iCompass Technologies Blog

How transparent is your organization?

On a given day, can you look across the hall and know exactly what your colleague is working on? If so, great. If this scenario generally doesn’t play out in your office, I urge you to read on.

At iCompass, we pride ourselves on accountability and transparency throughout all levels of the company. Everyone knows what everyone else has planned for the day and more often than not, it’s company knowledge if a daily priority isn’t completed or if it is postponed. In my mind, this is an essential tool in effectively increasing visibility within your organization. Due to its very nature, transparency within the ranks of your organization will empower your employees to work harder to reach their goals, because let’s face it, if they don’t succeed everyone will know.

On that note, our Action Tracking customers know how critical transparency can be. Among many of its other functions, our Action Tracking application allows municipalities to track key deliverables to determine who has been assigned what tasks and how far along they are.

If you’re wondering how we can be such cheerleaders for accountability within our services and on a day-to-day basis, it’s all in the huddle. Every morning without fail, we all gather for roughly 10 minutes to go over news, employee/company recognition, challenges, updates and priorities. No one gets a pass; no one gets an “I don’t have time for the huddle” excuse. The meeting is mandatory.

At first, the idea of another meeting may seem counterproductive, but trust me when say that it’s anything but. The morning huddle is an excellent way for everyone to get on the same page and according to Verne Harnish, author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, “This rhythmic pulsing of daily meetings constitutes the real heartbeat of a growing company.”

In football, team members huddle in an effort to strategize, motivate or celebrate. Although we’re not wearing matching spandex uniforms or throwing around the pigskin, our huddle is not far from that of a sports team. Besides, at the end of the day, it’s all about the efforts of the team and how well we played the game anyway.

-Jessica Scharien, Corporate Communications Officer

 

 

iCompass delivers the key for effective presentations

According to Wikipedia, nearly 95% of all people have some degree of anxiety related to public speaking. Since my time at iCompass, delivering presentations about our CivicWeb & AcademicWeb services has been a big part of my responsibilities, whether those presentations were online, in person, to a small group or to a large audience. For me, the guidelines I follow to conduct the presentation rarely changes, but the message and the hooks you use to interact with your audience can change from meeting to meeting.  For example, you would think that having a training session on how to effectively build your agendas using our Meeting Management Solution would be very different than a sales presentation to prospective customers on the benefits of the Meeting Management Solution, but in reality it’s not. Now I have read probably hundreds of techniques on what makes an effective presentation, but ultimately I have found that if you are knowledgeable and passionate about your topic, everything usually goes smoothly. People usually spend hours ahead of time preparing their presentations, but once you take your place in front of your audience, what you do next will ultimately determine whether your presentation is a success and your message is successfully delivered.

Any good presentation is one that will deliver its message in as basic terms as possible and appeal to the emotions of your audience. Regardless of how formal your presentation is, always consider to following format when preparing your presentation, ensuring that the content has a beginning, a body, and a wrap up. The format of your presentation will help you maintain the structure of your message while keeping it interactive and flexible. The key to a good presentation is to ensure that you are interacting with your audience; the easiest way to lose your audience would be to start into a monologue for the duration of your presentation. I have found that whether you are conducting a training session or sales demonstration, I usually structure my presentations in the exact same way, using the guideline mentioned above, and that usually helps me keep on track during the presentation, while maintaining a certain level of audience engagement.

 - Tara Holdbrook, Sales Rep

 

 

Intouch with your risk-taking side?

Here are a few quotes to get you thinking. Once you’ve been inspired, I’ll explain my point.

“Progress always involves risk; you can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.” – Author Frederick Wilcox

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” – British poet T.S. Eliot

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”  – Roman writer Marcus Annaeus Seneca

Encouraged yet?!

In the complex world of technology, there are various types of prospective customers, some of which are keen to incorporate new devices, gadgets and services into their organizations and lifestyles, while some are very against the idea. According to Geoffrey A. Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, there exists a technology adoption life cycle as follows:

Innovators – individuals who aggressively seek out new technology

Early Adopters – those who easily relate to and see the benefits of technology

Early Majority – individuals who are more practical when it comes to adopting new technology

Late Majority – those who are uncomfortable and lack confidence in handling new technology

Laggards – for many reasons, these individuals want nothing to do with new technology

Risk-taking is an essential element to moving yourself up within Moore’s “adoption life cycle.” You’ll never know just how beneficial technology can be for your organization if you don’t take a leap and test it out.  If you have already made steps to take that leap, but haven’t jumped yet, what’s holding you back? You’ll only work more efficiently and see bigger gains in the way of time-management within your office. In the words of Jack Canfield, motivational speaker and author of numerous books including The Success Principles, “If you want to get from where you are to where you want to be, of course you’re going to have to take that risk.” Eventually one day, you’ll look back and wonder why you hadn’t adopted technology sooner.

