Most of us small business owners don’t have the luxury of having a secretary or office manager to screen our calls for us. It can become overwhelming when answering sales call after sales call from telemarketers prevent us from doing what makes us money. To top it off, we can sometimes be talked into spending our hard earned money on products or services that are often overpriced and/or not needed in the first place.Each time we add a new business telephone number or change the business location of the ones we currently have, our telephone numbers are placed on a telemarketing list as a “new business.” Our business phone lines are then overrun by harassing telemarketers that want to be the first to sell a new business what they don’t need. You see a “new business owner” generally hasn’t fine tuned their decision making skills to the point that they can just say no and hang up. These skills come with time and experience. Telemarketers know this and target these new business owners because seasoned owners won’t fall for their tactics.I am always adding or changing toll free and regular phone numbers. To prevent this constant barrage of calls (I call it “the first wave”) or to at least limit them, I have developed a strategy that is working right now. You, as a small business owner, can take what you need from this and add to it your own ideas that you have found that work.First, the “Do Not Call” list! This list was set up for consumers and not businesses. We as consumers are afforded a lot more rights under the law than we are as business owners. Either way there is no mechanism the government can use to determine whether the number you put on the list is a business number or a residential number. I am not telling you to put your company’s number on the list. I am simply explaining that if you did, it would work. Any number that is put on this list almost instantly sees a drop in calls from telemarketers. You can find this list by doing a search for “do not call list” on your favorite search engine.Secondly you must accept the fact that if you need something for your business then you will seek it out and find it yourself! Train yourself to never buy “spur of the moment!” Spontaneous purchases can kill a business. Once you realize this then you will never change your phone service just because someone called and was nice to you. You’ll never buy twelve dozen light bulbs or two thousand feet of extension cord. If you need a first aid kit then go buy one at the Home Depot and don’t buy a dozen from a con man on the other end of the phone. First aid kits, extension cords, light bulbs and phone service are all the top sellers to the construction business, your industry may differ but I am sure not by much. You must say no and it is absolutely OK to be rude and to hang up mid sentence. The point is that once you have trained yourself to say “no,” then you can follow step three.Third, you must tell the caller that not only are you not interested but you want them to remove your company and phone number from their list. You must do this every time.
Watch out for “free” items, “we want to save you money” or “can I ask you why” because these are their favorite tricks to get you to spend. I try to be as polite as I can so that they will actually remove my phone number. Sometimes you may need to call an 800 number that they will give you in order to be removed from further solicitation. I recommend that you call and have your business’ phone number removed right away because these companies can actually sell your name to other companies as an “active” number and that will only make matters worse. The problem then spreads like a virus. The bottom line is to tell them no and to ask them to remove you from their list before you even hear what they have to offer.Another way that I minimize the distractions of telemarketing sales calls is to use caller ID. Unfortunately, only local companies that acquire work locally can utilize this method. My concrete cutting company services customers in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine, so when I get a call from California or some odd area code, I will prepare myself to be firm and up front before I answer the phone. If my calls are forwarded to my cellular telephone and I find out the call wasn’t from a vendor or supplier then I will simply program the number as DNA into my cell phone. This stands for “Do Not Answer!” You can program up to ten numbers under one contact name in most cellular phones and give it a distinct ring tone. I have DNA1, DNA2 and so on and I am up to DNA9 right now. If I see or hear one of these numbers come in I just push the button that sends them directly to voice mail.Lastly and very important is the use of a device that is called the “TeleZapper.” The TeleZapper sends a digital tone through the phone line telling automatic dialers used my many telemarketers that the line is currently disconnected and or not in use. The automatic dialing computer subsequently removes your phone number from its list. This not only stops them from calling back it also prevents them from selling your phone number as an “active number.” This device became almost extinct once the “Do Not Call” list became a reality because who needs to “zap” a telemarketer if you are not getting any calls? It still works great for the small business and you will see a dramatic drop in telemarketing calls if you use it correctly. This device will not work if you forward your calls to another phone or if you use a voice mail provided by your phone company and your calls are sent to that voice mail box. It will work when a call is picked up by an answering machine in your office. The TeleZapper is very difficult to find anymore in retail stores but it is still readily available new on eBay or online.© 2007 Affordable Concrete Cutting Massachusetts, MA All Rights Reserved
