Most of us never really learned how to delegate effectively and thus, we control way too much rather than teaching, coaching and inspiring our staff to perform at the same level as we perform for our Clients each day. There is no magic pill here, just a simple process to get you started and some best practices that we picked up along the way.

It all starts with hiring ‘A’ players and giving them both the authority and ability to perform their jobs and reach mutually agreeable objectives but, before I get ahead of myself… let’s start with an example of the viscous cycle.

THE SUPERVISOR’S LAMENT:
“I don’t have enough time to do everything that needs to be done!”

There are really only four options:

• Don’t do some of the things
• Make the day longer!
• Use the time available more effectively.
• Delegate some of it.

Clearly the best option above is to delegate some of the tasks but how do you delegate effectively? Let’s explore a few of the barriers to effective delegation first.

BARRIERS TO DELEGATION:

• I haven’t got the time (It will take longer to explain it than to do it
 myself)

• I lack confidence in my staff (They won’t do it properly/on time
- I can do it better myself)

• I’m the supervisor so I’m responsible(People expect me to know the answers/get the
  job done)

• I’m afraid (I’ll impose on others
- I’ll be disliked/resented
- They’ll be after my job
- I won’t be needed any more)

• I don’t know how to delegate

Here’s a little tip:
YOU CAN DELEGATE AUTHORITY BUT YOU CAN NEVER DELEGATE RESPONSIBILITY

So that we are all on the same page… let’s define the word
DELEGATION:
DEFINITION:

“Achieving results, by empowering and motivating others to carry out, to an agreed level of performance, tasks for which you are ultimately responsible.”

Please read and re-read the definition and commit it to memory. It will surely be handy to remember as you embark on this journey ;-)

If you invest time in Coaching your staff, they will likely become more competent and be able to take more off your shoulders. In this way the vicious cycle can be broken.
Coaching is a short term investment for the long term gains of improved performance; more independent and capable staff; and more time for you to concentrate on your role as supervisor.

REASONS FOR OVER/UNDER DELEGATING
Over Delegation

When tasks are delegated which fall within the area of ‘supervisory tasks’, this is known as over delegation.  Normally this would be considered to be an unacceptable practice, although there are certain circumstances under which delegation of these tasks would be acceptable.
Unacceptable reasons would include that the supervisor:
Dislikes the task
Is too lazy to do the task
Delegates to prove authority
Thinks everything should be delegated.
Some acceptable reasons would be:
Training/Coaching: where the task is normally done by the supervisor, but is delegated as part of a training session.
Succession planning: where an individual has been identified for potential promotion, or to deputize in the absence of the supervisor, certain tasks may be delegated which would normally be done by the supervisor.

EFFECTS OF OVER OR UNDER DELEGATING
The effects on the team leader who delegates too much, or too little are:
Too much:

• Causes resentment
• Loses respect
• Loses touch, and maybe loses control

Too little:

• Is overworked
• Has no time for planning
• Makes no provision for work being done in his absence
• Makes no provision for work being done in his absence
• Is despised by the team
• Is taken advantage of by the team

The effects on the team when the leader delegates too much or too little are:
Too much:

• Team is overworked and inefficient
• Team is prone to making mistakes
• Team resents the leader
• Staff turnover is high

Too little:

• Individuals don’t develop
• Motivation is low
• Team becomes complacent
• Team feels insecure

So… what can you do?

Here are 3 helpful tips from our manual on best practices on the process of effective delegation – they have worked beautifully with several of our Clients over the past decade and I hope that you get similar results. If you need some help implementing the following, just drop us a line.

THE 10 COMMANDMENTS OF DELEGATION

1. Choose the right person
2. ‘Sel’egate
   • WIIFM
   • IMPORTANCE
3. Coach
4. Specify results
5. Talk it through
   • How?
   • Action Plan
   • Deadlines
6. Never tell when you can ask
7. Give authority
8. Monitor implementation
9. Regular review/feedback
1
10. Support
11. TRUST THEM!

