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

A little background information is in order.  It starts with the one person in the US Navy more important than all the ships, equipment and weapons systems . . . a chief petty officer.  A chief petty officer is a senior enlisted sailor, normally with 12-20 years in a specific area of expertise (or “rate”) like radio & communication or sonar systems.  The Navy doesn’t hand out the rank easily.  It is earned.   In many respects, if you have met one chief, you have met every chief.  Besides keeping each ship in the Navy afloat and operational, there is a chief somewhere stopping a wee JO like I was from making a catastrophic mistake – literally – every minute of every day of every week.  And so it has been since John Paul Jones sailed the USS Bonhomme Richard into harms way nearly two and a half centuries ago.  If you are somewhat “getting the hint” impaired, the lesson I am about to relate came from a chief.  Because those lessons you can take to the bank.

Engine Rooms and LEDs

My boat was the USS Batfish, a fast attack submarine sailing out of Charleston, South Carolina (a great sailor’s town for 3 centuries).

Roughly half of the 300-foot length of the boat is the reactor plant and engine room. The engine room is dominated by 2 turbine generators, which generate electricity for the ship’s systems, and 2 main engines, which turn the screw.  All four are driven by very hot, very high pressure steam running through pipes big enough to swallow my 70 lb yellow lab.  Needless to say, my lasting impressions of the engine room are a lot of NOISE, like yelling to be heard noise at 10 feet, and HEAT, like 105-115 degrees Fahrenheit between those main engines.  It is also a place with incredibly little margin for error, where lives and the ship itself depend on split-second decisions from highly trained sailors.

For those of you who don’t remember (or more likely were too young to remember), the late 80s and early 90s was a time of technical innovation like today.  One of those innovations that said “modern” in every way was the light emitting diode (LED) digital display.  Every high tech thriller movie had computers and digital displays (Here’s one that might take you back – Matthew Broderick in “WarGames”).  I remember a ride in a family friend’s new Corvette back in the late 1980s, and the entire dashboard was digital – no old analog dials for the speedometer or battery charge.  Cool.  Modern.  Cutting edge.

The Lesson

I told you all that to tell you this.  One day aboard the Batfish, I was having my qualification card initialed in the engine room by our grizzled machinist mate chief.  I was being quizzed on the turbine generator (TG) control panels, which contained 14 analog dials and gauges displaying critical information to diagnose that piece of equipment:  steam pressure, lube oil pressure, RPMs, etc.  In order to qualify on the system, I had to be able to recite immediately from memory what the average reading was for each gauge, what problems would cause them to peg high or low on the meter, and so forth.

In the middle of that Q&A, I was thinking about that cool Corvette dashboard and for some unknown reason blurted out, “Hey Chief, why aren’t the TG control panels digital instead of these old analog gauges?…”

Chiefs have an uncanny ability to make you feel small and unimportant and downright stupid at times without moving a muscle.  It seemed like much longer, but within seconds Chief’s face was saying a combination of “where do these idiots hatch?” and “why do I even bother?” in a more explicit manner than I can write here.  I was feeling like a Dr. Seuss animated character, shrinking quickly from full size to miniature right in front of him – soon to go “pop” and disappear into anti-matter.  But half of a chief’s job is to pass along tradition and learnings generation to generation.  It is an irreplaceable piece of the institutional strength of the United States Navy that can’t be bought, and every chief takes the responsibility seriously.

“Do you have any idea why we don’t change the way we do things often in the submarine force?  Because things are the way they are based on lessons paid in blood and lives on the fleet boats of World War II, on the Thresher (which sank on its first test dive out of the shipyards with the loss of all hands in 1963), and for 30 years since.  Do you know that anyone with experience can look at those gauges from 25 feet away and immediately know if something is wrong with that vital piece of gear.  Your brain has to process digital readings one at a time, but your brain remembers the normal positions of analog gauges inherently.  There are 14 and only 14 readings, no more and no less, because more would add extraneous information and fewer would leave out a critical parameter.  Those displays were developed because the chiefs in the Pacific 50 years ago needed to read them in a split second in an engine room full of smoke.  That’s why they are not digital.”  Despite his obvious exasperation with me, he had never even raised his voice.  He didn’t have to.