Eliminating Profit Robbing Telemarketing Calls to Your Business
The 10 Best Tips on How to Keep Sabotaging Your Relationships Over and Over Again
This article lists the best 10 tips you will ever receive about how to fail in relationships. Paying great attention to them is a sure way to understand how to keep sabotaging your relationships over and over again. Read and internalize with the fullest attention.1. Never take responsibility for your part in the failure of your relationships. Always blame your partners. Taking responsibility shows that you too might be wrong. This can take away some of the respect and love your partner feels towards you. Being sure you are always right is the best way to prove your integrity and show how strong you are!2. Don’t ever try to get in touch and understand the needs which might drive you to sabotage your relationships. Trying to understand what might drive you to sabotage your relationships means that you don’t know yourself 100%. It means you don’t know “who you truly are.”In today’s world, where “knowledge is power”, not knowing “who you are” is a weakness. You can’t allow yourself to believe and assume you have personal needs you are not aware of which might drive you to harm your relationships.There is no reason for you to even consider the possibility that you have needs which cause you to sabotage your relationships (such as: the need to always be in control which drives your partners away from you; the need to always get attention and love which makes you too dependent on your partners; the need to always be “right” which makes you an unpleasant and stubborn person, and so on).3. Don’t even attempt to realize and understand the fears that control you and drive you to sabotage your relationships. It doesn’t make sense that you have fears you are unaware of which harm your relationships. It is certain that you realize your fears and know how to combat them. If you are unsuccessful in your relationships it is not due to fears. There is no reason to suspect you of having fear of commitment (which might drive you to escape from each and every relationship you begin to develop); fear of being alone (which might drive you to jump into a relationship with whoever blinks at you); fear of losing your independence (which drives you to be controlling with your partners); fear of being hurt (which might drive you to be cautious with your partners causing you to never dare to open up), and so on. No. Don’t let anyone suspect you have fears you are unaware of which cause you to sabotage your relationships!4. Don’t ever check whether your expectations from partners and relationships are unrealistic. It is great to have expectations! It is also natural to expect your partner to be there for you all the time; to love you unconditionally; to always understand you; to always remember your birthday. It is great to expect that you and your partner will always be in a good mood; will always be sexually attracted to one another, and so on.If you find out that your expectations are not fulfilled – that your partner doesn’t fulfill them! – it is not your fault! You have done nothing wrong! There is no reason for you to contemplate whether your expectations are unrealistic and try to modify them. If your relationship fails, there is no reason to suspect your expectations did any damage to it. Just find another partner!5. Believe in your fantasies and make sure they materialize! Fantasies are part of life. They give you something to dream about, something to look forward to. Where will you be without your fantasies? The more fantasies you have about partners and relationships the richer your relationship can be! Together with your partner you can reach the highest sky!Fantasize that your love will be just like in the movies. That your partner will supply all your needs. That the two of you will do everything together and never fight. That you will always agree on everything.Hang on to your fantasies! Let no one tell you they are unrealistic! They are part of “who you are” – of your perception of reality, of the way you approach love and relationships. Don’t ever give them up!6. Remember that you are always right! Whenever conflicts and arguments arise between you and your partner, never think – not even for a minute – that your partner may be right, and never ever compromise! Compromises in life indicate weakness, and once you compromise your partner might use it against you time and again in the future. You need to be assertive, even aggressive, knowing what you want and how to pursue it. Never succumb! If your partner doesn’t like it – it’s your partner’s problem, not yours!OR, by the same token -7. Always be submissive; compromising; giving in; allowing abuse; loving and understanding. Never allow yourself to do and express what you want to see taking place between you and your partner. Never express a different idea to your partner’s. Never refuse to do what your partner wants. The more you are there for your partner without any mutuality, the better it is for the relationship.8. Always react towards your partner and behave the same way you have in past relationships. Prove to yourself that you are consistent. That you don’t change from one relationship to another. There is no reason to choose different reactions and behaviors with different partners. If your past relationships failed it isn’t because something you did or not; it is more likely because something your partner did. Or maybe “the time wasn’t right”; or you were “too busy pursuing your career”, and so on. So there is no reason for you to devote time to thinking what to do differently in a future relationship. 