Productivity tools
Scheduling with Success
Having a human scheduling appointments on your behalf sets you apart from the crowd more than ever in a world of web-published calendars and do-it-all mobile devices
Technology-powered tools now available for scheduling are amazing:
- Web apps like Tungle.me and timebridge provide slick functionality for publishing your calendar to the world of people who’d like to select a time to meet with you
- Apple’s Siri takes key scheduling steps on your voice command without you even having to click or swipe
But simply saying “I’ll have my smart phone call your smart phone,” has some key limitations.
Relying entirely on these tools naively implies a business environment in which all parties have an equal interest in meeting. Your most important contacts will appreciate a more personal touch, and human input is critical to navigating the art in that the back-and-forth of “scheduling Ping-Pong,”
So how do you empower your remote admin in the complex and subtle game of business etiquette that starts when two busy people decide to meet and then need to lock down place and time?
It’s not “just” scheduling
Prospective Prialto members will sometimes say they “only” need help with scheduling, as if to imply this is a simple, commodity task.
They are right when the playing field is even and the parties looking to meet have plenty of time. Then it really is simply a matter of finding the next open spot on the calendar. The algorithm is indeed simple, and technology alone may get it done.
Those experienced in leveraging a professional scheduler will more often understand how much time gets consumed. They also know that there is an art to navigating through the complexity of how to time reminders, decide on where to meet and at what time.
Three tactics for getting it right
So how does one best leverage their assistant to track down targets and get you the right meetings in the right place and at the right time?
1) Start slow in the beginning to go fast later:
Many tech equipped, near autonomous knowledge workers have forgotten this basic management need, but there is always a tradeoff between the ease of getting something done yourself today verses taking the time to enable someone else to take it off your hands later. One should never offload key tasks to a new employee without great care. True, you might as well do a task yourself if you will always have to micro mange and explain it to your helper with painful specificity. But micro managing your new scheduler in the beginning is totally appropriate. Take the time to:
- Explain the etiquette of your business and client base
- Download the places you like to meet for which kinds of meetings
- Download the names of your VIPs, the key clients and/or personal contacts that get the highest priority
- Sensitize your assistant on how to discern in your email exchanges the importance of a contact and how that should translate into how a meeting is scheduled
To do all this, you ought to initially watch every email your assistant sends out and then set times to go over and give feedback on how they can be improved. Doing this for just a few days, will quickly yield great time savings and peace-of-mind.
2) Surface key information to the top of long email threads.
A good assistant may successfully disentangle long and complex email threads to decipher what you want done on an email, even if you simply copy him in with no instruction. But it may require a lot of unnecessary energy and time.
A couple of simple specifics as you CC your assistant will save lots of time and energy.
Here’s an email that works well:
Here is an e-mail that does NOT work well:
Develop a scheduling vernacular with your PA
Maintaining positive client relationships with a PA in the middle requires sensitivity. You can’t meet with everyone all the time. You have to prioritize and, while most everyone understands this need, you want to avoid inadvertently insulting even a lower priority contact.
Develop special words that you can place in the kind of email copy above to help your PA prioritize on your behalf.
For example:
- To indicate that you indeed want to meet while tactfully letting your assistant know that this meeting is not the highest priority, say things like “please schedule a coffee” or “please schedule for this month”
- To indicate that a contact, Charlie, is a high priority client who you want to defer to, say something like “please schedule at place and time that works well for Charlie
Oh, and one more thing
See Andy Mowat’s article on how to leverage your assistant to do CRM right. If you are looking to have an assistant help you schedule, you probably are tracking lots of contacts. A CRM and a good CRM process can be amazing tools with which to collaborate with your assistant and track key interactions. But if you’re a relationship person, you probably don’t want to spend too much time meticulously inputting data. Configure your CRM to work with your assistant.
Prialto Voice – A Voice over IP Solution
You’ve probably heard buzzwords such as VoIP, IP PBX, and IP telephony, but what is it? How can you benefit from it? Doing all the necessary research to understand it all can be daunting. And after that, performing a cost-benefit analysis of going from a “Plain Old Telephone Service,” or POTS system, to a Voice over IP telephony system can be complicated. The inputs are so many, and some of them are not readily measurable in dollars. At Prialto, we’re using VoIP exclusively, and actually, our business wouldn’t be viable without VoIP – proof positive of its cost efficiency.
Now, how can VoIP save your organization money? Read on to find out more.
Reduce Your Phone Bill
Saving on phone bills is the most obvious benefit of using a VoIP phone system. Typically, the biggest savings can be realized if your organization has many branches or if you have people working from home or on the road. For companies who have employees traveling abroad, the cost savings can be substantial. Prialto can quickly help you analyze how VoIP could benefit your organization by simply looking at your monthly phone bill.
Less Infrastructure to Maintain, Simpler to Administer, and More Scalable
Because VoIP systems run on normal servers, it is typically less expensive to deploy VoIP than POTS equipment, and that’s even true when it comes to a small office of 1-5 people. And if additional offices need to be connected to the same “corporate” phone system, that can be done quickly and easily too, allowing companies to grow without incurring large expenses for infrastructure.