The Delegation Process
(Some Key Points in a bit more detail)

1. Deciding what to delegate = planning
   • Examine your own work and decide what can be delegated.
   • Plan to delegate now, do not wait for a crisis.
   • Decide the outcomes to be achieved, not the activities involved.
   • Plan the limits of the task, resources and time required.
   • Think about the criteria for measurement and control.
   • Decide on the person.
   • Think about what support the person will need.
2. Selling
   • Decide how to ‘sell’ it to the person involved
   • Ensure initial briefing is clear
   • Invest time in the briefing
   • check understanding and
   • choose  the time and place carefully
3. Their Plan of Action
   • Ask what they plan to do and how they plan to do it.
   • Ask about the timetable and what control check they will use.
   • Agree the reporting back method and the frequency.
4. Implement and never tell what you can ask
   • When you spot a problem, or potential problem, and they do not, ask questions.
   • When things go wrong, ask questions.  Let them solve the problem with your support.
   • Do not take the task back, unless the circumstances are exceptional.
   • Remember your responsibilities and use mistakes to learn and to plan for the future.
   • Inform others what you have delegated and to whom.
5. Follow up and …
   • Carry out the agreed reporting procedures.
   • Encourage and give credit for good performance.
   • Trust them.

My favorite delegation acronym is SMART, or better still, SMARTER. It’s a quick checklist for effective delegation and it’s more than 50 years old – it goes like this:

Delegated tasks must be:
•    Specific
•    Measurable
•    Agreed
•    Realistic
•    Timebound
•    Ethical
•    Recorded

In a nutshell… that’s all you really need to get started with delegation. If you have questions or comments, please feel free to share your thoughts with us – we’d love to hear from you.

The mouse immediately ran into the barnyard to warn the other animals, “Hey guys, there’s a mousetrap in the farmhouse!”

The hen clucked “It’s not my problem!  I’m not a mouse.”

The pig responded.  “Sorry to hear the news, but all I can do is recommend that you don’t get caught in it.”

“It’s really no big deal, just ignore the thing.” said the cow.

The mouse returned to his little hole in the wall to wait for the farmer and his wife to go to sleep so that he could begin his daily quest for a bit of leftover cheese in the darkness.  The sudden snapping sound of the mousetrap disfiguring its prey caught everyone by surprise.

The first on the scene was the farmer’s wife. She was half asleep and failed to notice the venomous snake on the floor until it bit her. The snake apparently entered the house looking for a rodent dinner when it got caught in the trap.  The farmer rushed his wife to the hospital for treatment and then brought her back to the farm where the side-effects from the drugs and venom antidote created a high fever and excruciating pain.

On the premise that chicken soup would reduce the fever, the farmer sacrificed his chicken for the soup.  But the wife’s condition did not improve. Friends provided help around the clock so that the farmer could tend to his crops and animals.  In order to feed them the farmer butchered the pig.  Alas, the wife did not survive the week and hundreds more came to her funeral forcing the farmer to slaughter the cow to provide enough meat for the hungry and respectful crowd.

The mouse watched the events unfold with great sadness from his little hole in the wall. All his barnyard friends (the ones who ignored his warning) were now gone.

We all know stories like that:  we see a problem and try to warn our co-workers but they just don’t see the big picture until it’s too late.

When one area of your company is in trouble, chances are good that the entire company’s performance will feel the impact.  For example, if there are issues with production, sales will be impacted when Customers don’t receive their orders on time. Similarly, sales may be slow and it is only a question of when production will be reduced to reflect the decrease in demand.

Phone lines and websites that can’t keep up with demand can shut down an operation overnight and permanently damage the brand and your reputation even if sales are high and production is on schedule.  A natural disaster such as snowstorm, hail, hurricane or flood will derail the most efficient of businesses unless contingency plans are in place for remote operation.

It really does not matter if you are a one-person operation or a team player in a major corporation, you should always be prepared and ask yourself:  What could go wrong?

At BoxOnline, we call this process Protecting the Plan.

Protect Your Plan - Put our PPA Process to work today

A planned response to situations that have the potential for wiping out profit and ruining your business is what gives you that extra edge should disaster strike.

Setting up a contingency plan or taking preventative measures to minimize the most likely causes of potential problems are two processes that you can initiate immediately. We have well over a decade of Client experience Protecting The Plan and look forward to helping you and your team feel more at ease, knowing that you are prepared for the worst.

Remember the lesson many of us learned in school, the time to study for a test is before you take it.

Be prepared, or be prepared to fail.

