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3rd August 2004
OK the page has had the tag Currently undeveloped for some time now and I have 30 minutes on the train in which to add my thoughts. I don't know how often I can keep this page up to date, or exactly what I should put in in since I am constrained by a number of NDA's with all but a very few of my clients.
This is my situation at the moment:
I am working for clients more than full time. I spend between 8 and 14 hours per day with clients 5 days a week. I tend not to work on Saturday's unless I have to - usually at the behest of HM Customs and Excise at the end of VAT period, but hey ho! Sundays I tend to work for about 6 hours on writing up any note I have made during the week or updating peoples systems from things I have learnt - ie if I know after a certification visit that one body is suddenly always asking about root cuase analysis (which happened recently) then I make sure all my current clients are aware of it and I add some useful words to their corrective actions procedure
The consultancy market - currently I am working for one very large telecoms operator across Europe, which means a lot of European travel to their hubs and Customer Fault Help Desks. Last week was Frankfurt, this week is the fallout of the visit and planning for the trip next week to Madrid. It is not exciting, but it must be done and as a result we are uncovering massive opportunities for improvement. Truly massive. Ok so when I am not working for this client, I am working with a small defense company, they are just about to reach certification, so there will be a little tidying up I'm sure, but then they will have a very useful system that has already shown significant benefits freeing up the time of the MD from his desk. I'm working with a fast growing IT hardware and monitoring company who seem very organised, but have very little knowledge of the actual standard - they even conduct audits of their main suppliers for quality even though they know little of auditing! Great news! Well I'm conducting a full audit of the company on Monday next week - so we shall see! I am also working on a number of long standing projects with existing clients. Of note are a drainage company in South West London who have seen and continue to see major benefits from running their systems. I am also working as much as I can (which is sometimes not as much as I would like) with a client who have already achieved 9001 registration, but want to achieve BS7799 too. This is a very similar project in some ways to 9001, but more intense in some ways as it requires a considerably more documented system which takes more time. More of that at a later date though.
We have been engaged by quite a few new clients of late. Almost all of these have approached us through this website as they say they like our approach. One thing of note over the last 12 months or so is that, almost without exception, no-one has engaged us due to commercial pressure. They have decided to do this because it is a good idea. My thoughts on this are two fold - firstly great - people are taking this seriously - secondly - without commercial pressure why actually achive certification? Why not just run a good system and be done with it and not incur the expense of certification? But what do I know? They all want to achieve certification so that's what we do!
I think the market is a little quiet as people are on their holidays and don't want to commit to a new project, but as usual when September comes around, everyone will want to start their projects and we will be off again. Last year we dropped our prices for July and August work to relfect this, but since we are so busy across the board, there was no need to. Rather than raise our prices once we are back in the swing of things, I am beginning to ramp up the business and getting more people to help us out. Are we finally growing? I'm not sure, but slowly slowly catchy monkey! I do enjoy helping clients, but at the moment if I can do this better only being on-site three days a weeks and the rest in the office organising and training other people - I think I would take it!
OK - brass tacks - today I spent the day in recover mode from the trip to Frankfurt. There are aq lot of corrective actions to agree, debriefs from the audit to have, planning for the next trip to Madrid and I need to help on my the audit team along with his skills as although he is a qualified internal auditor, he is not always cutting to the issue which means his reports are very lengthy and take for ever to write and for me to review! This sort of approach helps no-one. Management want to know what the issue is and at this stage that is all - they do not want to know what to do about it. If they do want to know our opinion, or for us to something about it, then that is covered when we agree corrective actions but we haven't reached that stage yet! Perhaps tomorrow.....
I cannot believe how long it takes to plan these three days trips, but if you don't get the right people in the right room at the right time, expecting to see a presentation and then be around for an audit, plus the usual flight, hotel room, transfers booking - then you are wasting your time when you arrive - possibly completely!
OK that will do for day one!
David
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