David Pederson, Freelance SaaS Copywriter

White Papers, Cases Studies, and email for SaaS companies

I am a SaaS copywriter specializing in applications and services used in business intelligence.

Can You Stop a Data Tsunami?

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So, Your Customer’s Data is Lying?

Most clients can tell you stories about their data. Sometimes you can’t solve them without asking your client to throw tons of money at the problem. And that can strain your relationship. Costs can threaten your circle of trust. Not good. You want to solve problems in ways fair to you and fair to them.

Your customer knows the day their first report gave them bad answers. That was “The Day.” They call you, you have a look, and tell them the cost of fixing it – a leaky faucet. They think they can manage it on their own, so they don’t have to pay to repair the root cause.

Instead, they hire someone to “manage” reports. But that new manager asks the staff to stop what they’re doing and ‘validate THE REPORTS.’

After a few days, they deliver. And, it’s still wrong.

It’s stopping your client from moving forward on a new idea. Now, their staff is behind in their work. Their HR person is looking for a root cause … in the employees who work for them. Some quit, some try harder. But the data is now a full-time job, and everyone hates it.

They’re at the edge of a Tsunami.

The leaks expand, the system slows down, and failure is just on the horizon. Their competitor beats them to market. They lose market share. Guess who they call? Yep, now it’s your turn!

Are you ready to face their tsunami? Do you want me to stand with you? I will help you.

With a 20 year career with both large and small players like JP Morgan Chase, Best Buy, Washington Mutual, Ford Motor Credit, North American Insurance, Hannon Technology, and Data Educators I know data. I know it better than most.

At the core of each of these problems is analysis and communication. That is the job I do well. I communicate solutions after I do my research. My analysis finds answers. Then I write:

  • findings and summaries
  • visualizations that show the problems,
  • white papers showing options,
  • case studies explaining how others solved their problems, and
  • recommendations for new software or consulting services, so the data stop telling lies.

We’ll Tame the Tsunami.

I solve problems for companies handicapped by their data. — Companies ready to grow but held back by the cost of managing their data problems. They’ve seen the tsunami. I write to show them the path forward.

I help companies change their data into a well-controlled stream, rich in resources. As a technical copywriter with 20 years of broad data experience, I make their data talk without you breaking a sweat. You’ll show them what it’s saying, and they’ll be ready for your next suggestion.

I change data into actionable information in simple and understandable terms. And quietly help you keep your customers keep you in their circle.

Let me help.

Newsletter Sample – Are you SMART Enough to Telecommute

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This web content was part of a newsletter series on telecommuting I wrote for employees to make a successful transition to working remotely.

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On December 13, 2010, Shelley Fralic, of the Vancouver Sun, reported that Angus-Reid, one of Canada’s leading public opinion surveyors, determined that of the 500 Canadian small businesses they surveyed, 66% had off-site employees and that 61% reported increased productivity from those employees. Ms. Fralic also cited StatsCan who stated that in 2008 about 1.8 million or 11.2% of the entire Canadian workforce telecommutes – not bad for a large geographically challenged country with a small population of taxpaying workers.

While it is clear that Canadian small business is an agile and smart adopter of better ideas in the workforce, the reality is that today’s telecommuter should choose his or her mentor from the vast selection of American corporations whose processes have weathered the hardest of challenges and are now reliable and robust. Huge multinationals such as J.P Morgan Chase, Boeing, and Ford have leading manager awareness programs around telecommuting. Many others share the spotlight; Apple, Walt Disney Company, NBC Universal, Comcast, GE, Time Warner, Pitney Bowes, UnitedHealth Group, American Express, Aetna, MetLife, Wellpoint, Microsoft, Nielsen, IBM, Kaiser Permanente, and Hilton are but a few of the top drivers in the American economy which support a robust telecommuting component in their workforce.

Underneath this strength lay the outsourcing paradigm. Originally seen as a corporate tax grab under Bush, outsourcing has matured and given advantages to all workers in the area of telecommuting. The silver lining in the cloud of American job loss is that there now exists seasoned processes to handle employees who do not work at the same location as their team or their managers.  Today, employees can plug into that framework with much less resistance than they encountered ten years ago.

What your manager wants

Managers today are trained to handle the complexities of directing the workloads of remote employees. They understand how to use the correct keys to measure a telecommuter’s tele-commitment. Of the few critical and critical factors that I will discuss in this series, it is this first one that matters most. It sets the foundation for your measurement.

