I keep telling my team that they we need to be more proactive all the time.  On our website (www.remotedbaexperts.com) we talk a lot about proactive monitoring, proactive problem prevention, etc.

Proactivity has several meanings:

1. Having an orientation to the future, anticipating problems and taking affirmative steps to deal positively with them rather than reacting after a situation has already occurred.
2. Acting in advance to deal with an expected difficulty.
3. Psychiatrist Dr. Viktor Frankl, describes a “proactive person” as one that takes responsibility for their life, instead of blaming outside circumstances or other people for their situation.

As you may infer from the above definitions, there are several aspects to proactivity.  Proactivity is an attitude or mindset.  My first exposure to the term came from Stephen Covey’s book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, a few years ago.  He treats the subject better than anyone else.  According to him, being proactive is the first of seven habits that highly effective people develop and live by.  His model of proactivity claims that humans, unlike any other living forms, possess four abilities or capacities:

• Self-awareness
• Imagination
• Conscience
• Independent will

These capacities enable the “freedom to choose” how we respond to a stimulus—the things we see, hear, think, etc. or the conditions and circumstances we find ourselves in.  Covey points out that, “highly proactive people do not blame circumstances, conditions, or past conditioning for their behavior.”   Their behaviors (responses) are based on values, not on feelings.  Reactive people tend to be affected more by their environment and by things outside their control such as weather.  If the weather is “bad” they feel “bad” — they suffer and get down because of it.  They worry about the war, the economy, and about many other things that they have nothing or very little to do about or control over.  They worry about others and what they did, do, will do, or did not, don’t, or will not do.  They are also highly affected by how others treat them, react to them, etc.  They live at the mercy of others.

Covey poses that until a “reactive” or “non-proactive” person realizes, acknowledges, and accepts they are what and where they are today because of the choices and decisions they have made, as opposed to external conditions, circumstances and conditioning, they cannot become proactive.

Reactive people use a different language than proactive ones.  Reactive people tend to say things like:

• Nothing I can do
• I can’t help it
• I have to…
• I cannot…
• I wish…
• There is no way…
• It’s impossible…
• If it wasn’t for…
• I have no control…
• Why are they doing this to me?

Worst, they believe these things and allow them to control them.  They put their time and energy on trying to change things and people they do not have any control over.  On the other hand proactive people focus on things they control and can do something about.  According to Covey, when you do that you actually increase your “circle of influence.”  By focusing and working on things you can control, you become better able to affect things that you otherwise did not before.  That is the key point and most powerful lesson regarding this concept.

Covey describes three areas where the problems we face in life fall:

• Direct control (problems involving our own behavior)
• Indirect control (problems involving others’ behavior)
• No control  (problems we can do nothing about)

He goes on to recommend that in order to solve “direct control” problems we need to work on our habits.   To solve “indirect control” problems we need to work on our methods of influence.  And in order to deal with problems we do not control we need to learn to accept there is nothing we can do and then move on.

I mentioned earlier that the first step to change our stance from reactive to proactive is recognizing and accepting it.  The “language” list above can help you monitor your own language and assess your stance.  Once you do make a list of all the things you worry most about, then determine which area of control they lay in: Direct, Indirect, or No control.  With that inventory complete, move on to identifying the change strategies that will best deal with them including habits to change, new or different methods of influence, etc.  If you do so, you will see your “circle of influence” grow bigger and bigger — Imagine what that would be like — And what it would mean to you and others important to you?

If you have not read Covey’s book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People yet, get a hold of it ASAP — It is GREAT — it may change your life!!!  And NO, I did not get a free copy of the book to “promote” itJ! In fact, I think it is one of the most sold business books of all times.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

The purpose of this post is to stress the importance of keeping the results we seek in mind all the time.  When you keep results in mind, you are better able to align your time and effort to accomplish the results you desire.  Being highly conscious of the results enables you to better decide what to do when.  It allows you to better prioritize and focus.   “Beginning with the end in mind” is the second habit of highly effective people according to Stephen Covey’s bestseller Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

The challenge is that end results are usually not very clear for many of us.  Whether it is because we are not clear ourselves or others have not clearly communicated what they want, need, expect, etc.  Thus, many of us spin our wheels and end up wasting time, effort, and energy on things that do not contribute to the End Results.  If you want to add value or be most valuable, you need to make sure you clearly understand the key results you need to align to your efforts.  End Results get accomplished by a “chain of results”.  The best way to align your efforts is to develop a simple diagram to help you develop and visualize the chain of results necessary to accomplish your desired end results.