His book held my full attention for several hours and in addition to being a good writer, Dan is a superb public speaker. The presentation you are about to watch, offers some insight into how people make decisions. You may want to check any preconceived notions at the door, this video offers a glimpse into the reality of how effective marketing can be when the marketer is able to tap into a predictable pattern of behavior. Naturally, our consultants leverage many of the concepts that Dan covers in this video but, I did not want to sell you on our services here… I simply wanted to share great video content, especially when the speaker is a professor at MIT. The presentation is refreshing and interesting but above all else, Predictably Irrational.

By now most of our readers know that the two most
 important elements for people doing business online 
are conversions and traffic.

In the past I’ve mentioned the “one thing that 
always wins” for both traffic and conversion – and
 that “thing” is CONTENT.

Great content will get your site noticed in the
 Search Engines and will also help you convert
 leads into Customers if presented in a logical
 and convincing way.

OK, now you ask… it might be great if content 
always wins for traffic and conversion… but how
 do you turn that into money?

Well, I’ve used just about every revenue system
 under the sun since I started out. I’ve sold all
 kinds of things – from continuity programs to ebooks to 
home-study courses to online courses to membership 
sites to physical products. I’ve also sold 
advertising on my sites, in my ezines, and
 probably a few other places I can’t remember. And 
I’ve made hundreds of thousands of dollars with
 affiliate programs and Adsense.
And what I’ve learned about actually
 extracting money from a web site is this:
There are 
basically TWO ways to make money online:
1. You can sell your stuff.

2. You can sell other people’s stuff.

Hey, that might sound overly simple, but it’s CRITICAL 
that you understand it and how these two relate
 (and WHY they relate.)

First off, I’m a huge fan of selling my own stuff. 
This gives you big time control, positioning…
and most importantly it gives you higher profit
 margins.

And higher margins aren’t just about you making
 more money, it’s about your business survival.

For example, if you’re selling a $97 widget that
 someone else is producing, you might only make $10
 or $20 per widget that you sell. That might sound good, but if you’re competing
 against someone else who is manufacturing that
 widget (or a competing widget), and they are
 making $50 in profit per widget… then you aren’t
 going to be able to compete.

Higher margins mean you have more money to spend
 to pull in more traffic and increase your conversions.
For this reason, I think it’s important for you to 
have your own high-margin products. Maybe not when 
you first start out in your business, but it’s
 something you should quickly work toward.

Personally, I love information products for this 
purpose – they are relatively easy to create and
 they carry typically high margins.

All that said, you should also use the 
second revenue system – selling other people’s 
stuff.
Why?
1. Because it will balance out your cash flow
2. And you will never be able to create all 
the products that your prospects want.

Trust me on this – no matter what market you’re 
in, your prospects and Customers will have a 
bigger demand than you can meet.

Some people think they can put a wall up around 
their Customers, and keep them from straying to a
 competitor.
Well that’s pure fantasy… it’s not going to happen,
 not when they can find ten competitive solutions 
in the time it takes to do a search online. So you might as well be the trusted source 
introducing them to other people’s stuff.

So let’s break this down – what exactly do I mean 
by “selling other people’s stuff”…
In fact, if you’re doing any form of affiliate marketing,
 marketing CPA offers, advertising, or even
 Adsense… then you’re already selling other
 people’s stuff. Nothing wrong with ANY of that. In fact it’s
 GOOD… for the reasons I outlined above. You just
 need to be really clear about these two revenue 
systems, and understand that you can easily 
implement each of them to boost your bottom line.

And one more time – I think you should do both.

I know that when I first started out, I didn’t
 have the knowledge or the confidence to create my 
own products, so I sold other people’s stuff…

Basically, I had two CPA offers (CPA stands for 
Cost Per Action) on my site… they were what we 
call “soft offers”, one for a newsletter and one for 
a software product. That means I generated leads – people would sign
up for a free trial on my site, and I would get 
paid for each person that took the trial. The
 people didn’t have to buy, didn’t have to give a
 credit card… didn’t have to do anything other 
than request a free trial.

That CPA offer was the way I made my very first 
dollars online, and it went on to pay my expenses 
every month for about nine years.

As an aside, marketing CPA offers is a GREAT
revenue generator, and I have a soft spot for it
 since it was the way I started making money 
online.