9. Never try to change anything related to “who you are” and the way you behave in a relationship. The process of growing up has taken you years to arrive at where you are. During the years you have unconsciously learned and internalized (from your parents; the society you grew up in; books, movies, fairy-tales and more) a belief-system, a perception of reality; messages about love and relationships.In your adult life you continue to hang on to these. And this is fine. There is no reason for you to give them up. No reason to attempt to change anything you carry on with you for so many years. You are doing just fine. If your relationship fails, that’s too bad, but it isn’t a reason for you to begin doubting yourself or begin to “work” on finding out what has driven you to fail. Things happen, sometimes more than once.10. Resist, fight and reject any advice/suggestion to develop self-awareness.Self-Awareness is something only “losers” develop; only those who “don’t find themselves”; only those who “are not certain about themselves.”If you know who you are; if you appreciate yourself; if you feel you have a fine level of self-esteem – why develop Self-Awareness? It can only make your partner doubt your integrity; your strength; your stability.There is no reason for you to become aware of the ways in which you keep sabotaging your relationships time and again. Avoid any temptation to get to know and understand yourself better. Be and stay “who you are”. After all, consistency in life is a virtue!
Software Maintenance Implications on Cost and Schedule
Abstract The dictionary defines maintenance as, “The work of keeping something in proper order.” However, this definition does not necessarily fit for software. Software maintenance is different from hardware maintenance because software doesn’t physically wear out, but often gets less useful with age. Software is typically delivered with undiscovered flaws. Therefore, software maintenance is: “The process of modifying existing operational software while leaving its primary functions intact.” Maintenance typically exceeds fifty percent of the systems’ life cycle cost . While software maintenance can be treated as a level of effort activity, there are consequences on quality, functionality, reliability, cost and schedule that can be mitigated through the use of parametric estimation techniques.1. INTRODUCTION One of the greatest challenges facing software engineers is the management of change control. It has been estimated that the cost of change control can be between 40% and 70% of the life cycle costs . Software engineers have hoped that new languages and new process would greatly reduce these numbers; however this has not been the case. Fundamentally this is because software is still delivered with a significant number of defects. Capers Jones estimates that there are about 5 bugs per Function Point created during Development . Watts Humphrey found “… even experienced software engineers normally inject 100 or more defects per KSLOC . Capers Jones says, “A series of studies the defect density of software ranges from 49.5 to 94.5 errors per thousand lines of code .” The purpose of this article is to first review the fundamentals of software maintenance and to present alternative approaches to estimating software maintenance. A key element to note is that development and management decisions made during the development process can significantly affect the developmental cost and the resulting maintenance costs.2. SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE Maintenance activities include all work carried out post-delivery and should be distinguished from block modifications which represent significant design and development effort and supersede a previously released software package. These maintenance activities can be quite diverse, and it helps to identify exactly what post-delivery activities are to be included in an estimate of maintenance effort. Maintenance activities, once defined, may be evaluated in a quite different light than when called simply “maintenance”. Software maintenance is different from hardware maintenance because software doesn’t physically wear out, but software often gets less useful with age and it may be delivered with undiscovered flaws. In addition to the undiscovered flaws, it is common that some number of known defects pass from the development organization to the maintenance group. Accurate estimation of the effort required to maintain delivered software is aided by the decomposition of the overall effort into the various activities that make up the whole process.3. APPROACHING THE MAINTENANCE ISSUE Maintenance is a complicated and structured process. In his textbook, Estimating Software Intensive Systems, Richard Stuzke outlines the typical software