Here is an illustration of what one would look like:

Thinking about results and sub results all the way to the end result help you develop a result-oriented mindset that should enable highly efficient and effective accomplishment of what you want or need to accomplish.  The process can clear up lots of activity and action that may or may not yield impact on the next result link along the chain. Another advantage of doing this is that conflicting results can be identified earlier and clarified easier.  So often we work at cross purposes without realizing it until it is too late.   This approach also enables you to communicate more clearly and effectively up or down the chain of command.  It also makes resource allocation much easier.

Think about it — play with it — And do not forget that It is all about results.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

In this post, we will continue our discussion on effective communication skills and the role they play in our careers. This two-part blog entry is a somewhat lighthearted look at my own life’s lessons on effective communications (or lack thereof).   In future posts, we’ll look at different mechanisms we can use to communicate and coordinate more effectively with others.  We’ll also learn how we can use effective communications to keep our customer base happy.

Verbal and Written Communication Skills
I think people read this blog because they take pride in their work and want to become better at their chosen profession. So here’s my second piece of non-technical advice: The importance of improving your communication skills can not be understated. I don’t care how strong of a technician you are, if you can’t communicate effectively with your peers, you won’t be able to succeed in this profession. In the old days, you might have been able to get by with just your technical skills. That is definitely not the case in today’s business world.

Take a look at your last performance appraisal forms, I’m betting that most of the criteria you are being judged upon depends upon communications. The key words and phrases to look for are “ability to work in a team environment”, “keep supervisors informed”, “maintain good communication with the user community”, “ensure the content of the communication is at the appropriate level for the intended audience”, “provide system and user documentation for projects and system enhancements.” I pulled all of the aforementioned phrases verbatim from one of my own past performance appraisals. I reviewed all of the criteria that I was being evaluated upon and found that almost ninety percent of the items depended upon verbal or written communications.

If you don’t have good communication skills, all is not lost. Like anything else, these skills can be learned. I still consider myself to be only a fair writer. I am in awe of people like Craig Mullins who can just sit down and let the words flow. I often find myself agonizing over every word and sentence. When I first started working in a corporate environment (20 years ago now), my writing skills were terrible. My original career was not database administration, it was construction—a job that didn’t require you to excel at written and verbal communications. One on the job accident, 9 operations and 11 months of vocational rehabilitation training later and I had a new career as a COBOL programmer. I went from working with a construction crew to working with computer programmers. My first employer was a very large and somewhat stuffy financial institution. When I was employed there, men couldn’t leave their floor without wearing their suit coat.   That’s the way it was in the 80’s.

I quickly learned that getting caught wiping your computer screen off with your tie didn’t really show your managers that you were good at thinking “outside of the box.” That was about the only thing I thought that piece of knotted cloth around my neck was good for. For the first six months, I refused to tie them. Being the non-conformist that I was, I just loosened them up, slipped them off and hung them up. Saying that my communication skills were rough around the edges when I started my career would be an understatement. But I had the good fortune of having a manager that understood the importance of both verbal and written communications. I would write a memo, she would correct it with her red pen and send it back to me for a rewrite. Many of them had a “Nice Try!” and a smiley face on top.

After becoming exasperated because of the numerous rewrites (and seeing all of those smiley faces), I thought I had better improve my writing skills. I read books, practiced writing, and became involved with as many company newsletters and related communications as I could. When I asked to join a newsletter, I always started with “I’m not the greatest writer, but I’m trying to learn.” I also asked my peers that worked on the newsletter to critique my work. The more I was critiqued, the better I became.

The same was true with public speaking. My first speech could be described as being “somewhat less than stellar.” Craig Mullins would gently prod me from time to time until he finally convinced me that speaking was something I should be doing from time to time. Craig promised to sit in the back of the room for my first speech and give me hand signals if I was speaking too fast, too slow, too loud or too soft. Halfway through the speech, my knees were knocking and his hands were in constant motion.

I found that like anything else, experience helps. But I will say that my speaking career was not without excitement. I learned that you really shouldn’t drink a carbonated beverage wearing a tie mike that is attached to a set of 6 12-foot speakers. When I was done chugging the pop before the speech, I looked around and saw everyone laughing at the noises I had just made.