User Interfaces also Matter in Online Scheduling Software

I won’t pretend that our online scheduling system here at Shiftboard has life-and-death design requirements.  But more than likely, if you are looking for more efficient ways to schedule your workers, then scheduling is a mission critical business process for you.  It certainly is in healthcare and nurse scheduling, hospitality scheduling, law enforcement, and event management scheduling among many other market segments we serve.  So hopefully it makes you feel better that our product managers spend an immense amount of time working on clean, intuitive, highly functional user interfaces for our software.

And yes, we incorporate some of the US Navy’s user interface lessons:

•    Our application’s screens minimize clutter and non-critical information, both of which add to an average user’s confusion.
•    Custom-designed icons are used to complement or replace text, because the eye can distinguish differences quickly with pictures.
•    We use simple, meaningful graphs and bar charts to display reporting data and make it the information immediately apparent.

All of those design lessons and more get rolled into this objective: any worker who can use an email system can use our software without receiving training.  Sure we have training guides, video training, and so forth.  But for the vast majority of our customer base, our ease-of-use focus saves them immense amount of money and time avoiding training costs.  More importantly, our easy-to-use system receives quick buy-in from their user communities.

What are you driving?

Ever since that day twenty years ago, I have despised digital displays, especially on automobile dashboards.  They came to represent form over function for me, trendy over steady and competent.  I am just guessing that you might look more closely at the dash of the next couple of cars you climb into.  Want to know a little secret GM won’t tell you?  All the US automakers scrapped digital displays in the 1990s and went back to analog dials.  I drive a 2003 Ford with an all-analog display that is far more usable than the same vehicle’s digital readouts a decade prior.  To my knowledge, the German and Japanese automakers never made the mistake in first place.  Maybe a few other engineers had a heart-to-heart with a chief.

–Rob E.

When I get back to the Midwest each summer, I absolutely must do a few things.  If you happen to be headed to “The Middle” anytime soon, feel free to borrow my little checklist and save yourself the 40+ years it took me to create it:

•    Grab at least 12 bottles of Bell’s Oberon, a summer ale, and make darn sure to drink every one of them before you leave.  Bell’s is a small brewery in Kalamazoo that tops my list of the best micro-breweries in the nation in terms of top quality beer, although others like Deschutes Brewery out of Oregon are almost as good with stronger marketing and wider distribution.

•    Watch “High Fidelity”  or “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” to get into the spirit of the Midwest’s capital city – Chicago.  John Hughes (“The Breakfast Club”, “Weird Science”, etc.), the recently passed screenwriter/director bard of a generation that “was born between the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Bicentennial” in the words of a NY Times obituary, was also a Midwesterner – raised in Detroit.  He wrote the latter movie and helped discover the former’s star John Cusack in one of his earlier films – “Pretty in Pink”.

•    Finally and most importantly, listen to Gordon Lightftoot’s ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” at least 5 times on your trip.  This song, more than any other, is the anthem of the Midwest and Great Lakes region.  Many of you probably haven’t even heard of it, but ask anyone who grew up from Minnesota to upstate New York, from Ontario to southern Indiana about it.  It is such a hardwired piece of a Midwesterner’s soul that they will refuse to believe there is anyone in North America that doesn’t know the song or the shipwreck that inspired it.

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.

With a load of iron ore – 26,000 tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early

Many people I know are shocked when they first realize you can’t see across Lake Michigan, or any of the other Great Lakes. These are no inland lakes, but rather a group of inland seas that hold more than 20% of the earth’s fresh water.  The waves get big when the wind is piping.  If you ever really want to understand the power of water or waves, Sebastian Younger writes an enthralling summary near the beginning of “The Perfect Storm.”