Unfortunately, over the years it’s gotten harder
 to get approved for those CPA offers. The big CPA
 brokers are really hard-core about who they will
 approve… frankly, if it were this way back in
 1996 I never would have been approved in the first
 place – and it might have cut my Internet
 Marketing career short way back then.

Today, one of my colleagues just opened the 
doors to his own CPA network and he is allowing 
just about anyone curious enough to join
 as long as they are determined to succeed.

If you are interested in giving CPA a whirl, 
let me know and I’ll have him send you a personal
 invitation.

Since hourly rates for coding, additional costs for rapid development and pricing of tools and other resources can fluctuate based on circumstances beyond our immediate control, we offer the following guidelines to help you create a consistent and justifiable budget that is also realistic.

The Basics
A budget is one of those pivotal tools that is used to make decisions in many areas of a company. When creating budgets please keep the GIGO rule in mind and input quality data as often as possible. For developers, budgets dictate the amount of time they can spend on specific areas of an application. For the project manager, it’s a baseline used to determine if the project is on track. For our Client, the budget correlates directly to the success of the effort. Regardless of circumstance, a number of basic philosophies can help your budgeting immensely by protecting it from subjective review. By understanding the basic concepts, and making sure that everyone involved understands them as well, you’ll be on the right track toward an accurate projection:

Identifying project costs 

When you’re identifying the costs of development, stay as close to reality as possible. Look at performance of the team members on past projects to get a feel for how long it will take them to program a given amount of code. Consult with your lead developer. Watch out for braggadocios estimates & consider multiplying your developer’s estimate by 3 to pad for your risk assessment stage. Remember to include costs for integration, meetings, security certificates, license fees, quality assurance, debugging, documentation, material costs, testing, deployment and planning time are all areas that need to be included in your estimate. Whether we will be billing our Client for these items or not, they are all valid and substantial expenses of a project. Including them will help you accurately measure the profitability of the solution down the road.

Be sure to itemize estimates for features that were not included in the specification. These are items that you suspect will be requested later on or those that would be beneficial to the final product. List these as options in your proposal and budget for them. Another good thing to up-sell is developer support time for about 60 days after launch. Often when a project is rolled out, support groups aren’t in place yet and thus many questions get deferred to the developers – plan for this eventuality.

Once you’ve got your costs outlined, it’s time to look at the probability of staying within those boundaries.

Risk
Risk assessment and assignment is very important to a successful budget. Without it, the crises that occur regularly and are an inherent part of any project, will affect your bottom line. Values in your estimate need to have this padding built in – it should not be considered a part of sales mark-up. Risk represents actual costs incurred over the course of development. Risk line items should include things like development team experience (or lack thereof), obscurity (supportability) of the technology used, planning time shortages, number of development teams, location of development teams, number of modular components, proximity and availability of the project driver, product dependencies such as databases or third-party software, server side technology, hosting configurations (cloud etc) and any unknowns.

Once you’ve determined your risk items, assign a scope and percentage to each. For example, if one part of your application is to be built in C and another in PHP, and your team consists mostly of C programmers, the PHP component may have a higher risk assignment under the ‘developer experience’ line item. The percent assigned should be applied only to the relevant portion of the project.

All projects have a certain amount of risk involved that can be attributed to human nature. People get sick, take vacation, disappear without notice etc. No one is an expert in everything. I always assign a percentage risk to this area – in addition to other considerations. Here is a sample of how we assess risk: An average 10-developer, 6-month project justifies a risk assessment of 7 percent of the total project costs. For longer projects and smaller teams, it will be higher; for shorter projects and larger teams, it will be lower. If your overall risk assessment is between 20 and 30 percent of the total project cost, you are within our operating norms.

Your actual total risk percentage will depend on your experience in evaluating the team and the pending effort. If, after calculating an estimate, your numbers are coming out too high, look at other projects delivered by your company. Did they actually fall within their budget? If not, your numbers may be justified. If so, you may be giving your team too little credit. Rectify project-to-project discrepancies before presenting your estimate to the project driver.

Regardless of how close you come to reality, a Client will be much happier if your project comes in below budget rather than over it; however, too high a risk value can create sticker shock, revealing inexperience and creating misgivings about your management abilities. By following the guidelines we’ve suggested and applying some common sense, you are more likely to deliver your upcoming projects on time, on budget and meeting your Client’s quality expectations. Remember that Time, Quality and Cost are interrelated. If you modify one of them, it will more than likely impact the others.