I also learned that some podiums are on wheels and those wheels aren’t always locked. I started my first sentence, leaned against the podium, and it began to move. I tripped a little trying to stop the podium from moving and ended up heading for the end of the stage at a very rapid rate. It was a raised stage too, about six feet higher than the first row of seats. As I quickly approached the end of that raised stage, I noticed that the people in the first row were making motions just like the extras did in the old Godzilla movies- right before they got stomped on. Lucky for me one of my work buddies in the first row had the good sense to jump to his feet and stop the podium (and me) from killing a few members of my audience.

At a very large conference, the speaker (who now works for a competitor of mine), that was using the room before my session, left with the tie mike.   The moderators and technicians searched but couldn’t find a spare in time.  What they did find was a 4 foot corded mike that they plugged into the middle of the floor.   I then gave half my speech to 500 participants bent over at the waist.  Luckily, they rounded up the cordless version.   I got over those little snafus and kept plugging away. With each subsequent speech, I started to improve.

The point I am trying to make is that you can improve upon your communication skills. IT shops are no longer evaluating technicians purely on their technical skills. I have seen the soft skill evaluation pendulum swing a little more each year. It is the total package of skills that you bring to the table that you are being evaluated upon. We all know the importance that our technical skill sets have upon our success in this field. But you also need to be well rounded in all of the skill sets your managers are looking for.

In my next set of blogs, we’ll look at some of the different mechanisms we will use to communicate to our customers.  Whether your customer is across the hallway or across the globe, these mechanisms can be used to coordinate your activities with others and keep your customer’s informed of your progress.

Thanks for Reading,

Chris Foot
Oracle Ace
Director Of Service Delivery

The following post is intended to help the reader understand the power of taking full responsibility for problems or lackluster results of the groups and organizations they lead.  By doing so, they will identify what really went wrong and better develop solutions and take actions that effectively resolve the situation permanently.

In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins identifies a number of leadership levels with Level 5 being the top or ideal level.  One of the key character traits of such leaders is that they look in a mirror when things go bad and they look out the window when things go well.  What that means is that great leaders take responsibility for what goes wrong and they give credit to others when things go well.  It takes one mature person to do that.  It is very hard to do.  It is so easy to blame, especially when you are at the top of your business.  You can blame so much and so many.  Also, it is easy to take credit for all the great things that happen.

Blaming and taking credit are bad habits many develop early on.  We learn these bad habits at home and in school since these “social systems” punish those who make mistakes and reward those who do well.  As humans, we avoid pain and thus avoid the punishment that comes from making mistakes and taking responsibility for them.  We also enjoy the fruits of success and will do whatever it takes to succeed, sometimes including taking credit for things we may not have totally been responsible for.

I have recently had a number of opportunities to blame others for things that have happened.  I chose not to do so.  Instead, I chose to “look in the mirror” and to reflect upon the factors I controlled and influenced what had transpired.  I took responsibility for the results.  This allowed me to figure out the root cause.  And typically when root causes emerge, better solutions ensue.  More importantly, I felt really good about it.  It felt good to take responsibility and it felt good to see how others (my board and my team) reacted to my doing so.  It was so good that I now walk around with a small mirror to constantly remind me.

Ever since I read another great business book by Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline, I tried to live by one of his Laws:  There is not blame.  However, that never got me to look at myself as much as to look at “the system” for what went wrong.  When something went wrong I would ask lots of questions to see what went wrong.  On the other hand, the mirror metaphor makes you look inside.  It forces you to ask several questions:

• What did I contribute to the results?
• What could I have done differently?
• How did my actions or the lack thereof contribute?
• What or who did I miss, avoid, ignore, forget, etc.?

Once you get clarity regarding your role, you can proceed with much more comfort to examine all the pieces of the system that need improvement.  Taking responsibility does not preclude others from being held accountable.  It does not mean you are the only “guilty” party.  It means the buck stops with you.  And that gives you a lot more power to fix and improve things the first time out.  Fixing problems without dealing with the root cause does not fix them permanently.  They come back to hunt you or someone else one day.  According to another one of Senge’s Laws, “The easy way out leads right back in.” Top leaders look in the mirror, identify what really went wrong, and they take full responsibility and action to resolve whatever went wrong.  And they feel great about it and others do too!

