Tag: general

A new year is approaching fast, and the last remaining days of 2003 are hastily passing by, leaving time for family and for those involved in Siebel Projects, a well deserved chance to think about something else than Siebel Best Practices, Screens, Views, BusComps, user interface, Integration design, EIM processes and all the other what-have-you-nots of a typical Siebel Project. There are times when even the best running Siebel project is running shallow, and the resources that comprise the team are just on the verge of wearing thin. This is normal in all larger-scale projects and its not a foreign concept in a Siebel project. There are many ways to deal with this challenge in a project team – right this season the re-vitalization of the Christmas holidays is the obvious and easy one – simply ask team members to not think about the project for the holidays…. But there are other things you may want to look into too (after all Christmas is only once a year);

• Look at the team groups;
  • Are they communicating on the same level.
  • Do they combine efforts to make team progress.
  • Are team member only concerned with progress on their own area of responsibility.
  • Are team members actively discussing issues and solutions.
  • Are all team members being involved in the discussions.
  • Are the team members understanding the business reasons for the solution requirement.
  • Do the team make forward-moving decisions – and stick with them.
  • Is the team asking for help and input when facing challenges.
• When you’ve looked at the above points, you probably have some notion if you need to change anything to make the project run better. Here’s a list of steps you could take to make your project teams run even smoother;
• Shuffle members between teams in order to bring fresh thinking and new perspective into a team, if you identified a weakness or deficit on a team, look for a new member that excels in those areas. Don’t present changes as demotions or promotions, but rater as adding catalysts in order to help teams become even more successful. Their success is the projects success.
• Encourage “eXtreme Programming” in the teams when they are being challenged, even though extreme programming methodology is developed for pure programming tasks, it is easily adapted for Siebel Development. Encourage that extreme programming teams are sought across all teams. If you want to know more about extreme programming then read the book “eXtreme Programming eXplained” by Kent Beck.
• Encourage discussions about solutions, but make sure that everybody have the business reasons for the solution requirement clear in memory. Try and provide the teams with simple clear cut business reasons and requirements, just the headlines. This will allow teams to develop a better solution, without discussions creating divergence between customer requirements and resolution.
• Encourage taking mental breaks from the project. both in the weekends, but also during lunch breaks, and in the evening. Sometimes the distancing from the challenges in the project will allow a fresh take on any challenges that a team and it’s members may be facing.

In Manzana we live on our customers’ success, and our ability to scope, develop, implement and rollout solutions that cover the above points and more. And the results speak for themselves. Our customers are satisfied, their employees are satisfied, and resources have been freed for more important tasks. Look at the Customer Success to see some quotes from customer installations that Manzana have built.

Further we pride ourselves in not just being an implementator of Siebel, we also use Siebel actively in Manzana. So our experience also comes from our own daily use of Siebel.

Thanks for your time!
Henrik Ohm Eriksen, CEO
Manzana

If you are considering a CRM or Siebel solution or just want to ask a question, then send us an email and we will get back to you asap. If you would like to inquire on hiring Manzana Services please do not hesitate to contact us, either by email or phone.

And also, we highly recommend you visit the Siebel Inc. homepage at www.siebel.com

This year has been busy, The Economy is improving for many businesses. So again there’s impetus to invest and build a better CRM solution adding new features that has been requested during the unwelcome hiatus. Sometimes a hiatus is a good thing – if you use the time to look at and develop the suggestions and requirements for new functionality. Maybe you need functionality but don’t have budget for it. In this situation you often have choices – and some are good some are bad – and it may not be easy to choose. Think of this when you decide;

• You may need to invest now to save later
• Don’t fall for the temptation to create something now that you will throw away later when you will build “the real solution”.
• Scale down the things you implement from a requirement, so you get the most needed without breaking your budget.
• Make sure that you “build for the future”.

In Manzana we live on our customers’ success, and our ability to scope, develop, implement and rollout solutions that cover the above points and more. And the results speak for themselves. Our customers are satisfied, their employees are satisfied, and resources have been freed for more important tasks. Look at the Customer Success to see some quotes from customer installations that Manzana have built.

Further we pride ourselves in not just being an implementator of Siebel, we also use Siebel actively in Manzana. So our experience also comes from our own daily use of Siebel.

Thanks for your time!
Henrik Ohm Eriksen, CEO
Manzana

If you are considering a CRM or Siebel solution or just want to ask a question, then send us an email and we will get back to you asap. If you would like to inquire on hiring Manzana Services please do not hesitate to contact us, either by email or phone.

And also, we highly recommend you visit the Siebel Inc. homepage at www.siebel.com

Consider the priorities of functionalities that you want to implement in your Siebel application. Siebel comprise many areas of functionality, even if you bought licenses for a limited range of functionality you may well have access to a lot of useful standard functionality. But how and where do you start? There are many best practices that you may well glean valuable information from, best practices established both by Siebel and by the implementators you work with. Boiling them down into useable statements, may help you tremendously in getting your Siebel project from start to finish in the best way possible. You may beg to differ on these best practices and opinions, and you are welcome to do so – they are intended to provoke thought, and careful consideration, which should help you realize your company’s goals with a Siebel implementation without any grief.

• Use the Vanilla Functionality first – then decide how and if you need to change areas of the application to better suit your needs. There are two options here;

1. Change Siebel
2. Change how you do your business

Both options have merit, sometimes you cannot change Siebel to do what you want without breaking the application in places, or making it difficult to upgrade at a later stage. Sometimes you cannot change how your company does things.

