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How Software Asset Management Can Help You Save Money

Simply put, Software Asset Management is a business process that can help you reduce your licensing costs and optimize your software assets. The business benefits of Software Asset Management are:

Reduce software licensing costs – only purchase/renew licenses for software that is used. Track all your license rights, such as upgrade, downgrade and transfer rights to optimize the way you account for and use your software assets.

Reduce help desk costs – on average, 50% of the time spend troubleshooting computer issues is spent on obtaining the computer configuration

Minimize unauthorized software usage, security risks – SAM empowers you to use the right software for you. Ensuring that your employees are using only authorized software helps increase productivity and avoid security risks.

Reduce business and legal risk due to not meeting regulatory requirements, or not complying with software vendor license agreements.

Better negotiation capabilities with your software vendors – knowing exactly what you have and what you need, as well as the number of licenses you need and your current license rights puts you in control in your next license negotiation.

Software Asset Management can help you reduce your overall software licensing costs by only purchasing software that you use and need, organize your licensing assets and keep track of your licenses agreements, terms and renewal dates. It is a process that helps you know which software is installed and used across your enterprise, and minimize unauthorized software usage. You can use it to better manage your software assets from a business perspective, reduce the cost of software licensing and improves your software asset utilization.

Managing The Reputation Of Your Event.

As a Consultant in Quality and Customer Service, Roberta Meier often attends seminars and workshops as a “Mystery Shopper”. As well as checking out how well delegates are catered for by the training teams, she also takes great delight in testing how tenaciously event organizers pursue her for her true opinion about their reputation.

If and when they do catch up with Roberta, how do they quantify reputation anyway?

The easiest thing to do is to use the happiness sheets (event evaluation forms) and the post event questionnaires, remembering that this is not a popularity contest but a search for factual information.

If your questionnaires ask for a numerical score against each question, finding the average score (adding all the scores together and dividing the total by the number of delegates who answered) is a useful guide. It is also constructive to look at the spread of results. Check how many people rated the presenter a 6, how many a 7 and so on. A small cluster of very high or very low scores can give a false average, pulling it up or down. You should be interested in what the majority (60%) of the attendees thought and usually these valid results are centered on the true average.

Stress Avoidance

Also consider which elements of the project were the most stressful for you, for your team and for the delegates. Events management will never be a completely stress-free activity but, on occasion, poor planning, poor preparation or badly selected people can cause unnecessary anguish. Think back over the event and identify situations that you would prefer not to repeat if and when you run a similar event in the future. Use a cause and effect grid to home in on the real cause of problems and identify a course of action to avoid this happening again.

Effect

What actually happened?

Cause

Action Plan

Guest speaker was late arriving.

A rail strike was called on the day and we had to fly her in at the last minute.

We tried to save money by avoiding an overnight stay.

In future guest speakers will be put up in a hotel the night before the event.

One of our key delegates had to leave because of an allergy to marker pen solvent.

The interactive sessions of the workshop required lots of flip chart work and we only had solvent based markers with us.

We didn’t ask and he didn’t tell us about the allergy.

Only use water based markers in future and update the registration questions to include all allergies.

The statistics of customer satisfaction can make distressing reading, however, if you have a proactive system, you can track down the 60% of delegates who found it difficult to tell you they had a problem. If you then listen carefully to them and attempt to resolve the issue; you will convince a large proportion of them to do business with you again and you will prevent them from damaging your reputation through non-recommendation.

The Opportunity to resell Saas IT Management to Your Customers

In recent years, IT Asset Management solutions have emerged as a highly effective way for organizations to fully leverage the potential of their existing system architectures, and maximize return on their technology investments.

That’s why many technology resellers are adding IT Asset Management applications to their portfolios. By offering IT Asset Management to their customers, IT consultants, system integrators, value added resellers (VARs), and other technology sales firms can help customers to optimize the value and performance of their technology environments, while improving visibility and tracking, reducing costs, minimizing risk, and increasing internal productivity.

