We just had our first internal videoconference between HQ and our Atlanta office.  Well, that’s how we like to refer to Flournoy when we’re not calling him BP3-East.  We made the decision to invest in Videoconferencing equipment because it is really important to have high fidelity communications both internally and with our customers.

When I was at Lombardi we built a distributed geographic technical team based on the belief that high-value, high-touch interactions with customers were crucial to building lasting customer relationships.  That’s a really hard thing to do right when you are starting from a base of 2 or 3 staff members, and don’t have the national network of people to draw on.

At BP3 we’re going to attack this in two ways.  First, we’ll hire geographically again, I have no doubt.  We have a better national network to tap into this time around, and some of our colleagues from Austin have moved to other cities, and might be able to help us find the right people.  Second, we’re going to invest in videoconferencing equipment.  We think it will enhance the quality of our offsite work with customers, and likely it will somewhat reduce the need for travel expenses.  It also sends a powerful message to our team that we’re interested in their quality of life and their ability to do good work remotely.

Videoconferencing still isn’t cheap (can’t wait til its under $1000/seat), but I was pleasantly surprised at how affordable it is compared to what it cost 10 years ago, for a better product.  And with the cost of travel increasing, videoconferencing looks more and more affordable by comparison.  Oh, sure, you can go the <insert favorite IM chat client> route, but the fidelity of such video connections is generally terrible, and certainly not good enough to show someone at a remote location what you’re drawing on your whiteboard.  We went with a Lifesize system.  Its high-def, the quality is fantastic (720p), and with remote control, the person on the other end can zoom into our whiteboard to see what you’re drawing.  Voice is included in the video/audio stream, so there’s no need to place a separate voice call.  And there’s no per-call charges because it all goes over IP (over your network).

We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how many of our customers have videoconferencing setups as well.  Often these are underutilized assets, but there’s no reason for that to be the case on our projects!

I want to thank good friend Megan Lueders for giving us a demo of the system and getting us to take this seriously.

[author's note:  we're going to publish a number of blog posts that reveal our thought process behind what we do.  I guess you could call it looking backstage or behind the curtain.  I think this formulation is particularly interesting at the stage of the business that we're now in. ]

Not Just What. It’s How and Why.

We have a set of services we can offer customers, and in fact we have a list of a good number of those services on our website. That’s the “What” as Lance would say. But we don’t have the How, or the Why.

So Lance has been going through the process of defining the How and Why, and yet boiling it down to a visual that can be easily consumed. All great creative processes seem to require napkins or white boards. We went with white boarding. We now have a great chart on the wall that shows progression over time for achieving improvement in your process based on the three calls to action on our front page of the website: Visibility, Control, and Performance. Each horizontal band captures a discipline, and each vertical band captures a focus area. The intersections are specific services with expected outputs and expected value (return).

To me, the brainstorming around this framework was a lightbulb moment - the “aha” moment that crystallizes all those things we do into an actionable framework. For a given process, you find out what your goals are in terms of Visibility, Control, or Performance (or combination of the above), and where you are in your current progression from top to bottom (timeline reflecting actions taken to date). Based on that, the framework pretty well tells you what you should be looking to do next.

Already decided what to do? Well, our framework will tell you what the expected return on that next step is, and what the expected outputs should be.

We have some interesting ideas for this framework. It let’s us do apples to apples comparisons of projects and processes that, on the surface, are quite different. Which then allows for how we can focus our business growth and business development, because we can talk about statistically significant volume of projects and ROI’s associated.  Over the long run this will be a really valuable asset, and in the short- to medium- term it helps us drive a lot of decision-making.

We’re still working on the fit-and-finish for the framework, and it will likely to continue to be a work-in-progress as we build out our business, but watch this space for more details soon.