The wind in the wires made a tattletale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the Captain did, too,
T’was the witch of November come stealing.

The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashing
When afternoon came it was freezing rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind

Take a quick guess at the waves that sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald?  She sank in 30 foot waves.  In my five years in the Navy, I saw those kinds of seas only once on the Atlantic and Mediterranean.  The waves were so large on Superior that fateful November day in 1975 that she planed up on two of them and the bottom literally fell out of the ship.  She was gone in less than 2 minutes.

When supper time came the old cook came on deck
Saying fellows it’s too rough to feed ya
At 7PM a main hatchway caved in
He said fellas it’s been good to know ya.

The Captain wired in he had water coming in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went out of sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

On this past summer’s trip, my kids were 7, 5 and 3 years old.  They love digging in the sand of the Lake Michigan shoreline.  And of course they want to swim every day.  We had big waves most days this year, and even my oldest son can get knocked flat on his back by a 3 foot wave.  So we stood within twenty feet of shore much of the time, lifejackets buttoned up, and yelped with glee as we jumped the incoming waves while holding hands.

In the next summer or two, my older ones will be out on the sandbar, battling the waves alone.  They won’t need me near by then.  In four or five years, they will be body surfing out there and wondering why I don’t have the gas to keep up with them.  But we started them slow and got their feet wet, so they could learn the power of the surf and gain confidence quickly while still near to shore.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the ruins of her ice water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams,
The islands and bays are for sportsmen.

And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered.

Getting your feet wet with online scheduling

I am reminded of that analogy as I sit here in the office.  The more we work with customers, the more calls we take, the more launches we provide, the more obvious it becomes that the customers who are most successful get started immediately but with some small steps initially.

You see, the flip side is that we have people call us to ask about literally every add-on product we have listed on our website.  And they are extremely useful products, don’t get me wrong.  But the reason people come to us is a scheduling problem, and somehow with all those questions they lose sight of the core problem.  Instead of getting off the beach and adjusting to the water temperature, they are busy planning how to swim to Milwaukee.

Shiftboard in 6 Minutes

As we observed our customers, especially during the first week or two of them having access to the system, we sat down internally here and said, “We have got to get our customers started quickly and cleanly.  They each need some quick wins to get confident with the system and online scheduling as a process in the first day or two.”  We thought hard about that, and the more we thought, the more we felt that we had to get to the core of the issue.

So we created an initiative called “Shiftboard in 6 minutes.”  There is a training video to kick off your Shiftboard experience, and you should be ready to go in 6 minutes.  You will be up and running and actually putting shifts on the calendar the first time you sit down and log into Shiftboard.  Whether your gig is event scheduling or nurse scheduling or volunteer scheduling, have your credit card ready when you call us, because we are going to be urging you to take the first few steps into the surf FAST.  And trust me, the water feels nice.  All you need to do is get your feet wet.

-Rob E.

The full lyrics to Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad.

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

Nurse Scheduling is Going Online

A few years ago, Lauren Sabet, from the First Consulting Group did some analysis.  She found that,

“As hospitals and health care professionals struggle with a chronic shortage of nurses, Internet-based software packages are being developed that can make the staffing and scheduling process more efficient.“

They did their analysis showing, what many saw as brutally obvious but not yet clear on how to execute, that technology can help address challenges related to nurse staffing and scheduling.  I’ll add in here that it definitely does help.  At the time, they wrote six case studies profiling a variety of integrated software products, ranging in price from $60,000 to $150,000 for a 300-bed hospital, offer a range of benefits. Today, those costs have dropped for those using web-based online scheduling software.

• Optimizing staff resources and minimizing use of agencies (Shiftboard note: We have seen a lot of data and growth around the use of outside staffing firms);
• Boosting staff satisfaction and retention (Shiftboard note: We see this daily);
• Streamlining traditional management processes;
• Expanding personal accessibility, flexibility, and choices through staff bidding and self-scheduling; (Shiftboard note: we have not seen the bidding systems operating successfully, however, they could still be out there.)
• Improving control of staffing costs and potential cost savings; and
• Simplifying management of regulatory requirements.

