• the ability to shut up and listen
• the will to carry on learning

Without the ability to listen how are you going to understand what is required of you? For many, including myself sometimes, I think that this can be the hardest thing - listening is not just being quite whilst thinking about what you want to say next - listening is focussing all of your attention on what you are being told and digesting and understand it. Listening is constantly checking and summarising your understanding - so that when you start using your in-depth knowledge to solve a customers' problem you really are focussing on their problems - not what you think their problems are.

Also expertise becomes quickly stagnant and out of date unless you are willing to put as much effort into continually learning and researching about your field. This does not just mean sitting in a classroom or on endless courses, but going out and initiating discussions with your peers, gathering opinions, pushing traditional lines of thought, working with others to create solutions and reading everything that comes your way.

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One of the truisms of business is that what you measure is what you get.   We’ve been doing work around SLAs for rich media delivery lately and this has set me to thinking.  What is it that customers actually want us to measure?  We are all familiar with the standard SLA – its very technical, measures things that engineers like to measure and supports guarantees and penalties.  One thing that has always struck me over the years is how few customers ever claim the penalties - generally they only realize there has been a problem if the service provider reports one.  It is possible that this is because they are deliriously happy with the service but more likely that what is in the SLA is irrelevant to what the customer is really looking for.  The people who really care about the delivery performance of the media are marketing and customer service rather than the engineers who care about the performance of the underlying network.  So working with them to define the SLA makes a lot more sense than working with the engineers.

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If there is one thing that really annoys anyone who has anything to do with multi-vendor networks it’s the way that each vendor blames the other for any problem. Vendor A says “Our kit is working perfectly – the fault must be with Vendor B”. When you ask Vendor B guess who he blames. And neither knows anything about each other’s kit. So we’re developing a strand of the Cavell practice that gives real answers to these problems because we are multi-skilled, vendor independent and can work across all technologies. So we will be able to help sort out the vendor blame problems and get to the root cause of your troubles and then work with the relevant vendors to get the problem permanently fixed.

If you would be interested in finding out more drop us a mail or give us a call.

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The complexity of modern networks creates significant problems in understanding the costs associated with their operation.  While the capital investment is generally well documented and the cost of third party maintenance understood very few organizations clearly allocate operational costs across the network.  This becomes a significant problem when attempting to reduce the cost of operations and potential savings are not realized because there is little understanding of the cost base at anything more than a macro level.

Cavell has developed a process known as the Operational Best Practice Survey (OBP) which analyses operational processes, systems, costs and identifies areas where value can be increased..  The OBP process is applicable to all sizes of network and can be used for divisional operations within large companies.  It is very effective where networks are being integrated as it clearly identifies the areas of maximum benefit and cost reduction.

The primary objective of the OBP is to give the Customer a tool set to enable rational and cost effective management of operational overhead. 

If you would be interested in finding out more drop us a mail or give us a call.

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We’re doing work in South Africa at the moment so I had the good fortune to be there at the time of the election.  Yes, there are all sorts of problems, but what impressed and humbled me was the sight of people stood in queues, sometimes for hours and far into the night, to do what they all described as “exercising their democratic right”.  Its only 91 years since women over 30 and most men who did not own property were able to vote in the UK – that’s not long and in those 91 years we’ve lost the enthusiasm and sense of entitlement about voting.  Less than half the population turns out for a right that people fought and died for.  We can learn a lot from South Africa.

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Odd how problems come along in threes like buses (as an aside I notice that the rather smart electronic advice boards now at bus stops in London have not made the slightest difference to this problem.  In the last fortnight I’ve had the same conversation with three different major customers along the lines of “we do very well selling solutions into customers but then when the customers don’t have the skill to implement we are the ones who get the blame”.  Occasionally the kit never gets installed, more often it is installed but the use is sub-optimal and the promised savings are never achieved.

Part of the problem is that the issues are hidden until the sales person goes in for the next order.  Additionally sales people generally aren’t incentivized to follow up and make sure that the customer is getting all the benefits that were promised. 

At Cavell we’re working with our customers to provide skilled after sales implementation, acting as part of their team.  Because our people are trained on all major vendor platforms we can make things work in  complex environments.  If this is a problem you have give us a call.