The great thing about risk-taking is it doesn’t have to be isolated to technology – it can apply to all aspects of your life, personally and professional. Start making riskier decisions on a day-to-day basis and you will undoubtedly see great results. Sure, you might make some mistakes and struggle along the way, but all of those challenges only build character and help you grow as an individual. I should point out that I’m not advocating doing anything life-threatening or dangerous. I’m simply presenting a concept of going out of your comfort zone every so often and doing things that might make you feel uncomfortable or scare you. In pushing yourself or your organization to overcome daunting challenges, you’ll gain confidence and increase your success rate.

 -Jessica Scharien, Corporate Communications Officer

 

 

Time Management Tips and Tricks to Success

In today’s day in age, everyone is always so busy. Whether we are too busy to organize our kitchen cupboards, too busy to take that additional educational course, or too busy to learn something new... No matter what the reason may be, we all feel we are just too busy to consider adding anything new onto our plates.

I know myself, I have come across many of these “I’m too busy” reasons in my own life and it really makes you think, why are we always too busy to spend time on something that will help us in the future? For example, it’s hard to register for that online course to help you further your education and gain experience which could help you further your career. I know I always hear this same reason when working with customers as well, we’re too busy to learn about a new tool which could ultimately help save us time and money in the long run.

So what do we do to address this? One of the things we have been working through in our office is the implementation of time management best practices, and did you know they actually work!?! The trick is repetition, repetition, REPETITION!

A few of the best practices that have worked for me:

Plan your day – I actually have blocked out in my calendar specific segments of time for each task, and if you get off track, you know at least what you missed and it is very easy to reschedule.

Touch it Once – If you’re like most people today, you normally receive hundreds of emails a week and sometimes that can take you and entire day to get through your email. The ‘Touch it Once’ rule implies that you only read an email when you are ready to deal with it. I even go one step further and file or delete the email once I have dealt with it.

Top 6 Priorities – at the end of each day, plan the top 6 deliverables which you are going to accomplish for the next day and actually write them down. It also helps if you include devoted space in your calendar to accomplish these top 6 priorities.

These are just some of the best practices that work for me, give them a try for yourself but as I said, the trick is repetition.

Tara Holdbrook, Sales Consultant

What are customers saying about iCompass

North Valley Hospital - Case Study 

Connie Maden, Director of Administrative Services North Valley Hospital, Tonasket, Washington, USA

Life before iCompass

Well, plainly put, I do not ever want to go back. The data we have to track from our healthcare admin offices has always been significant, and the administrative healthcare duties that I am responsible for continue to grow day by day. If I was to start a list of my responsibilities, I would still be here next week! 

I gave a short presentation at a previous AHCAA conference on improving admin office efficiencies using Access for tracking policies and procedures and the beauty of the related reporting capabilities. As my Admin Assistant duties and responsibilities grew (I am now Director and on the Senior Management Team), Access was being utilized more and more for more detailed tracking for contract management and I was beginning the process to generate a foundation for tracking our strategic planning projects as well.

Then, several years ago, I stumbled across iCompass at a city conference (I am also on our local city council). After watching several demos at their vendor booth, I knew I had to have these tools in the admin office of the hospital district. I then arranged for a demo in-house and further negotiated a contract utilizing all of the modules that collectively form their Meeting Management Solution (Meeting Manager, FilePro and Action Tracking modules). North Valley Hospital became the pilot healthcare facility for iCompass Technologies.

Life After iCompass 

When I implemented iCompass I soon realized that what I had gained was likened to an office assistant or two at a much reduced expense. I also determined quickly that I now had the ability to access and track important executive data and easily create reports on items that are not tracked through the more sophisticated software - whether within our hospital patient care, financial, or billing software. My research has shown me that separate software packages are very expensive (one firm wanted to charge me $20K a year JUST for a Strategic Planning Tracker). Smaller healthcare facilities cannot feasibly entertain that kind of price point.

Meeting Manager

The iCompass Meeting Manager module alone helps me to completely eliminate paper packets to the board – everything is now online at their disposal any time day or night. Additionally, I now provide that all important transparency to the community.

Action Tracking – General

The iCompass Action Tracking module contains a number of ‘Trackers’ which are highly versatile. They are usable for any department (not just Admin) needing to track any kind of data (such as HR, Plant Engineering, Laundry, Contracts, Strategic Planning, etc.) They also provide powerful capabilities related to keeping lists, producing reports and tracking historical data. These Trackers can be accessed via Meeting Manager or directly within the Action Tracking module. I have the ability to set up notifications and reminders for future timelines (great for contract management). Committee meeting and staff meeting minutes can now be created and funneled into one main depository. Log-in information is set up for all managers to be able to go in, update, access and create their own Trackers, all the while preserving a historical trail of who did what, when.