Have you looked in the mirror lately?  — Try it, it feels great!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

In an earlier post, I introduced six Key Value Factors that I consider to be drivers of high value perception:

• Timeliness
• Efficiency
• Effectiveness
• Responsiveness
• Quality
• Integrity

In this post, I will expand upon the final factor:  Integrity.  I will do so by defining what it means and discussing what it entails.  While the focus of this post is based on my experience and approach at Remote DBA Experts, these factors are universal and thus applicable in multiple individual and business contexts.  Being timely, efficient, effective, responsive, and delivering quality output with high integrity will score big on anyone’s value scorecard.  That is why awareness of them is so important!

What is Integrity?

In this context, Integrity is doing what we say we will do.  That is simple, and very powerful.  It is the foundation of trust.  And trust is perhaps the most critical factor in any relationship.

What does Integrity entail?

There are two aspects to the Integrity Factor:

• Making commitments
• Keeping commitments

Integrity starts when you make a commitment.  To ensure integrity, you must make sure your capabilities are in line with your commitments.  In the service business, there are a number of elements that make up commitments and impact our ability to deliver.  Before you commit, you need to understand all the aspects of the commitment and the factors that can affect your ability to deliver on it.  Service deliverables may include one or several of the following:

• Tasks
• Information
• Results
• Etc.

Your ability to deliver is based on a number of factors such as:

• Resources
• Time
• Knowledge
• Etc.

These and other considerations must be taken into account when determining your ability to deliver what you committed. Once you are confident that your capabilities are in line with the commitment, then you can move on to doing what it takes to keeping the commitment.

Keeping the commitment requires full awareness of these aforementioned factors as well as some action.  To keep your commitment, you need to manage it.  If you are like most of us, you need to manage several of them.  Keeping them takes continuous planning and organizing.  You need to prioritize and reprioritize.  You have to keep an eye on the balls you have up in the air.  It is hard work, but when you make it happen, it feels great!  Delivering on or ahead of expectation is a great feeling!  Meeting commitments builds trust and strengthen relationships.  It gives you credibility and “power” unlike any other.

Before you make a commitment, first make sure you can actually deliver it. Then, work hard to make sure you ultimately do so.  High integrity is one of the best virtues to be known for.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

As we all know, effective verbal and written communication is critical to the success of any business activity.   The more complex the activity or the more coordination that is required to complete a given task, the more important effective communications becomes.    There are very few tasks in the DBA profession that don’t require some level of coordination between DBAs, other support units, and end users.   No matter how well you execute the technical activities required to complete the administrative task, if you don’t efficiently coordinate and communicate with others, bad things usually happen.

I use change management as a simple example.  Oracle states that 90% of all database failures can be attributed to human error.   Poor communication is certainly one of the problems that we can categorize as a human error.    The last thing you want to hear from an operator when you are requesting the restoration of a tape backup to a different disk is, “I thought you wanted me to restore the files in their original location – not to that spare disk.   I think I just overlaid your prod database…”

Remote DBA Experts provides remote database administration services to organizations across the globe.   We perform 100% of our administrative activities to customers that we rarely see in person.   We have become experts at effective verbal and written communications.   So, let’s talk about communication skills and the important role they play in our careers.

This two-part blog entry will be a somewhat lighthearted look at my own life’s lessons on effective communications (or lack thereof).   In future posts, we’ll look at different mechanisms we can use to communicate and coordinate more effectively with others.  We’ll also learn how we can use effective communications to keep our customer base happy.

It used to be that you could get by with a total lack of interpersonal skills in our profession. Well those days are long gone. If you want to succeed, you’ll need to learn how to communicate effectively and play well with others. These posts contain a few pearls of wisdom, and a story or two, to help you become a well-rounded technician that is on the fast track to a successful career.

The DBA’s Evolving Role
You have read numerous articles on the changing role of the DBA. How the various database vendors are making their products so easy to administer that, sooner or later, DBAs will no longer be required to be expert technicians (or be required at all). If you have been reading this blog, you’ll know that I totally disagree. It is my opinion that database administrators will always need to be just as technically proficient as they had to be in the past. I will agree that database environments are becoming easier to administer. Oracle Grid Control allows us to administer, monitor, tune and troubleshoot an Oracle database without having to go as deep technically as we had to in the past. Although, we won’t have to know as much about the internals as we used to, our skill sets will become much broader in scope.

