Friday 2 November 2007

Friday post: brownian scheduling

Analysts have usually little ideas how much work is involved in AR. Take scheduling for instance, it takes a hell lot of time to figure out where and when your exec might meet the analyst as both seem to be in a constant brownian motion between airports.

Stephen might have cracked gained many brownie points by publishing his schedule. Much easier than the dreaded Borg scheduling team, who comes back to your 3 days after you sent your request, and with a 30 mn slots. One more reason why you gotta love independent analysts: they're much more accessible if you need to do some message testing before a launch and easy to work with.

Another thing that AR professionals have to deal with is long, technical, boring briefing teleconferences. Maintaining your attention to jot down the follow-up points can be tough, especially after a relationship management lunch meeting. Don't read the Borg earnings release, there's nothing there: they're executing well, though not growing consulting very much. No new news. Best to try figure out what to do with your airmiles...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure you'd want to see too deep into my schedules, you might never be able to get out ;)

Wouldn't Dopplr (much-touted by James G) be the answer? I'm here:

http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/Jonno

Michael said...

I'd be psyched if more AR and *R people started using the Free/Busy service we have. So far, I've had one person use it out however many requests for meetings I've had since setting it up.

BFrench said...

Jon, Do you expect people to set up accounts with Dopplr to access some analyst calendars? or is this account requirement to go away after beta?

Cote', I'm with ARonaut on being impressed with the Free/Busy approach.

I do wonder what word we can come up with to replace "beta". Today's "beta" has little to do with olden times' "beta".

For example, when you think about it, a calendar prod/service/widget/API/whatever is mission critical to industry analysts. Yet, as analysts, you're not only using beta services, you are recommending adoption of them.

If nothing else, maybe we can come up with a Moore's Law for the number of active software betas in a given month.

Anonymous said...

@barbara, dunno - but good point. Maybe they should feed that into their roadmap.

I'd be happy to use a service that sucks info directly out of my Outlook calendar, but managing two diaries would be a nightmare.

Also, I remember back in my programmer days when I released a piece of "beta" code to the user community. Following some feedback, my boss, Bob, took me to one side a couple of weeks later. "Jon, that really was a bit closer to alpha, wasn't it..." :)

Not sure I agree on the "recommending adoption" - however when we advocate people try things, we should caveat.

Cheers, Jon