Action Tracking - Contract Management Tracker

I have over 250 paper contract documents that I manage with one of my Trackers I created - I call it my ‘Contract Management Tracker’. I now attach the pdf contract document to the Tracker item and put the responsibilities for managing the contracts back in the hands of the managers of the appropriate departments with the tracking, reporting, and reminder options. Just having the reminders set for insurance contracts in our billing department can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars of reimbursement if the contracts are negotiated at the appropriate time, ensuring also that they do not fall through the cracks and result in lost revenue.

Action Tracking - Strategic Planning Tracker

The Strategic Planning tracker is becoming a living and breathing tracker/document that will enable managers and supervisors to provide comments on detail of implementation of projects and objectives. I have been working with iCompass application engineers to fine tune this tracker and I am very excited about these capabilities. Imagine a transparent dashboard with admin able to extract data and managers/supervisors able to input comments and attach documentation as to the status of a project. Imagine the ability to track whether a project is on budget, below or over budget with the financial detail attached directly from the responsible staff. These are only a few of the capabilities available to us with this Tracker. At the end of the day, our strategic plan is no longer a set of papers with admin assistants running around to track down information prior to a Strategic Planning or board meeting.

Action Tracking - Employee Suggestions Tracker

This Tracker provides the ability to track when employee suggestions come in, and which Manager is responsible for doing the PDSA and further development. Employees can track the progress of their own suggestion.

FilePro - Document Storage & Search

With FilePro, I manage all of our policies and procedures from my office through the Internet. We had what could have been a real safety issue – nurses could search for policies on my old system but they would also pull up the old archived copies - this was a medication error waiting to happen. Now, everyone can access and search our documents safely via a secure site on the Internet.

iCompass Customer Service - The best!

In almost 3 years, I have not had one issue that iCompass has not handled as a top priority and with the utmost professional customer service. Highlights of their customer service include getting a person on the phone 24/7, a web-based incident reporting process, and their new Customer Advisory Board which will assist iCompass with further on-going functional improvements, new product development and enhanced customer service.

Big thanks to Connie Maden for this Case Study!

Nicky Plato, Marketing Coordinator

iCompass Announces Grand Slam Service

April 14, 2010

Today, iCompass officially launched the details of a bold and company-wide 2010 customer commitment, called Grand Slam Service.

"Our number one priority in 2010 is to take our customer service to a whole new level, and in doing so, WOW our customers in every way possible," said Todd Stone, iCompass President & CEO.  "This delivery of unequalled customer service means first class acknowledgement and responsiveness.  It means consistency of performance and meeting deadlines/expectations.  It means constant communication and products tailored to your needs.  It means being as easy to do business with as possible," added Stone.   

Two important ingredients in delivering success on all of the above are clarity and being specific.  Therefore, iCompass has delivered to each of its customers a document called "Grand Slam Service" which details 20 specific commitments that the company is making to all of its customers through 2010. 

"Many of these specific commitments require significant investments, new behaviours, and new business best practices," said Stone.  "I am pleased to report that through the first 90 days of 2010, we have delivered on 80% of these commitments.  For example, we have increased our customer service staffing levels by over 40%; we are responding to incoming requests/inquiries within 10 minutes of our Customer Advocacy Team receiving them; customer calls are now answered by a person 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; we have extended our Customer Advocacy office hours to 5 AM to 6 PM (Pacific); and we have taken great strides at improving our implementation procedures, documentation and self-help tools," added Stone.

"While it has been a busy first quarter, we have many more exciting initiatives to come through 2010 so stay tuned for a continual stream of innovations and improvements in service," said Stone.  "On behalf of the entire iCompass team, we thank our customers for all of their loyalty and support over the years," added Stone.

Todd Stone

President & CEO

5 Ways to Manage Your Time More Effectively

In today's tough times people are having difficulty finding enough hours in the day to get everything done. Try these simple tips to more effectively manage your time and stop stressing about your workload.

1. Set aside an hour of each day where you close the door and have heads down time (no not napping, heads down in your work). Put this into your schedule and tell everyone in your office that unless it is extremely important you will not be available during that time period.

2. Write a list of your top 3 priorities at work that day first thing in the morning. Always have this list in eye sight and ensure you allocate your time to the most important tasks you need to get done.

3. Avoid checking your email whenever a new email pops into your inbox. Turn off your notifications or close out of your email completely and only check it when you have ample time to respond to your emails without interruptions.

4. Make lists of everything you need to do. This will help you at the beginning of each day to prioritize your tasks for the day and you will never feel overwhelmed at the start of the day wondering what you are going to be doing.

5. Keep a detailed calendar/planner of your appointments, meetings, and other important priorities (heads down time). This will help you to stay on schedule and be most productive with your day.

With these simple and easy steps you are well on your way to managing your time more effectively and making the most out of the workday.

Photos:
laffy4k 
judepics
jurvetson
Martin Kingsley