maintenance process. It is apparent that the process is more than just writing new code.The following checklist can be used to explore the realism and accuracy of maintenance requirements.o Which pieces of software will be maintained?o How long will the system need to be maintained?o Are you estimating the entire maintenance problem, or just incremental maintenance?o What level of maintenance is required?o Is that which is being called maintenance in fact a new development project?o Who will do the maintenance? Will it be done organically by the original developer? Will there be a separate team? Will there be a separate organization?o Will maintainers be using the same tools used during development? Are any proprietary tools required for maintenance?o How much Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) is there? How tightly coupled are the interfaces?o Some follow-on development may be disguised as maintenance. This will either inflate maintenance figures, or else cause shortfalls if basic maintenance gets pushed aside. These questions will help you ask whether maintenance is being honestly represented.o Is the activity really an incremental improvement?o Are healthy chunks of the original code being rewritten or changed?o Will additional staff be brought in to perform the upgrade?o Is the maintenance effort schedule regular and fairly flat, or does it contain staffing humps that look like new development?4. SANITY CHECKS Although sanity checks should be sought on a year-by-year basis, they should not be attempted for overall development. The reason for this is that maintenance activities can be carried on indefinitely, rendering any life-cycle rules useless. As an example, consider Grady (p. 17):We spend about 2 to 3 times as much effort maintaining and enhancing software as we spend creating new software.This and similar observations apply at an organizational level and higher, but not for a specific project. Any development group with a history will be embroiled in the long tail ends of their many delivered projects, still needing indefinite attention. Here are a few quick sanity checks:o One maintainer can handle about 10,000 lines per year.o Overall life-cycle effort is typically 40% development and 60% maintenance.o Maintenance costs on average are one-sixth of yearly development costs.o Successful systems are usually maintained for 10 to 20 years.Finally, as in development, the amount of code that is new versus modified makes a difference. The effective size, that is, the equivalent effort if all the work were new code, is still the key input for both development and maintenance cost estimation.5. FIVE ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES All software estimation techniques must be able to model the theory and the likely real world result. The real world scenario is that over time, the overlay of changes upon changes makes software increasingly difficult to maintain and thus less useful. Maintenance effort estimation techniques range from the simplistic level of effort method, through more thoughtful analysis and development practice modifications, to the use of parametric models in order to use historical data to project future needs.5.1 Level of Effort As is sometimes the case in the development environment, software maintenance can be modeled as a level of effort activity. Given the repair category activities and the great variance that they show, this approach clearly has deficiencies. In this approach, a level of effort to maintain software is based on size and type.5.2 Level of Effort Plus Stuzke proposed that software maintenance starts with basic level of effort (minimum people needed to have a core competency and then that that basic core staff must be modified by assessing three additional factors; configuration management, quality assurance, and project management. His process addressed some of the additional factors affecting software maintenance.5.3 Maintenance Change Factor Software Cost Estimation with COCOMO II (Boehm 2000) proposes a deceivingly simple, but also quite useful methodology for determining annual maintenance. Maintenance is one of the menu selections in the menu bar. In COCOMO II Maintenance encompasses the process of modifying existing operational software while leaving its primary functions intact. This process excludes:o Major re-design and re-development (more than 50% new code) of a new software product performing substantially the same functions.o Design and development of a sizeable (more than 20% of the source instructions comprising the existing product) interfacing software package which requires relatively little redesigning of the existing product.o Data processing system operations, data entry, and modification of values in the database.The maintenance calculations are heavily based upon the Maintenance Change Factor (MCF) and the Maintenance Adjustment Factor (MAF). The MCF is similar to the Annual change Traffic in COCOMO81, except that maintenance periods other than a year can be used. The resulting maintenance effort estimation formula is the same as the COCOMO II Post Architecture development model.As stated previously, three cost drivers for maintenance differ from development. Those cost drivers are software reliability, modern programming practices, and schedule. COCOMO II assumes that increased investment in software reliability and use of modern programming practices during software development