PRODUCT LINE:

Medical Examination Gloves
(yawn)

BACKGROUND:
Medline is the leading provider of healthcare supplies and equipment to the long term care market. One of their product lines is gloves. They had already delivered latex gloves to the market for 40+ years, added a strong and durable line to deal with high-risk and high-stress settings, expanded with vinyl for the low cost market and the latex intolerant and even added aloe to the inner coating to soothe and moisturize. Management was struggling to come up with an innovative product that could both enhance the line and draw more attention to their brand.

CONCEPT:
Support a charity.

Get one or more Customers to participate and produce a viral video.
The charity: The National Breast Cancer Foundation
The product: http://www.medline.com/breast-cancer-awareness/pink-glove.asp
The Customer: Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, OR USA
The video: (see below)

THE GIVING:
Medline has donated almost a half million dollars to the National Breast Cancer Foundation to provide education and free mammograms to those in need.

THE EARLY RESULTS:
The Charity: Thanks to the increased exposure and awareness, donations increased by 9% during the past  month period not including those donations made by Medline.

The product: According to internal sources, sales quotas have been exceeded for the quarter but exact numbers were not yet available.

The Customer: More than 200 employees of Providence St. Vincent Medical Center took part in the team building event which strengthened moral and brought many diverse groups together to support the project.

The Pink Glove Dance video has been viewed more than 8 million times on You Tube!

Communication allergy number one is Stalling.
When a person responds to a CEO’s question they should try to refrain from using phrases such as “It depends” and “I’m not sure but..”
The truth is that when a person responds in this manner, they state the obvious and then confirm that they either really don’t have a clue and can’t actually answer the question or that they don’t necessarily want to tell the truth.

If you want to keep your CEO happy, give a direct response in one to two sentences. Be honest, brief and intelligent. If your boss wants more of an explanation, they will ask for it.

Communication allergy number two is Withholding Information.
Your CEO is there to help solve problems and manage risks. If you decide that you know what you’re doing and deliberately try to solve a problem with a key account before involving the CEO, you are probably going to be looking elsewhere for employment and perhaps a bit more education. It’s amazing how many managers actually do this, risking their jobs and reputations at the same time.
Why would someone hide important information from the CEO? Simple, they know the CEO will blast them with questions: “Why didn’t you anticipate this? Why didn’t you do X, Y, and Z to prevent it? Why haven’t you done A, B, and C to fix it?” If you want to keep you CEO happy, summarize each situation that presents adversity, do a PPA on it and seek input from your boss – perhaps there is something that s/he can do to influence the outcome of this threat. A successful Swiss CEO that I know well used to have a boss who would send an army of analysts to question the team if he suspected that one of his directors was not telling him the whole truth. In order to put a fire out before it even got started, this successful CEO told his former boss during the first month of his employment at the firm: “I hear that you don’t like negative surprises, so I promise to keep you in the loop within a few hours of identifying and verifying that we have a problem. Please give me a day or so after that to investigate why it occurred and then I’ll get back to you with what we believe to be the most probable cause, what we’re doing to get back on track and how we plan to prevent it from recurring.” My friend and current CEO of the very same firm, was never was visited by that army of analysts.

Communication allergy number three is Too Many Details.
CEOs typically guard their time vigilantly so try not to waste a single moment with details on ‘how’ you plan to do something unless you are asked for such details. Use your time wisely and come to the point as quickly as possible. Never use suspense as a tactic when delivering information or responding to your CEO’s queries. This may sound like a no-brainer but it is amazing how many people choose to bore CEOs to death with details rather than getting straight to the point delivering information directly, honestly and succinctly – yes, even bad news. The folks that wish to justify their verbal output in some way before actually responding to a question are primary targets during downsizing cycles… need I say more?

So in summary, don’t stall, don’t withhold information and don’t bury your boss in details. Just prepare in advance, do some careful thinking prior to the meeting and then present your case concisely so that you encourage input, guidance and a solid basis for decision making. Feel free to test the above with Clients as well… it could possibly improve your closing rate.

