companies.  Almost every worker at a staffing company is explicitly making a decision to trade off stability to gain flexibility.  Let that thought simmer a bit in your mind.  Stir it around, take a long whiff.  Because you know what I hear from far too many staffing executives?  Their contractors do it for the money.  They can get paid more on a per hour basis than working a W-2 job, so they jump to staffing.  I beg to differ.  First of all, because a staffing contractor usually doesn’t know if they are working tomorrow or next week, many of them actually do not make more in aggregate each year in a staffing business.  So a few of them do it for the money alone – maybe 10-20% max.

But we are talking about the general mindset of a very broad set of workers in a very large set of industries.  And those workers are opting for flexibility.  Trust me on that one.  Maybe that worker is a single mother that can’t be at work first thing in the morning each day.  Maybe that worker has a spouse that works odd hours or travels for long stints.  Maybe a child has an illness that requires attention at differing times.  Maybe it is someone working 2 jobs.  Maybe they couldn’t stand a commute, or couldn’t afford it.  But if you think about your workers and start gathering some information in bits and pieces, you will find way more often than not a personal issue at home that is demanding more flexibility than a W-2 job can offer.  Keep noodling on it.  Ask around.

Why do workers needing flexibility matter so much to us here at Shiftboard?  Well, to start with, this is a trend in the overall workforce of the nation that is going to be growing for as far as the eye can see, so we had all better understand it.  The good news is that if you run a staffing business, you are going up the learning curve on this issue far faster than, say General Electric or Dupont.  Which means that if you think really hard about it and why it matters, you can capitalize on it.

But on a day-to-day level it has mattered here since our founder Bryan built the first version of Shiftboard software back in 2003.  His first customers were staffing RNs and CRNAs (certified registered nurse anesthetists – just so you don’t ever need to wonder again why they are called CRNAs for short).  Those are some skill-sets in very high demand.  So his first customers wanted a way not only to schedule their workers, but also keep them from walking down the street to a competitor.  To keep their workers, they felt they had 2 options:

1. Pay them above market wages – in which case that business won’t be around long.  And besides, based on my premise above, it would not matter that much to most workers anyway.

2. OR be easier to work for.  How?  Capitalize on that notion of flexibility that workers in staffing value so highly.  Milton Friedman would say they derive high utility from additional flexibility, but remember that I don’t talk to him often.

So what did Shiftboard enable for those first customers?

What we still do today.  Our system allows workers to select and confirm some of their own shifts – on the web, any time of the day or night, in real-time.  We call it bottom-up scheduling.  Workers like it, because they have a little more control of their schedule, which allows them to schedule themselves around whatever personal issues drove them to needing the flexibility in the first place.

And guess what?  Since your competitor doesn’t offer that option, your firm just became a better place to work on the issue that matters most to a contractor or hourly worker.  Those key assets of yours just decided to stick around a few more weeks, or months, or years.  Dang!  This combination of both a lemon AND a lime in the club soda I am sipping really does have the kid’s synapses firing.  Maybe its a little different way to think about your business, eh?

Let’s wrap this puppy up with some facts, which would be factoids, except that they are true:

•  A lot of our customers still do plenty of top-down scheduling, where the scheduler tells workers when and where to work.  But even a little of the other way around make big differences in worker satisfaction.  And as you get used to it, you will in our experience at least double your scheduler’s productivity, which reduces a huge overhead cost in staffing companies as you grow.
•  Well over 30% of the shifts on our system, thousands and thousands of shifts a week, are confirmed by workers between 7pm and 6am the next morning.  When your scheduler isn’t working.  But when a worker is off and has time to search for other work.  FLEXIBILITY
•  Fully two-thirds of all the shifts on our system, across all of our customers, are confirmed bottom-up by workers.  That is the trend and a growing expectation of flexible workers in most industries.  It was a trickle that is quickly becoming a flood.

My advice, whether with Shiftboard or any other way – think hard about that trend.  Get out in front of it.  Because not only do you need to move faster than GE or Dupont, but also that competitor down the street.