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Successful Business Decision Making

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Some people make decisions without any difficulty, while others struggle. Are you having trouble making a decision? Do you feel overwhelmed by all the choices you have, and aren’t sure how to pick just one? No matter how big or small those decisions might be, I can teach you how to strategically:

-- Define your decision and come up with alternatives

-- Determine what criteria you’ll need to help you make the decision

-- Make the decision

"If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin." – Ivan Turgenev, famous 19th-century Russian novelist, poet and playwright

DEFINING THE DECISION AND ALTERNATIVESSTEP 1: What is it that you need to make a decision about? Maybe you have several choices to make, but start with one. Ask yourself a couple of questions that are applicable to your situation, such as:

“What do I want to be doing for the next 6 months?” “What business am I going to start?” “What aspect of my business do I want to grow?”

STEP 2: Determine your primary goal and write it down. For example, you might want to grow your business over the next six months. Therefore, your goal sentence might be: “I want to earn 25% more within the next 6 months.”

STEP 3: After you’ve written your goal sentence, begin brain-storming a list of ideas for how to achieve the goal. Below are some rules for brainstorming:

-- Write all ideas down – ideas are neither bad or good--they’re just ideas!

-- Do not judge or analyze the idea – just write it down.

-- Make the process fun!

You do not have to generate a list of ideas in one sitting, but you may need to set some limits around how much time to spend creating your list. Be creative in how you capture your ideas. Carry a small notebook with you so when an idea comes to you, you’ll be prepared and write it down immediately. I put stickies (Post-It notes) and pens in my purse, car, and bedroom, so whenever and wherever I generate an idea I have a way to capture it. When I’m ready, I collect the stickies and add them to a master list I keep in my office. Just do whatever is easiest for you!

After you feel you’ve completed your options list (or when the time you’ve given yourself to make the list has run out), ask someone you trust to read over your ideas. This person needs to be someone who has a positive attitude and is supportive of your efforts! The person may come up with some options you hadn’t considered. Write them down! Remember, you’re not judging the ideas--just recording them at this stage.

DETERMINING THE CRITERIA AND EVALUATING EACH OPTION

STEP 4: Identify no more than 4 or 5 criteria that you will use to determine how well your options achieve the goal you’ve established.

Decision criteria provide checkpoints to measure your options against your goal. Typical criteria fall into two categories:

Do-ability (do I have the money, time, expertise?)

Likelihood of Success (do they meet the goal in time, revenue, fun factor?).

STEP 5: Using the criteria you’ve defined, evaluate each option. This process can be as simple, or complex, as you desire, and may be qualitative or quantitative. You may need to allow some time to experiment a bit with some ideas to test them out and determine how well they meet each criteria.

MAKING THE DECISION

STEP 6: Sometimes the winner(s) is obvious…you’ll just pick it and go with it. Or, you may immediately notice certain ideas drop to the bottom of the list and just need to be deleted because they do not support your business needs. When one option is not standing out among the others, you may have to prioritize the options by weighting the criteria to help you evaluate the alternatives and make your decision.

BONUS STEP: Keep in mind, just because an idea may not fit with your current focus; it may serve you later. Create a place to store those ideas--an “idea vault” to tap into the next time you need good ideas!

Terri’s keys to successful decision-making

-- Write it all down!

-- Clarify the decision you are making

-- Know your goals

-- Be creative in coming up with options

-- Trust your gut

-- Don’t procrastinate!

Copyright 2002-2003, Terri Zwierzynski - Accel Innovation, Inc.

My colleagues and I get asked a lot about licensing. Frankly, Microsoft doesn’t have a great reputation for keeping it simple. And to be totally transparent – I, like many of my colleagues, would usually rather stick a fork in my eye that talk about it because it can get complicated. And confusing. And just…ugh.

So you can imagine my joy when I was asked to write a newsletter editorial about simplifying licensing. Exactly.

Then I had a very enlightening conversation with Terry Choquette, Licensing Marketing Manager at Microsoft and she pointed me to a few resources that got back to the basics and laid it all out very simply. I like simple. And I decided that this simple information was as blog worthy as it was newsletter worthy. While details about software licensing is not everybody’s favourite reading material, stick with me on this.

Ways to buy a license

First of all, there are 3 ways to buy a license as illustrated in the slide below: a full packaged product from a retail store, an OEM product on a new computer or a volume agreement from a reseller.

Volume licensing agreements

While you could simply walk into the nearest Best Buy or Future Shop and make your purchase, most organizations that need 5 or more licenses can benefit best from volume licensing agreements. Why? Well, there are some pricing advantages, there are more flexible options based on size and type of business, payment structure, ownership of software, etc., there are additional use rights for cross-language and reimaging machines, and there are use rights to new product versions, support, training, tools, etc., with Software Assurance (more about this below). 

For this post, I’m going to limit my discourse to those organizations who want to license less than 250 devices or users, which I would hazard a guess applies to most of you reading this blog. If you need help with licensing options for 250 devices/users or more, lemme know and I’ll put you in touch with people who can help you or you can check out these online resources.

Below is a great 3.5 minute video that lays out the volume licensing options that are part of the Microsoft Open License program for small and medium sized businesses:

(Please visit the site to view this video)

 

Basically, there are 3 volume licensing agreement options: Open License, Open Value and Open Value Subscription. Now if you want more detail than the video gives (you did watch it right? C’mon it’s only 3.5 minutes long and it’s pretty entertaining!), you’ll want to take a look at the Open License Program Guide. It has a very useful chart on page 8 which compares what you get with an Open License agreement compared to an Open Value agreement.

Software Assurance

Software Assurance is something that can be added to your volume license agreement which provides 24x7 support, deployment planning services, training, and the latest software releases. Although once viewed as simply an insurance policy for free software upgrades, Software Assurance has now been recognized by analysts as an essential tool for getting the most out of your licensing purchase.

Below is a screen shot from an interactive PDF listing the benefits of Software Assurance with each type of licensing agreement.

For more information about Software Assurance and what it can do for your organization, check out the Software Assurance site.

Let me know if this was helpful!

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