The database engine is taking on a much more strategic role in most organizations. It provides the mechanism to store physical data along with business rules and executable business logic. The entire application environment (data storage, business rule enforcement, application program storage, communication, system monitoring) is now controlled by the database. Over time, the database engine will store more information related to the understanding of the business, the meaning of the data stored (metadata), and the mechanisms to control and track versions of the database, access programs and related software. As the database’s area of influence expands, so does the DBA’s. Can any one of us predict what IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have up their sleeves in their next “latest and greatest” release? Not me. But THAT is what makes this job exciting. Our area of technical influence will be expanding, not contracting.

The Importance of Soft Skills
Now that I have expressed my opinion on the expanding role of the DBA, let’s talk about the importance of soft skills. Before we begin, I define soft skills as the ability to communicate in both written and verbal forms and the ability to interact with fellow employees in a positive manner. In the past, a technician’s lack of interpersonal skills was often overlooked. The more technically proficient the technician was, the more leeway he or she was given. Let me provide you with a couple of quick examples.

When I first started in this profession, I attended a meeting at a large financial institution that included some pretty high-level representatives from both the business and technical areas. One of the technicians that attended the meeting was a mainframe operating system support technician. The guy was well known to be very good at his job and as nasty a person as you would want to meet. The meeting started and it quickly became apparent that most of the issues being discussed would be about business processes. The O/S expert slammed his pen and pad down on the table and declared, “It looks like this is going to be a waste of my time. I have work to do. Call another meeting with me when you need technical advice.” He then promptly walked out. Being a junior level programmer, I was in awe. I asked my boss after the meeting who he was. He stated “one of our mainframe gurus, don’t act like he does until you get as good as he is.”

A dozen years later, I saw a technician raise his hand at an enterprise-wide IT meeting when the CIO asked (rhetorically I think), who was the most important person in the organization. I think the CIO thought the answer would be “the CEO.” The techie who raised his hand said “I am.” I think every manager attending that meeting shrunk down in his or her seat. When the CIO asked him why, he stated, “When my computers go down, all business stops.” At a previous job, I had a 20-minute conversation with a UNIX admin who never bothered to turn around from her screen to look at me.

Although my examples may be over the top, they show you the mindset that often plagues our profession. As the years have gone by, I have migrated from DBA to DBA Unit Manager and now DBA Operations Manager. I have seen too many excellent technicians end up with a mediocre career because they achieved a reputation for “not playing well with others.” I talk from experience. If you want to excel as a technician, you will need to be technical, but you will also need to work well with others.

Next week, in the conclusion of this two-part blog entry, we’ll continue our discussion on the importance of communication in achieving customer happiness with more words of wisdom and personal experiences.

Thanks for Reading,

Chris Foot
Oracle Ace
Director Of Service Delivery

In an earlier post, I introduced six Key Value Factors that I consider to be drivers of high value perception:

• Timeliness
• Efficiency
• Effectiveness
• Responsiveness
• Quality
• Integrity

In this post, I will expand upon the fifth factor:  Quality.  I will do so by defining what it means and discussing what it entails.  While the focus of this post is based on my experience and approach at Remote DBA Experts, these factors are universal and thus applicable in multiple individual and business contexts.  Being timely, efficient, effective, responsive, and delivering quality output with high integrity will score big on anyone’s value scorecard.  That is why awareness of them is so important!

What is Quality?

My definition of quality comes from my days at Westinghouse.  Their Productivity and Quality Center came up with what I consider to be a great definition:

“Doing the right things right the first time”

It is a straightforward, yet meaningful, definition.  So let’s delve into what it all means.

What does Quality entail?

There are three aspects to the definition:

1. Doing the right things.
2. Doing them right.
3. Doing them right the first time.

Before getting into them, let me say that Quality, like the other Value Factors, is an Attitude embedded in individuals and in the organization’s culture.  Quality has the same enablers as the other factors:

• Processes
• Procedures
• Methods
• Tools
• Information

You must want to “do the right things right the first time” and be expected, enabled, and encouraged by the organization to do so.  Now let me get back to what it entails:

Doing the right thing means that the first thing you need to do in order to deliver quality is to know what the right things are.