In many ways the world of commerce is a perfect place for a social network to flourish. Doing business, after all, boils down to managing a web of relationships with Customers, prospects, suppliers and others. Professional networks make it easier for people to maintain such relationships and to forge new ones. LinkedIn, for instance, has over 500,000 groups—some better than others—on specialised subjects that people can join to share ideas and make new contacts. Such connections may prove useful later on.

Research has shown that the more distant members of people’s professional networks are often the best source of new job leads. Job-hunters can also use their networks to gather intelligence about prospective employers and to solicit recommendations that strengthen their candidacies, and they can benefit from some of the career tools that networks provide. LinkedIn, for example, has launched a service that aggregates data it holds to show career paths for certain professions. So someone who wants to become, say, head of consulting at a large company in ten years’ time can see what sort of jobs have led to such roles for others in the past.

Online networks have attracted plenty of attention from corporate recruiters too. Olivier Fecherolle, the head of Viadeo’s French operations, says that for an employer the networks have several advantages over online job boards. One is that people visit them frequently, so profiles on the sites tend to be more up-to-date than those on job boards. Another benefit, he says, is that the networks’ rich profiles help recruiters get a good feel for a candidate without having to spend time on and delve into a detailed curriculum vitae.

But perhaps the biggest attraction is that the professional networks help firms to cut search costs.

Don Cooper, a recruiter at Intel, reckons that they save millions of dollars a year in fees by recruiting senior managers through LinkedIn rather than using headhunters or executive search firms. US Cellular, a telecoms company, says it saved over $1m last year by using LinkedIn that produced good candidates for its jobs faster than traditional recruitment channels.

Mr Piskorski of the Harvard Business School thinks professional networks have been successful because they offer a way for people to participate passively in the job market yet still claim plausibly that they are seeking out information to do their current job better. Companies put up with this, he says, because the benefit they get from better-informed workers more than offsets the cost of losing them when they get poached.

All this makes labor markets more efficient. By cutting out middlemen such as headhunters and executive search firms,  corporations save money. And by looking at rich online profiles of candidates, they can cut the time it takes to get the right people into jobs. Network users, for their part, get what Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s chairman, calls an “active sonar” system that publishes their skills to a broad marketplace with minimal effort and collects the responses that ping back with job opportunities.

Social networks have made the labour market more transparent in another way too. A survey by CareerBuilder.com of about 2,700 executives in America last year found that 45% of them looked at job candidates’ social-network pages as part of their research, and more than a third of those had unearthed information there that put them off hiring someone. Time to turn up those privacy settings?

Want our team members to show you how to make Linked In and other similar services work for you?  Just contact us on this page today.

• Provide an adequate level of documentation

Modern software development methodologies may lead you to believe that less documentation is better, however this isn’t necessarily always the case. For starters, the best documentation that is provided is the user interface. Not only does the UI show the developer where data should be and how it should be formatted, but also represents the basic flow of what needs to happen. A well thought-out and complete UI will make you a developer’s dream colleague. Granted, there will always be developers who don’t like everything defined and love to take liberties with your interface. These developers are rare (and most of the time unwelcome) in the design community.

• Stay ahead

As a designer, you don’t need to have every single page thought out before starting development, but it is helpful to stay ahead of the developers. Plan your features accordingly, and make sure you at least have some type of structure (HTML, etc) ready to go when they need it. It is a lot easier for developers to come through on a polished page and insert data where it is needed instead of creating the page from scratch and having the designer come in after them.

• Be decisive

As designers, we make hundreds of decisions on each interface we work on. Whether it is the height of navigation, the amount of text in a table cell, or the alignment of text in the footer, we need to make many decisions each and every day. This is very much like for developers who have just as many (or more) nitpicky decisions to make on every piece of functionality they write. But the beauty of development is that it is less subjective than design. Sure, the architecture, code style and language could all be subject to opinions, but not in the way that design is subjective. Some people prefer stock images, while others illustrations. Everyone has a favorite color, while many colors may be perceived differently by every person.

Designers need to decide what the interface should look like. Although some developers may enjoy tinkering with the UI, it’s not their job; and ultimately slows them down from what they should be doing: developing.

• Don’t change mid-cycle

It is also important to try not to change the design while the developer is in the middle of building that specific feature. Agile and Scrum methodologies insist that the developers work with the requirements they had at the time, and in the following sprint, the developer could revisit the feature and make modifications. As designers, we should try to avoid any type of refactoring of the UI as we can. It is tedious work for developers to go back and change HTML.