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Globalization is sometimes seen as a modern phenomenon – if fact it began when our ancestors left Africa and started spreading out over the globe.  In the past phases of global growth have often ended in geo-political crisis – think of the fall of the Roman and the British empires to see how apparent stability can end in financial and social disorder. The upswings have been driven by technological advance, the downswings by social and economic failure.   Is the latest wave of globalization, which has undoubtedly helped to reduce poverty levels across much of the world, any different?  The upswing was driven by two things (apart from greed and credulity which are common factors through the ages), the creation of increasingly complex and opaque financial instruments and the global internet which provided the capability for a worldwide market of instant and repetitive trades.

With the collapse of the global banking system and the resultant national rather than international bail-outs,  will the global financial system remain in place or will more protectionist national centered systems take its place?  What has changed in this downturn I believe is the interconnectedness of the world.  We are now, thanks to technology, all more intimately connected than we have ever been and that connectedness will be very hard to break.  Markets have opened in ways that would have been unimaginable not long ago, and information flows globally and instantaneously.  Even if financial protectionism is put in place it is hard to see how the march of globalization can now be halted.  The problems that confront the world are increasingly global, from climate change to terrorism and need a global response.  For those of us whose life has been spent building ever more connected environments that spells challenge and opportunity.

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Keynes would have been proud of me.  I made my contribution to the upturn by buying a sofa and a rug.  I’d been meaning to do it for a long time but there are so many bargains out there – really good products currently undervalued and being sold off by anxious retailers.  Which brought me to thinking how many really good companies there are that are currently undervalued and being sold off by anxious investors.  Over the next few months we will see some real basement bargains.  But how do you distinguish between the good bargain and the company that deserves to die?  Too often buyers do financial due diligence but fail to do technology, service and team diligence.  I’m seeing this as a major gap in the market that Cavell can fill – just as soon as I get of this sofa.......

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I’ve recently been following a mail thread from old UUNETers catching up and exchanging where we are now.  A recurring theme was how much working there was a high point in so many people’s careers, how people felt excited and valued.  Looking back from 12 years out I’ve been trying to analyse what was different – it was a fun company, there were great people, tremendous ambition, incredibly hard work and lots of frustrations but above all there was the sense that what we were doing was making a difference.  The thing that I find amazing looking back is how right we were – the Internet has transformed the way we live and work in a way that few of us even dreamed to think it might.  What a privilege it was (and still is) to be part of that.

Pat Chapman-Pincher

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If you are under 30 you may feel that the end of the world has come. For many companies and individuals this is going to be a grim time but there is a light at the end of the tunnel and it's not an oncoming train.
Here at Cavell we're all old enough to have been through numbers of economic cycles and have built up some distilled wisdom to help you survive and profit through the downturn.

• Firstly focus on cash - hang onto to what you have and become the "squeaky wheel" that your customers pay first - incentivise your credit controller.
• Secondly treat this as an opportunity to really understand what is at the core of your business, what is unique, what do your customers value about you, and focus on that.
• Stop doing anything that isn't core and rationalise your operations. We work with companies to rationalise and cost reduce their networks, products and services and its surprising how much cost you can save if you take an objective view. Get some outside help because that will give you an objective view and make it much easier to take out some of the pet projects that mushroom in good times.
• Be realistic about revenue expectations and get your costs in line - if you have to cut then cut hard, deep and once - do not salami slice.
• Make sure your best people know you value them.
• Do one new and innovative thing for the future (if you need help figuring out what this is we can help). Put your best people on it and build hope for the future.

For more information about how Cavell Group can bring their experience to your business contact us on consulting@cavellgroup.com

Posted by Pat Chapman Pincher

Tags: experience | cost cutting | cost saving | recession

The case for going "green" and reducing power consumption within IT is not simply a means of paying lip service to the environmentally aware. It is an absolute requirement. The reality is that companies in high-concentration areas for IT service delivery such as the Docklands in London and many major European cities are hitting the limits of what the energy provider can offer them. This is forcing enterprises to maximise the use of their existing power. To do this companies need to measure their existing usage and then begin to reduce it.  By understanding your network's power consumption you can take your first step towards "greening" your network - at the same time saving on-going costs (which are only going to increase).

So what next...  The first step is to accurately measure the power consumption in your network - Vendors own published power consumption figures are meaningless - we have found them to be very inaccurate during internal tests in our labs. By offering accurate power consumption testing Cavell, in partnership with Broadband Testing Labs, can produce a report with defined metrics and recommendations to increase power efficiency and decrease power usage.  To take the first step to a greener network contact Cavell Group at environmental@cavellgroup.com

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Tags: business success