• What are you supposed to do, deliver, accomplish?
• What are the expectations, requirements, specifications, SLAs, etc.?
  • When is it expected?
  • How is it expected?
  • Etc.

Once you know what the target is, you can deliver it better.

Doing them right means that you have to meet the expectations, requirements, etc.  It means delivering what the customer needs, wants, or expects.  Not only are the quality attributes important, but the time dimension also plays a key role in perception.  The right thing has to be done right at the right time.  It can be well done but late and make the quality aspects be less meaningful.  While I have treated Timeliness as a separate Factor, it is also a critical dimension for this Factor!

Doing them right the first time has internal and external implications.  It means that you minimize rework and thus save time and money on the company side.  The external implication is a time implication.  Rework implies taking longer to complete a project, and thus, affecting the Timeliness Factor perception, and its influence on the Quality Factor.

Probably more than any of the other factors, Quality is in the “eyes of the beholder”.  You must set and manage this expectation more than any other. Quality can become a fuzzy factor if not carefully managed.  Keep that in mind!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

In an earlier post, I introduced six Key Value Factors that I consider to be drivers of high value perception:

• Timeliness
• Efficiency
• Effectiveness
• Responsiveness
• Quality
• Integrity

In this post, I will expand upon the fourth factor:  Responsiveness.  I will do so by defining what it means and discussing what it entails.  While the focus of this post is based on my experience and approach at Remote DBA Experts, these factors are universal and thus applicable in multiple individual and business contexts.  Being timely, efficient, effective, responsive, and delivering quality output with high integrity will score big on anyone’s value scorecard.  That is why awareness of them is so important!

What is Responsiveness?

Responsiveness is being responsive to something or someone.  It means reacting to requests for information or action quickly and appropriately according to expectations, conditions and circumstances.  Responsiveness is a mindset or attitude.   Responsiveness is one of the top value drivers for service providers.  Time and again customers want service providers to respond quickly and consistently, especially when it regards critical issues as shown in the graph below.

Source: SSPA Benchmark Data

What does Responsiveness entail?

In the context of service delivery, Responsiveness involves several aspects:

• Acknowledging
• Timely Action
• Updating
• Closure

Acknowledging means getting back to the person who requested information or action from you as quickly as possible.  It is a powerful act and it is critical to a high responsiveness perception.  When you acknowledge quickly, you give the other person importance. Action means doing what is necessary to satisfy the request in a timely manner.  Updating means keeping the person(s) informed of progress along the way when closure takes time and effort.  Lastly, Closure means ensuring the action taken addressed the need of the requester.

The biggest challenge with Responsiveness is the volume of things most of us end up with on our plates on a given day: Calls, messages, IMs, tweets, emails, SMS, etc.  Need I say much more — We have way too many input channels!  The key to responsiveness is prioritization and systematization.  In order to be responsive, you need to carefully choose who you need to be most responsive to as well as when and how you respond.  You also need to minimize the input channels and filter the noise out when possible.  And you need a system to handle it.  The following approach can help you become more responsive:

1. Identify and prioritize your key internal and external customers.
2. Set and manage responsiveness expectations and commitments (SLAs).
3. Develop a responsiveness strategy and system for each of the customers according to your priority list.
   • Who
   • When
   • How
4. Establish a way to measure and monitor responsiveness.
5. Seek feedback and continuously adjust and improve accordingly.

The best way to get the importance of responsiveness as a value factor is to recall or imagine how it feels not to be responded to in a timely manner.  How do you like waiting for someone to answer the phone, reply to an email, etc.?  How do you feel when you do not know the status of your request? Responsiveness is best when you apply the Golden Rule: “Do onto others…”  And never forget, you are as good as your last response.  That means your responsiveness approach must yield consistency.  It is not being responsive once, it is being responsive repeatedly and consistently!

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO

As we learned in my last post, effective measurements are required to judge the success of any activity.  The blog also contained some recommendations on questions to ask your customers in order to determine if you are delivering high quality service.     After the responses are received, the customer feedback data needs to be evaluated quickly and corrective actions put in place.  The alterations made to the service delivery activities to more closely align them to the customer’s requirements are then communicated to the customer base to complete the process.

