BarCamp Sydney 2008
Saasu on PRODUCTIVITY
By Marc Lehmann | Director/Founder

What is it to be
productive?
Good entrepreneurs convert
negatives into positives
Good entrepreneurs convert
manual processes into
automated ones

Incrementally improve automation
Always try and kill off the extremely manual tasks first.
Even better, kill off the boring bits so people enjoy their job.

Service as a
sales channel
Turn what is normally a cost
into a benefit and continue to
commoditise service through
procedure and automation.
Service is an opportunity to:
Sell
Learn
Automate help
Make customers happy

Create an exceptions based business
Automate everything you can with systems and procedures.
Saasu.com | the web finance engine is obviously a good start.

Keep attacking the worst exceptions.
Ask what's slowing us down?

Minimise transition and duplication costs.
Moving between tasks has transition costs. Minutes saved per day lead to many
hours saved per year. The cumulative effect.

The magic of compounding productivity.
Small amounts of automation or productivity today result in a large Future
Value impact on your business. Better still, many small gains over time
create compounding efficiency.
This is what I believe allows some business to achieve the seemingly
impossible with limited resources and time.

Make peoples jobs fun. If you don't they'll lay about.
give your staff equity and automate the boring stuff

Exercising cheap or free options.
Outsourcing can be so cheap that it is nearly a free option. E.g. extremely
cheap service plans from Apple are very 'insurance like'. Potentially capping
cost for a small premium.

Systems simplicity
Reduce the number of systems you use.
Adopt more online services.
Reduce the complexity and duplication of tasks.
...The All SaaS Enterprise (ASE) is the way of the future.
.

Your infrastructure and outsource capability is very high in an ASE.
Backups, upgrades, data storage and security is cheap. As an example
you can get all my flickr photos on a disk for about $20. How can you
possibly improve on that by doing backups yourself?
All SaaS Enterprises (ASE's) are productive.

ASE's are Secure.
Is the alternative?
Many SaaS applications have
API's and CSV exports
enabling you to leave very
quickly and easily.
SaaS has multiple measures
of security and backups that
are difficult to achieve in a
smaller scale DIY approach.

TCO is old school.
What's the Future Value impact of
your investment on your
companies equity value? The
cultural shifts, the productivity
impact, the automation, they must
all be factored into the ROI

Good operations = command and control.
Control helps create predictable results. Don't stifle the creativity. We give
creativity it's time and place but within limits. It's not about clocking on or
off but it is about getting projects done and that means coal face work - no
two ways about it.

Productive business needs ideas management
We have created our own IDEAS framework to
progress an idea through a series of steps so
the best ideas float to the surface and get
implemented.

Exploit unused time buckets.
A simple thing like giving staff
mobile web access might create
20 minutes a day where it didn't
exist. Reading email or blogs on
a train trip as an example.
Keep valuing your time!

TPO
Time
Price
Opportunity
Time is money, it faces market forces.
Saasu built an efficient, low cost of sales
business by avoiding jamming too much
development into a short time bucket. Fast
development means paying a premium price.

Rule out, don't rule in.
It's too easy to load a Saasu release cycle. We tend to rule out based on
lack of requests. We also rule out features that take us back into our
competitors arena - we avoid the red ocean.

Passion Key Productivity Driver
Don't let it only be about the money. It also has to be an authentic love of
exploration and creation. Most of all it needs to be about the game. Playing it
like your on the field, not watching from the stands.

Marc Lehmann
marc@saasu.com
skype: marcleh
twitter: marclehmann
mobile: +61 434 033 945
web: saasu.com
blog: saasu.com/blog
personal blog: marclehmann.net
linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/marclehmann
Copyright 2008 Saasu Pty Ltd,
1st Floor, 111 Elizabeth St Sydney, Australia 2000