BarCamp Sydney 2008 Saasu on PRODUCTIVITY

By Marc Lehmann | Director/Founder

What is it to be productive?

Good entrepreneurs convert negatives into positives

Good entrepreneurs convert manual processes into automated ones

Incrementally improve automationAlways try and kill off the extremely manual tasks first.

Even better, kill off the boring bits so people enjoy their job.

Service as a sales channel

Turn what is normally a cost into a benefit and continue to commoditise service through procedure and automation.

Service is an opportunity to:SellLearnAutomate helpMake customers happy

Create an exceptions based businessAutomate everything you can with systems and procedures.

Saasu.com | the web finance engine is obviously a good start.

Keep attacking the worst exceptions.Ask what's slowing us down?

Minimise transition and duplication costs.Moving between tasks has transition costs. Minutes saved per day lead to many hours saved per year. The cumulative effect.

The magic of compounding productivity.Small amounts of automation or productivity today result in a large Future Value impact on your business. Better still, many small gains over time create compounding efficiency.

This is what I believe allows some business to achieve the seemingly impossible with limited resources and time.

Make peoples jobs fun. If you don't they'll lay about.give your staff equity and automate the boring stuff

Exercising cheap or free options.Outsourcing can be so cheap that it is nearly a free option. E.g. extremely cheap service plans from Apple are very 'insurance like'. Potentially capping cost for a small premium.

Systems simplicityReduce the number of systems you use.Adopt more online services. Reduce the complexity and duplication of tasks....The All SaaS Enterprise (ASE) is the way of the future..

All SaaS Enterprises (ASE's) are productive.

Your infrastructure and outsource capability is very high in an ASE. Backups, upgrades, data storage and security is cheap. As an example you can get all my flickr photos on a disk for about $20. How can you possibly improve on that by doing backups yourself?

ASE's are Secure. Is the alternative?

Many SaaS applications have API's and CSV exports enabling you to leave very quickly and easily.

SaaS has multiple measures of security and backups that are difficult to achieve in a smaller scale DIY approach.

TCO is old school.

What's the Future Value impact of your investment on your companies equity value? The cultural shifts, the productivity impact, the automation, they must all be factored into the ROI

Good operations = command and control.Control helps create predictable results. Don't stifle the creativity. We give creativity it's time and place but within limits. It's not about clocking on or off but it is about getting projects done and that means coal face work - no two ways about it.

Productive business needs ideas management

We have created our own IDEAS framework to progress an idea through a series of steps so the best ideas float to the surface and get implemented.

Exploit unused time buckets.A simple thing like giving staff mobile web access might create 20 minutes a day where it didn't exist. Reading email or blogs on a train trip as an example.Keep valuing your time!

TPOTime is money, it faces market forces. Saasu built an efficient, low cost of sales business by avoiding jamming too much development into a short time bucket. Fast development means paying a premium price.

TimePriceOpportunity

Rule out, don't rule in.It's too easy to load a Saasu release cycle. We tend to rule out based on lack of requests. We also rule out features that take us back into our competitors arena - we avoid the red ocean.

Key Productivity DriverPassion

Don't let it only be about the money. It also has to be an authentic love of exploration and creation. Most of all it needs to be about the game. Playing it like your on the field, not watching from the stands.

Marc Lehmann

marc@saasu.comskype: marcleh

twitter: marclehmannmobile: +61 434 033 945

web: saasu.comblog: saasu.com/blog

personal blog: marclehmann.netlinkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/marclehmann

Copyright 2008 Saasu Pty Ltd,1st Floor, 111 Elizabeth St Sydney, Australia 2000