BE SMART

Despite the many variations on the theme, bosses start with your SMART goals. Now an industry standard, the ability to define goals that include Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Sensitive components will provide the framework you need as a telecommuter.  The more time you spend up front refining these, the better your experience will be and the more likely you will continue towards your career goals.

If you are not familiar with SMART goals, you should know you are living on a whisper which will fade and take you with it. You will not last as a professional. If you think you don’t need SMART goals, then you don’t even need to finish reading this article because you don’t have the drive you need to be a professional while telecommuting.

But for those who want to be a professional, start with your SMART goals. Make yourself an expert in this area, read, write, practice and discuss them. It sounds easy but it is not, and everyone who masters this is a master because they did the work. As a telecommuter, you need to join the other professionals in this group of leaders. There is plenty of information on this subject around, search for it, clean out the crap, hang onto the good stuff and devour it until you dream about it. Take ET’s advice and “BE GOOD” – at being SMART.

Despite all the well-intentioned advice available, if you don’t get this right, you have nothing other than fairy dust supporting your work life so suck it up and become an expert. Your boss will love the results this produces.

LET SMART INFORM YOU

SMART goals will make you think differently about your time, your contributions and your abilities. They will guide you into your strengths and weaknesses and set your path towards success, informing you by forming your inner core.  If you aren’t good at setting, refining, monitoring and adjusting your SMART goals, you will fail. You may keep your job, but you will be as disgruntled as your Dilbert devouring friends who remain in the cubicle farm.

Ignoring this process, even if your Dilbert buddies gloss over it, is not an option for you as a telecommuting professional. Take it seriously, and it will set up the frame of reference for all your work. It will make you stand out as exceptional despite the fact you may be laying on a lawn chaise while you work SMART on your iPad. Do this well, and you will succeed and more importantly advance while working outside the office.

ON THIS ONE YOU MUST LEAD

I want to caution you against being a follower here. On this, you must lead even if you are not a leader. Also if your manager tells you she or he does not place a high value on these goals, do it anyway. Lead yourself – your manager will change, and you must be more significant than you were when you first reported to him.

Over my career, I changed managers more often than Murphy Brown changed secretaries and each time the door revolved I became a key player on the team because I was a professional, a professional who was no smarter than his SMART goals. Thankfully, my SMART goals were smart. Trust me. Start here, and you will be as comfortable leading from Starbucks as you are when you are flown in to spend time in a meeting room.

Published Article Sample – Three Myths You Should Know About Risk Management

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VaR Imagined

Risk management takes real skills, developed over time, with tools to formulate options for any series of events that may occur during the life of a project. Those options range from negative risk, where an event will harm the project, to positive risks, where an event reveals a new opportunity to pursue.

But the real challenge is when a black swan appears. Black swans are big, bad, unanticipated catastrophes that force change. Sometimes referred to a VUCA and demanded a new way of thinking and responding to risk.

Black swans aren’t restricted to weather. In finance, they present mathematical challenges that earn Nobel Prizes for those who find new ways of modeling for the risks they represent, folks like Robert Engle.

The 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis was a black swan. Recently, the graduate school at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby Canada took a deep-dive into how black swan events affected Value at Risk (VaR) strategy and published a case study on the top four methods used to set on a 10 million student services fund it has been building since 2003.

The study, while looking at the best of the best in risk management practices, pointed to three myths about which we should be aware.

One: Things Work When We Choose a Best Practices Strategy.

  1. The low-risk model, HS, over-estimated Swan for one year. That means the fund didn’t take advantage of stocks that were actually in positions to increase returns.
  2.  73% of banks use HS – that activity holds back investments that could stimulate growth only because the model is deficient, not because the opportunity was bad.

Two: What’s Good For a Fortune 50 Company is Good For Us.

  1. There is inconsistency even among the biggest players who are responsible for protecting the public from financial risk.
  2. In a study of VAR among the “Big 5” Canadian banks, researchers Xiaoya Chen and Duo Zheng studied data from 4340 trading days, including the beginning of the black swan. During that time a total of 43 exceptions (days where losses exceed the VaR) were acceptable to regulators, but 47 exceptions were created. When they drilled down into each bank, they found larger variances with two of the banks (BNS and TD) very close to the norm and two others BMO and RBC) significantly exceeding it.
  3. Even among the biggest players in the same industry risk is seen differently. To hold them up as a standard for project managers to use is foolhardy.