Another benefit is that because there are less specialized systems to maintain, there are fewer things that can go wrong and it reduces the need for system administrators at each site. Additionally, with fewer machines to maintain, the fewer maintenance contracts are needed.
Because VoIP phones run on the same type of network as regular computers, there’s no need for additional wiring for phones. Again, this means less infrastructure components to maintain and troubleshoot. Lastly, most things related to extensions or phones can be administered by the user, which reduces the need for IT staff.
Cut Costs Using Alternative Phones
A VoIP system allows users to make calls from their computers. These so-called “softphones” are cheaper and work just as well as a regular desk phone. However, if a person or organization prefers to use a standard desk phone, a nice VoIP phone is fairly inexpensive, starting around $100. The main difference from a user’s perspective between a VoIP phone and a POTS phone is that VoIP phones offer many more options and more flexibility. › Continue reading
Zimbra Desktop: Achieve greater flexibility with your email
Local access to your Prialto/Zimbra email and calendar is moving closer to production release.
Zimbra Desktop is a desktop email client alternative to Outlook. One of the biggest benefits of Zimbra Desktop is that it runs on more than just Windows. Versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux are available, and the application looks exactly the same on all systems. Moreover, if you have been using the Prialto Collaboration Suite (Prialto CS) webmail, you will instantly recognize the layout and design in the Zimbra Desktop as it’s nearly identical, giving you the best of both worlds!
Zimbra Desktop is now out of Beta and will soon be released as General Availability. The latest version, 1.0 RC1, is a feature-complete product and is now available for download at Zimbra.com.
Zimbra Desktop benefits at a glance:
* Offline email access
* Write emails when offline and send as soon as you have an Internet connection
* Same great search capabilities as with the webmail version
* Gather external email accounts, such as Gmail, in the same place, and access them offline too
* Access your documents and briefcase while offline
Prialto’s corporate email solution, Prialto CS, is based on the Zimbra platform, which provides our members with the ability to manage their email and calendar from any computer or mobile device with its online capability. And now with the offline version, users will have the ability to access their email, calendar, contacts, and documents on their computer even when not connected to the Internet (e.g. during a flight) – creating even greater flexibility for our members.
Growing a small consulting firm
Many small consulting companies struggle with building capacity and finding technical solutions that will serve their needs and make them more productive while keeping costs at a manageable level.
Member Profile
Cordoba Consulting is a two-person enterprise in the transportation industry. The company is steadily growing and occasionally contracts subconsultants for larger projects.
Background
Handling and managing administrative tasks take time and resources. Much of the daily billable work for small consulting companies revolves around client meetings, appointment scheduling, and project management. Even on an extended workday, very little time is left for tasks such as updating recurring reports, invoicing, booking travel, and dealing with technical issues. In addition, while consultants are either meeting with a client or working on a job, calls are inevitably left unanswered. The obvious solution would be to hire an administrative assistant and an IT consultant, but for most small companies, this solution is just not an option – it’s simply too expensive. So, Cordoba Consulting sought to find a cost-effective solution, which they found with Prialto.
Solution
Prialto developed a human resource and technology infrastructure that supported the company’s business. A remote personal assistant was assigned to handle administrative tasks such as answering inbound calls, coordinating meetings, and managing consultants’ calendars. In addition, a technology solution was put in place to seamlessly manage communication between clients and consultants. Prialto Collaboration Suite, an enterprise-class collaboration platform, was implemented. This service includes email (plus push email), contact information, calendar, and online file storage. Prialto also took on the management of the company’s domain registration and DNS.
Conclusion
With the Prialto solution, the staff at Cordoba Consulting are now able to focus on their core business. The company has effectively added an executive assistant and IT support at less than half the cost of hiring two additional employees. Gone are missed opportunities due to unanswered calls, so are the hours spent on administrative tasks. In its place is an affordable, efficient solution that provides the human touch lacking in an increasingly automated world, and a technology system and support that is scalable, robust and dependable.
How to create a secure password
One of our new members recently told us that prior to becoming a Prialto member, about a year ago, she had one of her passwords compromised. This was a password that she used for multiple online accounts containing sensitive personal data, such as banking information. As you can imagine, it was a nightmare for her. Luckily, the breach of her accounts didn’t lead to anything too serious, although it could have.
We learned that the member had been using a password that was easy to figure out. And to make matters worse, she had been using a single password for most everything, a common mistake made by many people. Therefore, I decided to write a blog article for our members about how to create a secure password that is hard for others to guess or crack.
Prialto takes its members’ security and privacy very seriously. But from conversations with members, we know that few create strong passwords. A common reaction to our password policy is, “Wow, that’s complicated. Can you make it a bit easier?”
Well, creating a good password is actually a lot simpler than you think. Here’s how: › Continue reading