theThought's thoughts

A Week in Malaysia

Three months into my new role as Creative Director at Synovate, I found myself travelling to Malaysia to identify whether it was possible to build a new design team in Kuala Lumpar.  This has been my first trip to Malaysia, although not my first to Asia as I previously travelled to Xi-An in China to work with the IBM SPSS Data Collection Development team.

The purpose of the trip:  to interview and hopefully recruit a new design team that will help me meet the main objectives of my role (improving respondent engagement, improving client engagement and delivering end to end solutions that increase company profitability). 

The process started two weeks before with a conference call to a number of local recruitment agencies.  During the call I defined the roles I wanted to fulfil and the skills I was looking to find.  Previous attempts to engage in the recruitment process remotely had resulted in a slurry of applicants with the wrong combination of skills.  Consequently when I started this recruitment drive I was not convinced that I would be able to find the talent that I required.

During the ensuing two weeks the agencies aimed to fulfil their target of providing 20 candidates that I would accept for interview.  As my requirements are quite stringent they only managed 20 in total of which five were rejected as unsuitable.

I will not go into detail regarding the recruitment process we used, its enough to say that the technique employed was based on my recruitment experience in IT, Design and Education (I have sat on a number of recruitment panels for teachers, deputy head teachers, school business administrators and even head teachers).  I find that the process used in education is more formal, more structured than those used normally used in business.  The process used in this instance included focus on four areas: personality, skill, technical awareness and team work.

I arrived expecting to encounter a certain degree of “culture shock”.  Having never been on the island and certainly never recruited there I was pretty sure that there would be a range of social and cultural differences. In China, for example, there seems to be a real reluctance to ask questions, it took a significant amount of effort to teach new staff that asking questions is essential, that their perception of requests and reality could well be different and that only by asking questions and seeking clarification could they ensure that communication is efficient.  As a consequence I engaged three members of the local team to help with the interviews.

There is no doubt that there were differences.  The designs in their portfolios had a distinctly Asian influence to the exclusion of any real non-Asian style.  Their technical skills were based on technologies that are not particularly new and most had little or no knowledge of the subtleties of events in their relevant fields of expertise.  On the positive side, the majority were keen, enthusiastic and willing to learn, the skills that they did have were practically sound even if their theoretical knowledge was not as complete as I would have liked.

By the end of the process it was obvious that in previous jobs the candidates had been encouraged to listen to the exact tasks they have to do and to execute without really thinking about the relative merits, or lack thereof of those tasks.  They were not encouraged to monitor new technologies and identify ways in which they could introduce new ideas.  Despite all this I believe that the recruitment process was successful I managed to find five candidates who showed good skill (albeit dated) and significant potential and hopefully will develop into a strong versatile team.

My trip was not limited to the short term issue of building a team,  I also wanted to look to the long term and identify ways in which it might be possible to improve the quality of future candidates.  Consequently I spent a day visiting  a number of universities looking at the courses that related to the skills I look for and identifying if there is a way in which we can share expertise to our mutual benefit.  It is too early to say whether this will really be possible but there is no doubt that there were a number of potentially exciting and beneficial opportunities that could deliver significant reward in the years to come.

So, as I travel home ,(currently I am flying between Malaysia and Hong Kong) I await confirmation that each of the selected candidates is willing to join the team and I am hopeful that we will be able to deliver a range of solutions over the forthcoming months that will show the true possibilities when you apply creativity to the IBM SPSS Data Collection software.

"No Product is just One Man"

I have been delighted to receive no small number of e-mails (mostly via LinkedIn) in relation to my last two posts and my departure from SPSS.  A fair percentage of them have expressed concern for Data Collection now that I am not there.

These concerns are very kind, however it needs to be made clear that as influential as I was in the shaping of Data Collection (into its current form - and that of its next release later in 2010), I was not the only person on the team.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swingometer

In the British election of 2005 Peter Snow famously used the Swingometer to help predict the election result based on which seats were won a lost. As a keen watcher of election nights (geek that I am) I have always used a similar principle to look at the potential damage inflicted on a team when it looses a staff.

In my case I use a dart board.  Positioned on the dart board are people who influence a product, be they developers, marketeers, sales people, company directors or strategists.  The closer they are to the centre the more important they are and the bigger the impact if they leave.

The board is not static, not only are people added and removed as they join/leave but people move in and out as their influence waxes and wanes.

In 2004 when I joined SPSS I was very much on the outer rim and when I left, in 2010,  I was indeed much closer to the centre.

During those 5 years, Data Collection definitely took a number of serious hits.  The most notable of those in the early days was Paul Petersen.  His drive, influence, imagination, the strength of the team he ran and the respect he had in the industry resulted in his departure being a "significant loss".  However people not quite so  near the centre, like Lance Nichols, stepped up to help fill the gap.  There is no doubt that I (still travelling inwards took up a certain amount of Paul's responsibility).

An equally big loss happened in 2009 with the departure of Patrick Quigley.  His loss was probably more noticeable to me than Paul's because I had worked with him for longer.  As most strategic customers will know Patrick was a shining light in the SPSS organisation and helped Data Collection grow as a product by delivering new customers and ensuring existing ones stayed.

But again his leaving gave others the opportunity to step up.  Dave Suedkamp (still at SPSS) is now probably closest to the centre his knowledge, willingness to help customers understand how to get the most of Data Collection is immensely important as is his influence in the higher echelons of SPSS.   And lastly, but certainly not leastly Jane Moore (Sales Person of the Year 2009 at SPSS - well done Jane) is an ever present who I most enjoyed working with and who is helping IBM understand that Data Collection is worth investing in.

So yes, there will be an impact to Data Collection now that I am no longer there, but it will recover.  As a result it may be slightly different in the future but it should still be the best survey platform in the world and worth including in your software portfolio.