has a strong positive effect upon the maintenance stage.Annual Maintenance Effort = (Annual Change Traffic) * (Original Software Development Effort)The quantity Original Software Development Effort refers to the total effort (person-months or other unit of measure) expended throughout development, even if a multi-year project.The multiplier Annual Change Traffic is the proportion of the overall software to be modified during the year. This is relatively easy to obtain from engineering estimates. Developers often maintain change lists, or have a sense of proportional change to be required even before development is complete.5.4 Managing Software Maintenance Costs by Developmental Techniques and Management Decisions During DevelopmentWhen it comes to maintenance, “a penny spent is a pound saved.” Better development practices (even if more expensive) can significantly reduce maintenance effort, and reduce overall life cycle cost. The more effort put into development, the less required in maintenance. As an example, the software development cost and schedule can be significantly impacted (reduced) by letting the number of defects delivered grow. This cost and schedule reduction is more than offset by the increase in maintenance cost. The following discussion is an example of how management decision can significantly affect/reduce software maintenance costs.Lloyd Huff and George Novak of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in their paper “Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Performance Based Software Sustainment for the F-35 Lightning II” propose a series of development and management decision designed to impact and reduce software maintenance costs. They propose an eight step process to estimate and control software maintenance . Their proposed steps are:1. Strive for Commonality2. Apply Industrial Engineering Practices to Software3. Engage4. Adopt a Holistic Approach to Sustainment5. Develop Highly Maintainable Systems and Software6. Manage the Off-the-Shelf Software7. Plan for the Unexpected8. Analyze and Refine the Software Sustainment Business Case (use Parametric software sustainment cost estimates)5.5 A Parametric Assessment of Software MaintenanceParametric models like SEER for Software allow maintenance to be modeled in either of two ways:Estimating maintenance as a part of the total lifecycle cost. Choosing the appropriate Maintenance category parameters will include an estimate of maintenance effort with the development estimate for the individual software program. Several reports and charts show breakdowns of development vs. maintenance effort. This method is best used to evaluate life cycle costs for each individual software program.Estimating maintenance as a separate activity. Using the appropriate maintenance parameters for the software to be maintained you can model the maintenance effort as a separate activity. This method will allow you to fine tune your maintenance estimate by adjusting parameters. Maintenance size should be the same as development size, but should be entered as all pre-existing code. This method can also be useful in breaking out total project maintenance costs from project development costs.A good parametric estimate for maintenance includes a wide range of information. Critical information for completing a software maintenance estimate is the size or amount of software that will be maintained, the quality of that software, the quality and availability of the documentation, and the type or amount of maintenance that will be done. Many organizations don’t actually estimate maintenance costs; they simply have a budget for software maintenance. In this case, a parametric model should be used to compute how much maintenance can actually be performed with the given budget.Estimating and planning for maintenance are critical activities if the software is required to function properly throughout its expected life. Even with a limited budget, a plan can be made to use the resources available in the most efficient, productive manner. Looking at the diagram above, you can see that not only are the multiple inputs that impact the maintenance, but there are several key outputs that provide the information necessary to plan a successful maintenance effort.6. Conclusion The conclusions of this article are:o Software maintenance can be modeled using a simplistic method like Level of Effort Staffing, but this technique has significant drawbacks.o Software maintenance costs can be significantly affected by management decisions during the developmental process.o Software maintenance can be accurately estimated using parametric processes.o Software maintenance is best modeled when development and management decisions are coupled with parametric cost estimation techniques.REFERENCES [1] Software Maintenance Concepts and Practices (second Edition) by Penny Grubb and Armstrong Takang, World Scientific, 2005.[2] Estimating Software Intensive Systems; Richard Stuzke, 2005, Addison-Wesley.[3] Lloyd Huff, George Novak; Lockheed Martin Aeronautics; Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Performance Based Software Sustainment for the F-35 Lightning II.[4] G. Edward Bryan, “CP-6: Quality and Productivity Measures in the 15-Year Life Cycle of an Operating System,” Software Quality Journal 2, 129-144, June 1993.[5] Software Sizing, Estimation, and Risk Management; Daniel D. Galorath, Michael W. Evans, 2006, Auerbach Publications.