Choose an HTML structure and stick to it. Try to account for any type of design feature in your first draft of the HTML (even if it makes your HTML seem somewhat bloated). CSS should already control the look of your interface, so try to think of HTML as backend code that is more difficult to change than a font color in CSS.

Developers don’t like refactoring their code as much as we don’t like providing revisions to Clients. Get the ‘most perfect’ result as soon as you can.

• Communication is key, so be available

You have spent countless hours mocking up the UI, polishing it to your liking and you’re ready to hand it off to the development team. Often times, this is where design ends and development begins. As designers, this is where we should be most involved to ensure that the design concept is fully realized in the working application. Avoid just ‘throwing the design over the fence’, and hoping the developers implement it exactly how you have envisioned it in your mind.

• Stay Involved

Stay close to the project. At the least, be available by e-mail so the developers can contact you about issues with your designs. Respond quickly to ensure your developers are staying on track with the final product. Once again, be decisive in your communication. Most of the time, the real data doesn’t match what you mocked up, and there are many issues you will need to work out in conjunction with your developer.

• Avoid the feature creep

The crew over at 37signals recently wrote a book called Getting Real which talks about this exact problem. This topic probably stems more toward product managers, however it is also important for designers. Always ask yourself, “why does this feature matter?”Avoid a UI that is far too complex, as it only adds time on to development, and ultimately forces you to miss deadlines. If you can’t come up with a good reason why it should be included, then it doesn’t need to be there. It will only slow your team down, as well as create more for you to support.

• Stay Focused

Focus on what is important for your users. For example, if your users aren’t going to use invoicing heavily, or you already know better alternatives exist in the market that you can’t beat, don’t include them.

As we developed one of our recent projects, we weren’t planning on providing a full suite of tools that included invoicing. We wanted to concentrate on proposals, bids and RFPs; knowing that we still needed to serve a small user base that may require invoicing. We choose to add in a bare-bones system (simple line items, nothing recurring), because we felt it may be useful to some people that didn’t already have an invoicing solution. We also realized that users probably wouldn’t want to switch to our invoicing system (mainly because they already had a solution), so there was no sense in creating something robust.

• Set realistic deadlines, and stick to them

As designers, we can quickly turn around designs in a few days and be done with it. Unfortunately, this is not the case for development. The ratio of design to development hours is not even close to 1:1. Make sure your deadlines allow enough time for the developer to implement the features, as well as any back and forth time for questions.

No matter how hard you try to hit your deadlines, something always comes up. Perhaps another project, kids, family, etc. Try your best not to announce any hard dates until you are absolutely sure you will hit them. Announce the week before (or even month before) if you feel comfortable. If you just started a project, never commit to launching in the next 6 months. It just won’t happen, and your users may or may not hold you accountable for that date.

• Don’t make promises you can’t keep

As irritating as missing deadlines is for you and your team, its even more irritating for potential customers that are waiting for your app to change their workflow. Be vague about deadlines, and keep people wanting more.

• Test it yourself

Don’t rely on your developers to write perfect code, as it will never happen. You can’t always rely on developers to test their code to make sure it functions properly, fulfills requirements and ultimately works in the manner you described. But remember, developers don’t write buggy code on purpose. They would rather write perfect code and work on newer, cooler features each release. Since your developers are so close to the code and system, they will inevitably miss something. Don’t blame them, help them fix it. Explain to them where it’s failing and what the desired action should be.

Also as you take on the testing, this frees up the developer to keep moving on the back-end, which once again, is where they should be focusing. And as you find bugs, make sure to fully document them, including screenshots, how to recreate and most importantly, the desired outcome.

Of all the developers we’ve worked with, none of them have been interested in any type of testing past in-the-code unit testing. Large enterprise shops higher entire Quality Assurance teams to follow-up on developers work (which doesn’t make it right, but it’s the way it is). Help your developers out by testing their features — your app will be much better for it and your users will thank you.

• Metrics

One last point is to measure performance. Set milestones and goals and make sure you are hitting your marks. Try to monitor how your team is doing on fixing bugs versus creating new features, as there will always be a snowball effect. Fix bugs early and often to prevent them from growing into larger and more complex bug colonies in the future. And always, always always start the project with a clearly defined end result in a graphic so that everyone sees the same goal and can give valuable input on how to get there.

