Pros
Honestly, I don't think there are any good reasons for working with these con artists
Cons
It's all about the company, not about people They rip you off on your rate They rip off their customers They treat customers poorly They like PMP management (see SAFe . . .) Here's a great example of tone deafness--it's all about Marva and the leadership team, not about people. Hello Community Team Member! By now, you’ve probably read or heard the announcement about big changes at Veracity (probably from Val, last week), and you may be wondering what this means for the company and for you personally, so I thought I’d start a dialog with you. We’ll start with a brief introduction. You may not know much about me. Let’s fix that. Hi, I’m Marva Sadler, your new CEO. (remember Hitchhiker’s Guide?) I joined Veracity in 2012. Like you, I joined as an independent consultant, working on a project. (In my case, the project was to improve Veracity’s financial processes, and help the management team increase their expertise dealing with financial issues). At the time, like many of our consultants, Veracity was my part-time gig, while I pursued other personal and professional goals. (My full-time position was as Program Director for People Helping People, a non-profit that helps low income women develop job skills.) Over time, I came to enjoy the work, value Veracity’s mission, and really like and trust the team. Again, like many Veracity consultants, I came for the paycheck, and stayed for the culture and the people. Over the course of my (really long) career, I have been a strategy consultant with some highly respected firms, (Bain and Co., and Marakon Associates, the authors of Value Based Management or VBM) a C-level executive for some other highly respected (and some not so respected) organizations, in a variety of industries, from heavy manufacturing to software and professional services, ranging in size from start-ups to Fortune 1000 firms. I brought a historic woolen mill back into operation, and (one of my personal favorites) ran a group of car dealerships. (If you need some tricks for buying a car, I know most of them.) Somewhere along the way, I became a Theory of Constraints Jonah, (which is like Lean on steroids) and launched an operations consulting practice. In my spare time, I also raised five children to become reasonably productive adults. Like you, I love the excitement of a new challenge. I value variety, and I’m constantly trying to develop new skills. Over time, I’ve realized that my personal mission is to help individuals and organizations achieve their full potential. Just ask any of the leadership team. They’ll tell you I’m relentless in pursuit of that goal. Now, about the “Big Change” and what it means. From the view of the leadership team, the changes both are, and are not, big. Clearly, changing CEO’s after almost 20 years of Galen leading the team and setting the pace feels like a big change. But from the perspective of your recent daily professional life, you won’t see much difference. The senior leadership team (Brian, Scott, Val, and me) have been working together since mid- 2013. Galen’s efforts to transition responsibility for day-to-day operations, and even long-term mission and goals, began when he put the team together. Like most successful founders, he realized that for Veracity to achieve its full potential, there would come a time when we needed to move from a founder-led business model, to a more scalable leadership-team based business. Beginning in late 2016, the team took responsibility for running the business while Galen got back into the field directly driving a client transformation (something he loves doing). Galen’s interim CTO position at Lumeris has been a test run for the team to see if we could manage without his daily input, and so far, we’ve been doing well. 2017 is shaping up to be a great year, with strong revenue, income, and cash flow, and a growing opportunity pipeline. This last is especially important, since Galen’s contacts have traditionally been a major source of new business. In addition, we are improving internal processes, strengthening our client relationship and project management skills, and working to be more inclusive with our community. Looking to the future…. Galen is not gone. His role has changed, along with his method of influencing the organization. He will continue to provide input as Board Chairman, and will keep making client introductions and providing thought leadership. He has demonstrated his faith in the leadership team, and Veracity’s future, by giving us the Con (as in, “I’m going to the shuttle bay. You have the Con, Number One”). If you peek behind the scenes, you are likely to see a few subtle, but important changes. The leadership team will set goals and vision, with Board approval, and make and carry out decisions together. In addition, we’ve recently rededicated ourselves to “walking the talk” by becoming more agile as a team and as an organization; increasing our use of the basic Agile Leadership principles found in SAFe. (For a list of those principles, please see the end of this message.) We are working to accelerate the growth of our community members (employees and consultants alike) by sponsoring more opportunities for relevant training and certifications, increasing individual and team coaching, and continuing to seek interesting and challenging client projects to test and strengthen our skills. We are also upgrading a number of our systems. The Concur travel/expense management implementation is a direct response to the frustration team members have expressed over PSA expense entry. If you haven’t tried it yet, I strongly recommend it. It will rock your world. We are de-coupling expense management from our time entry system in preparation for implementing a new time management system later this year. This is in response to the “anything but PSA” mantra we hear from consultants. We are dedicated to growing personally and professionally while working together to create superior client value, with amazing people and teams, in a vibrant culture. After all, that’s why we’re here, right? We came for the paycheck, and stayed for the people and culture. But I promised a dialog. So far, this has been pretty much a monologue, and while my thoughts are fascinating (at least to me) one-way communication has some serious limitations. So, please join the dialog. Send us your thoughts, suggestions, concerns, and questions. Your feedback will help us identify what to do more of, what to stop doing, and what to do differently. What have you been dying to tell us that you thought we wouldn’t pay attention to? What have you just experienced that you want more of, or want us to fix? If you let us know, we can address it. If you don’t, we have to guess, and that wastes time and energy that could be used to identify solutions and improve outcomes. Remember where I mentioned that I am relentless in pursuing growth potential? Welcome to Veracity: The Next Generation. Please enthusiastically join us as we boldly go…… SAFe Lean/Agile Principles: 1. Take an economic view 2. Apply systems thinking 3. Assume variability; preserve options 4. Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles 5. Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems 6. Visualize and limit WIP, reduce batch sizes, and manage queue lengths 7. Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning 8. Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers 9. Decentralize decision-making Marva