Three: Choosing a Well Engineered Best Practice Means We Can Short-cut Analysis

In the SIAS fund, the risk management strategy was weakened by the governance process focused on individual stock volatility rather than portfolio risk. They used seven teams to make strategic decisions which would go through a voting process resulting in a slow turnover and trading frequencies. The advisors, including three from top Canadian banks, tended to review the effectiveness of the team and how well past strategies held up. Rather than deep dive into the details of the chosen VaR, the methods used were accepted as industry standard.
It wasn’t until Hsieh and El-Hourani took on a more in-depth analysis of the portfolio for their thesis that it came to light that the ratios used for individual stock evaluation were flawed when looking at the collection. The short-cuts were taken, despite using best practices and industry standards were not good enough to optimize results and the black swan event pointed out the deficiency in the strategy.

 

Curation Sample – How Did An International Project Team Expose Corruption?

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This is a curation sample of content I produced for a newsletter sent to senior level project managers. I enjoy curating content It allows me to share research about topics with readers who want to keep up with subjects in their field and benefit from the guidance of someone familiar with the issues.

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Center for Public Integrity
Click on the image to go to the story.

In April of 2013 the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published the results of their exploration of the secretive world of offshore companies and trusts. This project team of 86 journalists worked together to expose correction and fraud. It’s an amazing story of what a good team can do, even with shaky stakeholders.

About the Team

The report itself is valuable, but for project managers the team has an inspiring story to tell. Many of us are given a project fraught with problems,  short on budget, tight on staff, and shy on stakeholder support. And we’re expected to deliver.

This story is the story of such a team and how they overcame the problems, got on with the job, and not only met the challenge, but invented ways to exceed everyone’s expectations.

The ICIJ is an independent network of reporters in more than 60 countries who collaborate on cross-border investigations, as part of  a project of the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity. They are a complex virtual team with a mission that matters and a process open to inspection and improvement.

It’s real-life drama that inspired me. I think it will inspire you as well. Enjoy the story, but read it for the teamwork. It’s worth the time.

About the Story

Gerard Ryle, ICIJ’s director, obtained the data trove as a result of his three-year investigation of Australia’s Firepower scandal, a case involving offshore havens and corporate fraud. To cover the vast amount of information he engaged PICIJ’s 86 investigative journalists from 46 countries in one of the biggest cross-border investigative collaborations in journalism history. Unique digital systems supported private document and information sharing, as well as collaborative research. These included a message center hosted in Europe and a U.S.-based secure online search system. Team members also used a secure, private online bulletin board system to share stories and tips.

Here is a great detective story; by a great project team.

Detective Story: How ICIJ’s Project Team Analyzed the Offshore Files

Blog Post – This Telework Calculator Shows How Much Can You Save

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Yahoo Vs The US Government

Yahoo’s former CEO could have seen the writing on the wall when she banned telework. It removed top talent from the success equation.

Perhaps they didn’t use a telework calculator at all. It would explain Yahoo’s decision to eliminate telework for remote workers from its business model. The decision put Yahoo at odds with the US government’s policy direction to save money on federal services. An even bigger concern is the message that Yahoo is indifferent to the environmental challenges we face as a gas consuming nation.

Yahoo created a real challenge that has ripple effects even today.  It has already influenced the struggling “Best Buy” franchise to adopt a circle-the-wagons approach to management.

What both companies failed to realize is that this decision only encourages the “creme of the crop” to leave. They will move on to competitors with robust telework policies. So who has the burden of carrying this out? Well, managers do. They want to keep their high performing players on the team. Now is the time to think this through – before the executives cripple their teams.

Tools To Help Decision Makers

There are mechanisms to do a cost analysis on this issue. However, mid-level decision makers will be challenged by the time constraint HR will enforce to make this shift happen. So, I recommend a quick look at a tool used by the US government to do some “back of the napkin” analytics. That can, at the very least, plug the leaks until better solutions can be found.

The US government’s simplified calculator can be plugged in quickly to provide quick high-level answers. And in a world of expectations that want quick answers, it may provide a leg up.
Here is a link to check it out.

The Telework Calculator

GovLoop’s calculator is “designed to help employees put some real hard metrics in front of their management about the benefits of teleworking.” The calculator factors in the # of days per week you plan to telework, the round-trip miles driven each day, vehicle type, and commute time. It produces your annual total cost savings, annual hours of productivity saved and productivity in terms of dollars gained, annual vehicle savings, and pounds of greenhouse gases saved.