SAManage is a leading provider of today’s most robust, secure, and feature-rich on-demand (SaaS) IT Asset Management solutions. We understand the importance of resellers in any successful technology sales strategy, and are looking to expand our user base and tap into opportunities in new regions and markets by building strong, long-lasting, mutually-beneficial relationships with industry leaders.

By partnering with SAManage, IT resellers and consultants can:

Provide their customers with a powerful and full-featured, yet intuitive and easy to use solution with proven success in real-world scenarios.
Take advantage of generous recurring commission policies and volume-based discounts to further boost revenues.
Offer additional value added services such as audit, compliance, license true-up, asset disposal and integration services.
Deliver superior support and post-sales service through our skilled and knowledgeable support team.
Build an online business with no capital outlay, no cost to start and with no inventory to carry.

Project Managers Need To “Manage The Boss”

Most people have one. Yet attending to their demands and idiosyncrasies can be nerve-wracking. Wise people engage good boss management strategies. After all, bosses are not exalted and invincible gods. They are human beings with special roles and authority as well as the requisite levels of human weaknesses, problems and pressures.

Assess Leadership Style

Recognize leadership skills inherent in your own boss. This assists you to better understand your boss. You also benefit by becoming a better manager.

Leader #1: The Press Leader

These leaders pretend to be drill sergeants. Low self-esteem and a strong fear of failure drives them. They are impressed by outward displays of project management and busyness.rather than by results. The leader treats people as expeditors who obey orders. They tolerate no mistakes. Trivial details snare their energies and attention. They oversupervise and manage by punishment.

How to handle The Press Leader: Quickly discover on-the-job limits. Determine whether your boss is simply tough or ruthless. The tough leader precisely delegates authority balanced with appropriate responsibility. The ruthless one disregards human factors. If you choose to resist the press leader, do it privately, not within view of colleagues. This way your leader will not lose face. Support your position with plenty of evidence. Otherwise you lose.

Leader #2: The Laissez-Faire Leader

This leader abandons staff. These leaders provide little or no support in tough times. They stipulate little of what is expected of employees. They provide virtually no project management guidance on how to accomplish tasks. While the Press Leader may hover over an employee’s shoulder, this leader does nothing to train or guide. The Press Leader overmanages. The Laissez-Faire Leader overlooks.

Managing The Laissez-Faire Leader: The individual who is self-motivated and needs little praise will work well under this type of leader. This leader craves facts such as costs, statistics and research findings. Provide these facts and figures for your boss, while at the same time trying to stress some human elements. Encourage your boss to clarify exactly what is to be accomplished.

Leader #3: The Participatory Leader

The Participatory Leader is adept at communication procedures. Under this type of boss, employees are given precise feedback and recognition when deserved. The Participatory Leader strives to involve employees in the assessment process. He or she is inspirational and innovative. The Participatory Leader customizes the type and amount of feedback required for each employee.

Managing The Participatory Leader: The most effective way of dealing with the Participatory Leader is to feed back the same techniques that he or she uses with subordinates. Keep them informed of what does and does not work. Since this type of leader is interested in results, your opinions will be heeded.

Leader #4: The Develop Leader

This leader goes a step beyond the Participatory Leader. The Develop Leader fosters staff self-esteem, autonomy and competence. Techniques for success are isolated and taught to subordinates as the need arises. The Develop Leader empowers staff and nurtures a feeling of reverence, not in the boss, but in employees themselves.

There is often a high staff turnover rate for employees of develop leaders. But it is a good one because it is upward. Because this type of leader creates such a high level of competence amongst the ranks through professional development and project management, there is always someone to take over when someone moves up.

Keep Your Boss Happy

Learn what your boss expects and values.
Strive for high quality results.
Solve as many problems as possible without the help of your boss.
Keep your boss informed.
Be your strongest critic.
Get regular feedback from your boss.
Differ with your boss only in private.
Save money and earn revenue.
Be a good leader yourself.
Promote only valuable ideas.
After all. Your boss is not interested in the storms you encountered, but whether you brought in the ship.