• Limit the amount of functionality that you expose to your users from the beginning. But make sure that super users have access to functionality areas not yet used in production – for safety – just do it in your UAT. Doing this should help ensure that your users do not loose sight of new functionality that can be added to the application.
• Get your users on board. There is no excuse on this, you need to educate you users, you need to nurse them, and you need to let them have time to develop an understanding for the application, this way your investment in software and configuration is not lost. If you do not get your users to embrace the application – just forget it then.
• Listen to the users, it goes almost without saying – if you get them onboard, they see improvements to the application and you dismiss all of them, then you’re going to loose the support of the users. Always balance the development to make sure that you provide functionality required by management and by users. Remember there may be differences in what management and end-users want the application to do.

In Manzana we live on our customers’ success, and our ability to scope, develop, implement and rollout solutions that cover the above points and more. And the results speak for themselves. Our customers are satisfied, their employees are satisfied, and resources have been freed for more important tasks. Look at the Customer Success to see some quotes from customer installations that Manzana have built.

Further we pride ourselves in not just being an implementator of Siebel, we also use Siebel actively in Manzana. So our experience also comes from our own daily use of Siebel.

Look for the Download Section, there’s a small free utility that will test your Siebel COM objects.

Thanks for your time!
Henrik Ohm Eriksen, CEO
Manzana

If you are considering a CRM or Siebel solution or just want to ask a question, then send us an email and we will get back to you asap. If you would like to inquire on hiring Manzana Services please do not hesitate to contact us, either by email or phone.

And also, we highly recommend you visit the Siebel Inc. homepage at www.siebel.com

Often Customers ask themselves how to proceed developing a Siebel installation after the initial phase rollout. Many have had serious difficulties with this process, and they have problems with the user acceptance levels. So how do you proceed???

It is indeed an important question to ask when you are looking forward – as a company you may want different things from what your employees want. I don’t claim there’s a simple blue-print solution available, but there are good rules of thumb to follow. And even though some of these may not be the holy grail of many of the implementators – they should be for any company using Siebel.

• Siebel is both a management and an employee tool. Make sure that you balance the development so both users and management get functionality that they need, make sure that there’s new functionality that will make everyday tasks easier and faster to perform. Besides higher user acceptance you get the added benefit of freeing resources for other more important tasks – like selling or keeping contact and building relations with your customers.
• Don’t upgrade just because there’s a new Siebel version out there. There are many good reasons to upgrade, they may include new needed functionality, or lack of support on the old version or other factors. But if the current version is doing what it should and you don’t need the new features – why upgrade, the money may well be better spent developing the current application that you already have invested in. I’m not saying No to Upgrades, but I’m urging caution on the issue.
• Review the installation – and bring your employees into the review as well. Ask yourself what’s working and what’s not. If your employees are not part of the solution, they will not as readily accept the best practices that you as a company choose to embed in your Siebel application.
• Make sure that you don’t take too big steps in your development goals, its better to take two smaller steps more often, than taking a giant leap very rarely.

In Manzana we live on our customers’ success, and our ability to scope, develop, implement and rollout solutions that cover the above points and more. And the results speak for themselves. Our customers are satisfied, their employees are satisfied, and resources have been freed for more important tasks. Look at the Customer Success to see some quotes from customer installations that Manzana have built.

Further we pride ourselves in not just being an implementator of Siebel, we also use Siebel actively in Manzana. So our experience also comes from our own daily use of Siebel.

Thanks for your time!
Henrik Ohm Eriksen, CEO
Manzana

If you are considering a CRM or Siebel solution or just want to ask a question, then send us an email and we will get back to you asap. If you would like to inquire on hiring Manzana Services please do not hesitate to contact us, either by email or phone.

And also, we highly recommend you visit the Siebel Inc. homepage at www.siebel.com

In a time where financial trouble even for the biggest companies is common news many sit down to decide what to do so they and their business stay healthy in such harsh times.

More often than not the item(s) on the agenda will (among others) be;

• Where can we cut costs – what development don’t we need – or at least can live without until better and more profitable times.
• We need more business and more customers to stay ahead.

And it’s perfectly natural to ask these questions. But the answers may turn out to be all wrong. You got to consider a couple of good questions instead (or maybe as well);

• How do we free important human resources from labor intensive tasks that they should not spend time doing?
• What’s the most likely scenario: Get our current customers to buy more or get new customers instead?

The answers may lie in some investments and some clever thinking. And yes – in Manzana we do CRM for a living so naturally we have an agenda here too.

Consider the human resources you already have – if they spend time shuffling paper and looking for facts to support their job function – maybe you should invest a little in giving them better tools that does these tasks for them – freeing up valuable time to deal with customers and building customer relations.

Then consider if you need to attract new customers or focus on the customers you already have – either way there’s a key element in succeeding in both areas – and the magic word is Customer Relations Management. For your existing customers you need to make sure that the customer considers you a good and caring business partner that supply what the customer wants, when they want it. For the new customers you may want to attract it’s really the same thing, delivering quality and service to a new business relation.

Obviously CRM and Siebel is not the magic word alone that just makes your business a success, but it can be an important cornerstone in making sure you focus on the important stuff driving your business.

Thanks for your time!
Henrik Ohm Eriksen, CEO
Manzana

If you are considering a CRM or Siebel solution or just want to ask a question, then send us an email and we will get back to you asap. If you would like to inquire on hiring Manzana Services please do not hesitate to contact us, either by email or phone.

And also, we highly recommend you visit the Siebel Inc. homepage at www.siebel.com