Since we are a remote services provider, our customers’ businesses range the spectrum from heavy industry to high technology.   We understand that each of our customers has a unique set of value drivers upon which they evaluate the quality of services we provide to them.  We are also aware that our customer’s service delivery expectations are constantly affected by changing business and economic drivers.  The types of services we provide must be tuned and tweaked continuously to ensure that we meet these fluid service delivery expectations.

Once you have collected your own set of customer evaluations, you need to review the results and tally them to identify any common issues that are occurring. Epi Torres, my Remote DBA Experts’ co-blogger, has already identified the key evaluation criteria that are used to evaluate services providers: Timeliness, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Responsiveness, Quality and Integrity. You can categorize your own customer responses according to the key evaluation criteria we have identified or create your own. Once you create the categories, your next step is to perform a thorough analysis of the responses in each of the them.  If you identified a common theme of recommendations, your next step is to rank them in order of importance to your customers.

As you evaluate the categorized responses, you will need to take external influences into consideration that may be affecting your ability to provide high-quality support (inadequate staffing levels, time consuming projects, technical limitations of the environment). One of the key benefits of these documented responses is that this information can be passed up the management chain for further analysis and recommendations. For example, if you have too few DBAs and too many work requests, this additional documentation will notify your management team that the quality of work is suffering.  If additions to staff are hard to come by due to economic conditions, you have at least made both your management team and customer base the importance of setting realistic deadlines and prioritizing workloads.

Action plans to improve in weak areas are created during the evaluation process. Once agreed upon, the internal procedural and process changes can be implemented to tune and tweak the service delivery mechanisms.  A formal document that describes the issues identified and provides details on the changes that will take place to address them can then be distributed to the customers involved in the evaluation and the DBA team’s management chain.

It is important to also address specific customer recommendations that were contained in the customer responses.  Even though a specific issue was not identified as a common theme that exists across the entire customer base, they must still be addressed to ensure that individual customer’s happiness.  Is the customer’s expectation realistic within the confines of the external influences?  If it is, the recommendation needs to be addressed.

Follow-up meetings, designed to ensure that the service delivery changes are having the desired outcome, should be scheduled a few weeks after the action items document is distributed. The meetings should be held with the customers that participated in the original review process.  The discussion will address recommendations that were identified to be common amongst the entire customer base as well as the individual recommendations identified by that particular customer.

The process then becomes iterative in its nature. We have developed our own cyclical customer feedback process here at Remote DBA Experts.  We feel so strongly about this iterative approach to customer feedback that we have created a standardized customer feedback strategy called “The Customer Feedback Engine.” We have established multiple communication flows to ensure that we receive feedback from all of the folks that we support including management, DBAs, developers and end-users. We continuously approach our customers to gather feedback to improve our services.   We also look for new, innovative ways to gather customer feedback, process it, improve our approach to service delivery and then communicate those improvements to our customers.

You need to know what your customers are expecting from you.  You also need to know how they feel about the quality of support that you are currently providing. Without that information you will never be sure if you are providing the highest level of quality support possible.

Thanks for Reading,

Chris Foot
Oracle Ace
Director Of Service Delivery

In an earlier post, I introduced six Key Value Factors that I consider to be drivers of high value perception:

• Timeliness
• Efficiency
• Effectiveness
• Responsiveness
• Quality
• Integrity

In this post, I will expand upon the third factor:  Effectiveness.  I will do so by defining what it means and discussing what it entails.  While the focus of this post is based on my experience and approach at Remote DBA Experts, these factors are universal and thus applicable in multiple individual and business contexts.  Being timely, efficient, effective, responsive, and delivering quality output with high integrity will score big on anyone’s value scorecard.  That is why awareness of them is so important!

What does Effectiveness mean?

Effectiveness means the capability of producing an effect or result.   It means being effective!  When all is said and done, efforts should yield the intended results for which they are expended.  Ineffectual efforts are wasted efforts.  At Remote DBA Experts, we are effective in the delivery of our remote database administration services when we maintain the highest database availability and database performance for the systems under our stewardship.  That is what we are in business to do.  All our individual and collective efforts and activities must yield these results.

What does Effectiveness entail?