Since we want our own Customers to walk away feeling so good about their experience with us that they just can’t wait to tell others, we need to be sure that we empower the right people closest to our Customers, that they have an appropriate level of authority and that they have the right tools supporting the entire process.

If you deal with Customer service issues on a daily basis then you need a set of tools that help make your job easier. Customer service is a process that can be a pleasure for all involved if you know what to do next, have the appropriate tools working for you and are able to deliver satisfaction to your Customers effectively in both written and verbal form.

Now, don’t get me wrong, not everyone is cut out to be a Customer service rep – it takes a special person to do well with this kind of challenge. In our experience, those who excel in such a role are the type of individuals convinced that their Customer is King. For these lovely people, I’d like to extend a personal thank you as both a business owner and as one of your Customers – you folks are the reason that I recommend your products and services to my list without hesitation.

Who are we to recommend something in the Customer support space? Well, over the past 10 years BoxOnline’s b6group consultants have implemented more than 60 Customer service solutions for our Clients and from that experience across a broad install base, I’d like to share some tips on improving your Customer service processes so that you too can focus on delivering world-class Customer service instead of fighting with technology that was not designed to treat Customers as King or to make your life any easier.

Let’s try to tackle these items one at a time with the objective of satisfying more Customers, following up with each issue in a professional, organized and sequential manner and also allowing these Customers to walk away feeling so good about their experience with you and your company that they just can’t wait to tell others about the great experience.

To deliver world-class Customer service you are going to need three things.
1. A ticketing system
2. An issue tracker
3. A platform for Customer service

While most software used to be installed directly on your computer or server, today there is a web application service model rapidly gaining acceptance. Three superb examples of such systems are Zendesk, JIRA and Get Satisfaction. I list these Apps specifically because they are not only three of the best Customer service web-based applications we have implemented in the past but also because they are now well integrated to provide a best of breed complete CS solution. Ticketing system Zendesk, issue tracker JIRA, and Customer service platform Get Satisfaction can now communicate seamlessly with each other.

Though much of this functionality was created independently by each of the three vendors, the result is a smooth connection between a public support tool, an enterprise issue tracker and a customizable help desk. Together, the trio delivers a powerful set of tools for responding to Customers in either a public or private forum.

The basic process outline is that CS issues and bug reports get submitted into the system by your Customer service reps (or your own Customers) then a ticketing system handles each request, humans prioritize and delegate the tasks and decisions if needed and then resolutions are shared and resolved via Customer dialog.

Get Satisfaction provides a friendly front door for Customers to enter into a dialog with your team plus optional access to positive communities where they can interact with others.

Ticketing systems are an enormously helpful way for a company to prioritize support issues, but for Customers it can be frustrating to report a problem and then be given a really long string of numbers and letters as proof that they submitted a problem to your team. But what happens then? If companies do the follow-up steps of ticketing poorly, they end up making Customers feel like they’ve been swindled. The exact opposite is what we refer to as Customer Zen and a company called Zendesk has tackled this issue superbly with an elegant and simple solution. They offer a great ticketing and tracking system.

To take this example one step further, let’s say that your business has a technical side to it and you have a software development team who need to identify and kill bugs regularly as they improve your software. Well, Zendesk has a plugin for JIRA (one of the best bug and issue trackers ever invented). This plugin allows anyone to draw tickets into the tracker, while any updates within JIRA are automatically mirrored in your Zendesk. This means that a developer can continue to use JIRA to resolve the bug while your support staff can use Zendesk to keep your Customer informed and both platforms are updated simultaneously and seamlessly.

Tying It All Together
The final piece of the puzzle is the Zendesk and Get Satisfaction integration. This is direct fusing of the two apps. Today you can send and edit Zendesk support tickets without ever leaving your Get Satisfaction interface.

So what this all means is that Get Satisfaction has evolved into a superb Customer Service tool that makes your Customers feel special while giving them the support that they need to resolve each and every one of their issues with your company, your products, your services and your staff. So if you are in need of a powerful viral marketing weapon – try giving great Customer service and then power it with both Get Satisfaction and Zendesk.