Nurse Managers and Nurses Lead the Way

Today,  more health care organizations are taking advantage of online scheduling and staffing programs. The research findings from Sabet indicated that once nurses started using online tools, other departments began to demand them. So, in large measure, nurses drive adoption in the world of healthcare technology.

We couldn’t find updates to the analysis, but in our next post, we are going to explore some of the findings of the new FCG parent company, CSC. They created a report about healthcare costs and regulations, which includes healthcare staffing and retention, in 2009 and looking forward over the next 5+ years.

–TJ M

Stefan Deering writes at the BNET Intercom blog about a comment made by Seth Godin, famous marketing guru (who I also follow and enjoy).  But Godin made some comment about how nonprofits are blowing it and don’t get social media. Godin couldn’t be more wrong.

We have a fair number of nonprofits, event management types, who are all over the Twitter-sphere and Blogosphere and Facebook-sphere (okay, that last one is a goofy stretch word-wise).  Point is, they do get it. They are leveraging the tools as well or better than some of the, scratch that, than many of the corporate and media types I know.

I’m voting with Stefan. Seth Godin Is Wrong about Nonprofits and the Web

-TJ M

Five reasons Twitterers make better employees

In this post, Jay outlines why banning Twitter from the workplace is not a good idea and how it can, in fact, be better for your company to hire workers who “get” Twitter than not.

From Jay Shepherd’s post about Twitter and Workers:

“Tworkers are interested in being part of a community, one they help build. They care about people, and they’re sharing and compassionate.”

The comments that follow the post are equally interesting and illuminating. The big question I hear a lot seems to be should we ban Twitter and social media from the workplace and many seem to think yes, that it is only a waste of time. While that can be argued, Jay’s post at least makes some good points about the positive qualities of an active Twitter personality.

No doubt, there are Shiftboard customers who use Twitter and many who don’t. But that isn’t the point, really, of this post.

The point is how do you create a workplace that uses the enthusiasm and energy people have for social media (which is increasingly part of the fabric of our digital, and not-so-digital, lives). If you run a business that has customers or volunteers, how do you connect with them? I’ve seen quiet little case studies from SaaS companies like Shiftboard to bakeries that are successfully using Twitter to stay in contact with their customer base, to drive traffic to their website, and to spread the word about what they are doing.

Who does all that? Employees and Volunteers…

–TJ M.

http://www.shiftboard.com

http://blog.shiftboard.com

Twitter ID to follow…

A big breakfast and a couple cups of coffee with him covering politics and sports and family always seems to help re-center me a bit.  You see, the reason I look Bar up when I am back is because of the lessons he taught me about life.  Football was just the vehicle.  Of course there were some classic teachings: “NOBODY SWEAR!  I’ll do all the swearing for the whole team.  I have a lot more practice at it than all of you!”  But after seeing Bar this year I was reflecting on another thing I learned on the field.

Running off tackle

When I played back in the 1980s (ouch), we came out every August and practiced plays from an offense developed in the 1940s called a “Full House T”.  The “T” described the shape of the offensive backfield, packed with a quarterback under center, a fullback and two halfbacks to the right and left.

It does not “spread the field” as is the current offensive wisdom, and even back then it was considered antiquated.  (For those interested in a good read of the evolution of football and recruiting, Michael Lewis, the well known author of “Liar’s Poker”, recently wrote a book called “The Blind Side” that I recommend.)  The Full House T limited your options to some extent, telegraphed what you were going to do.  It said, “We are going to run off tackle . . . over and over again.  It’s what we do.  No tricks, no slight of hand.  What you see is what you get.”  We ran the same plays I saw Bar’s teams run as a kid in the 1970s, the same plays he ran in the 1990s after I was gone.

The idea was not about keeping all those teams we played guessing which plays we would run.  It was about being more focused, running those same plays off tackle harder and faster with more discipline than anyone else we played.  We would scrimmage other teams and instead of quietly calling a play in the huddle, Bar would just yell so everyone on both sides of the ball could hear, “RUN IT AGAIN!.”  We would then proceed to run the same play three or four times, to see what we could do when the entire defense knew where the ball was going.  It hammered into our brains the emphasis on doing the little things right – every play.  What others might see as limited options of the Full House T in fact led to more focus.  And focus led to juggernaut-like consistency of execution.  And execution won games.  And winning games won championships.

What you see is what you get

There is an acronym in the software industry now, WYSIWYG, that is pronounced “wizzy-wig.”  It stands for “What You See Is What You Get” and it describes a user interface paradigm where you can see exactly what things will look like when you edit them, before even saving your changes.  We have recently implemented one of these WYSIWYG editors so our customer’s site administrators can update their own web-registration forms.

But more to the point, our entire company – products, services, team – is WYSIWYG.  We focus on providing easy-to-use online scheduling software via the internet at a very affordable price point.  That focus and simplicity of purpose is not just because of me, but rather a group of hard working folks gravitated here who are all of the same mindset I learned on the football field.  How does that translate to y’all out in the market?

•  Your users won’t be confused by complex, busy software.  Ease-of-use is and will continue to be a core competency of ours, because we are in the online scheduling market for the long haul.

•  We don’t offer a free version.  Instead, we are very clear and transparent with our pricing, which is very affordable at all edition levels but allows us to run a stable, consistent business.  Because everyone reading this right now knows you get what you pay for.

•  We host our software and deliver our products in the form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) so any user can access Shiftboard from any browser, 24×7.  This delivery method allows us to push new functionality to market very quickly and consistently to all of our customers with much lower development costs and associated prices than “installed software”.

Instead of being abstract, let’s be specific, because all of you have to make hard business decisions every day.  A couple of weeks ago, we received a 6 page Request For Information from a large federal government agency in the Midwest.  It would have been one of our 10 largest customers in terms of revenue.  We could meet 80-90% of their requirements without any modifications at all to our software, in other words Shiftboard was a very good fit.  We provided a 2-hour online demonstration to an evaluation team.

They came back to us very interested, but said it was an absolute requirement that they install the software on their own servers inside their firewall.  We didn’t noodle on it.  We didn’t look at the cost-benefit of maintaining multiple versions of software out there in the field, trying to upgrade various versions, trouble-shooting different IT environments.  I have seen that movie play in enterprise software.  We said “No.  We deliver our software-as-a-service because it allows us to get much more product to market and keep it affordable.  Come back if you have second thoughts about your requirement.”  If we had gone down that road for one big customer, it would have jeopardized all that our customer base has come to expect from us.

Whether you just found us on a search, or you are currently considering an online scheduling system for your business, or you are already are a customer of ours – you won’t see Hail Mary passes and double reverses from Shiftboard.  You will see the ball move, however.  You will see our feature set increase, constant refinements to usability, more self-service and online training. WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET.  I certainly owe Bar a lot more than breakfast once a year.

–Rob E.

Two things stood out for me about getting mentioned in this review:

1.  She found us because she’s knowledgeable about the web-based applications space.  Lots of growing companies are paying more attention to software-as-a-service.

2.  We have a number of virtual assistant, virtual staffing agency customers.  Alyssa is not yet a customer, but she saw the value. We wish her lots of luck and success with her new venture: Virtual Assistant Hub.

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/28/online-scheduling-systems/

–TJ M

In the Pharmacy Staffing world, we have been watching Welborn Relief Agency, a Seattle-based pharmacy temp staffing agency, grow in a crazy economy. It is always fun to see your friends and customers succeed. We’re glad to be a small part of it.

You can click above to read the full case study, but here are a couple of highlights:

•  They saved on overhead expenses by scheduling online.

•  Welborn managers now have powerful reporting and quick visibility into scheduling activity.

View all of the Shiftboard customer success case studies.

-TJ M