To be most effective, you need to start by understanding your goals and mission.  That is the genesis of effectiveness.  Once you know what the target is, then you need to understand your current situation or reality.  The difference or gap frames the effort necessary to accomplish the goal or mission most effectively.  In the service business, another important aspect of effectiveness is to have a clear understanding of your customers’ expectations.  Since, as the post title implies, “effectiveness is in the eyes of the beholder”, that would make sense.  Make sure your customers’ expectations are in-line with reality and capabilities, or otherwise you’ll set yourself up for failure.

As I mentioned above, your ultimate Effectiveness is measured by the key results associated with your goals and/or mission.  However, to achieve it, you must be effective at many sub-tasks and activities.  Thus, you must be effective at the things that yield the ultimate key results.  It takes a Sequence of Effects™ in the Chain of Effectiveness™ to accomplish most effectively.  Effectiveness is a serial process, as opposed to a parallel one.  That means weak or ineffective links make the whole chain weak!

Similar to Efficiency, Effectiveness also involves multiple aspects.  Our ability to accomplish impactful results effectively depends on how well these aspects are integrated and managed.  There are five aspects I want to delve into to give you a better sense of what Effectiveness entails in our remote database administration business:

• Human factors
• Effective Enablers
• Effective Activities
• Effective Tasks Completion
• Effective Results

Human Factors are the seven “Accomplishment Factors” I wrote about in one of my prior blog series:

• Aspiration
• Attitude
• Aptitude
• Approach
• Action
• Absorption
• Adaptiveness

These factors frame effectiveness at the human level.  To start, you must aspire to be effective.  Effectiveness also requires a certain mindset (or attitude) and a set of aptitudes (or skills).  Furthermore, it requires an approach (or strategy), action, absorption (or focus), and adaptiveness (or flexibility).  These factors are critical to both individual and collective effectiveness.  But this is just one of the links in the Chain of Effectiveness™ required. More links are necessary to make up the whole chain.

Effective Enablers are the next link in the chain.  These are the set of capabilities that enable individual and collective effectiveness.  Effectiveness at this level is the same.  Each capability must be effective given its intended purpose.

• Effective Processes
• Effective Procedures
• Effective Methods
• Effective Tools
• Effective Information

In addition, the company’s culture, expectations, reward systems, and work environment influence effectiveness significantly!  Thus, they must be carefully considered and managed in order to maximize effectiveness at both the individual and group level.

Effective Activities are another link. These activities are what I call the set of “meta-activities” people must do effectively in order to accomplish value delivering tasks and achieve the key results customer expect.  Effectively completing them is part of the sequence.

• Effective Preparation
• Effective Learning
• Effective Communication
• Effective Documentation
• Effective Search
• Effective Analysis
• Effective Collaboration
• Effective Research

To execute these activities most effectively, you need to clearly define each.  You need to know and understand what Effectiveness means for every one of them.  You need to know which of them are more vital to the end result.  Spending too much time and/or effort on less vital activities will affect their proverbial strength as a link in the chain.

Effective Tasks are the next link.  These are the tasks customers hire us to do for them.  Each of these tasks breaks down into many more “sub-tasks” for the lack of a better term.  However, these three capture the essence of the services we deliver.  Their effective completion is the ultimate contributor to us being most effective as a whole.  Database availability and performance directly depend on how well we proactively monitor and maintain the databases under our stewardship.  Furthermore, effectively preventing and resolving problems enhances our effectiveness.

• Effective Database Monitoring
• Effective Problem Management (prevention and resolution)
• Effective Database Maintenance

Effective Results are the bottom line of our service engagements: When all is said and done, everything we do at Remote DBA Experts must result in one or both of these results depending on customer expectations and contractual agreements.  These are the bottom line of our effectiveness efforts.  All the links in the chain lead to them:

1. Database Availability
2. Database Performance

Similar to the Efficiency factor, Effectiveness is not as simple as it may seem.  As you have seen, there are many links in the chain and because of its linear nature; any weak link makes the chain weaker.  That means attention must be paid to all of them in order to maximize individual and organizational efficiency. They need to be measured and monitored on an ongoing basis with goals and benchmarks to drive effectiveness.  The process starts by hiring and retaining people with a set of performance factors attuned to Effectiveness.  Then you need to provide them with capabilities that enable them to complete effective activities and tasks, and thus, accomplish effective results.

And never forget that “Value is in the Eyes of the Beholder.”  That means that you must ask your customer what “Effectiveness” means to them, because no matter what, that is the only definition that really counts when it comes to delivering them high value.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO