The Stalled filter is one of those features.  It shows you projects that can’t proceed, either because the next possible action is a Waiting action, or  simply don’t have an action.  This makes reviews really fast! The problem is that as soon as you add an action, the project is no longer stalled, so it disappears before you’ve had a chance to actually type the action!

Fortunately, Omni provides great support. They taught me a trick that solves this and helps make my weekly reviews much faster!  Kudos to Kris at Omni support! Here’s his response to me.

I’ve got a suggested work-around for Reviewing Stalled projects: First, set the sidebar filter to “Stalled”. As you review the projects and wish to add new actions to the stalled projects, simply call up the Quick Entry window and add the actions there.

I have my Clean Up Preferences (in Data Preferences) set to “Clean up Inbox items which have: Both a Project and a Context”. This way, the Stalled projects remain in view when I’m entering new actions into the Quick Entry and assigning them to the Stalled project — those new actions remain in the Inbox (assigned to the Stalled project) until I add a Context.  After I’ve fully reviewed the Stalled Projects, I return to the inbox and assign the proper Contexts for each action, et voila!

Does that help? If not, or if you have any other questions or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. We really appreciate your support!

Recently, I was helping my friend  set up her website. She’s an artist and illustrator, and was resisting the suggestion that the website design is far from her top priority, even though the design has been holding up the entire process until now. She has a unique style and a very fun, human way of communicating. But as she puts it, so far her great work and ability has been kept “hidden under the bed.”

I’ve seen this happen with all kinds of freelancers and service businesses. We let our professional perfectionism overturn our business priorities. From our current perspective, we feel the only way for our website to communicate the quality of our work is for the website to be an example of our work. A writer toils over the website copy, the photographer over the site imagery, and meanwhile there’s no site, and no new clients!

So even with such a clear goal of gaining clients as quickly as possible, why is it so hard to prioritize? Why is it hard to single out the priorities that get us to our goals the fastest?

To dependably identify the highest leverage activities, there’s are established ways of thinking:

1. Take baby steps. Start with the bare minimum you need to get your first customer. It may be that a more hastily designed site might not land as many customers, but it will land some. More imporantly, it will land them sooner. Consider that once you have client #1, you’ll have a bit more cash and time to invest in your site.
2. Begin at the end and work backwards.  Imagine when you have loads of clients, and an established reputation. What will be the most important aspects of your website? Chances are they will be your portfolio and the description of your methods. Basically, the things that communicate your expertise. Remember, it’s not our websites that represent us, it’s our work that represents us.  When you’re busy with client work, imagine how you will communicate your expertise very quickly by keeping things simple.
3. Consider the customers perspective.  Ask any freelancer who keeps website stats – people go straight to two places: About Us and Portfolio, and some move on to contact. Once someone is on a site, all other content is basically ignored.

I suggested to my friend, as I do for many startup businesses, that a blog with a template design actually offers a greater payback at a lower cost. A blog allows you to focus on the getting the message out. The website’s measure of success is the number of clients she wins, whch depends on how quickly it gets them. Promotion and content are the key factors here.  Within a few hours, she found a suitable template and had begun populating it with her work.

If you’re having trouble getting your website or social media started, Stay Connected has an Online Quick Start service, which can get you online within days. It’s a high leverage service that stays focused on your strategic goals, and uses high quality but  free, open-source resources to make progress quickly.

This is a learning opportunity for us all. The following strategies will help you make immediate improvements with the reliability of your IT infrastructure:

1. Always make the business decisions first.

If you’re finding your IT infrastructure tends to hold you back, rather than create opportunity, you’re likely making IT decisions that aren’t driven by your business strategy.

A common trap is thinking that maintaining software will be as cheap and easy as installing it. This trap sometimes disguises itself to leadership as, “That’s an IT issue – I’ll let them decide how to handle that,” or to IT as, “I can just install that quickly.”

In both cases, the IT decision doesn’t get aligned to the business strategy, and it bypasses the risk/reward process that all other business decisions go through. Not only is this needlessly dangerous, it sets your IT investments down a path that isn’t in line with your overall business.

2. Don’t host anything you don’t have to.

It may seem trivial to host your own DNS, email, web servers or another common service, but you’ll pay dearly when it’s a trivial problem that takes your service down.

As you have to maintain more software, you spread your resources thin and expose yourself to catastrophe from unpatched security flaws and version incompatibilities. When it comes to reacting in an emergency, managing all of these bits and pieces is going to exacerbate the problem, reducing your response time.

In the long run, it’s cheaper to use a company with dedicated experts, leaving your experts to focus on your core business. This applies to tech businesses too: if it’s not in your core offering, outsource it.

3. Don’t punish your users for your failures.

Degrade gracefully. Avoid unnecessary dependencies between systems.

In many cases, a single failure causes other functional systems to stop, causing more inconvenience than necessary.  If there’s a catastrophic failure in one area, plan on containing it.  Consider that minimising your users’ inconvenience may be more important than other factors (such as billing.)

For example, if you run a metered service with low marginal costs, billing or authentication failures should default to a minimal access level rather than no access at all. The loss of the unbilled revenue is likely much smaller than the loss in revenue from customer churn.

4. Communicate.

Don’t worsen your downtime by going dark on your communications as well. Have a plan to get the message out quickly and regularly. Letting your customers know ASAP helps them to minimise impact to them. Regular updates, whether you’re on track or not, help your users manage and maintains their confidence in you.

5. Monitor.

External monitoring services are so cheap, there’s no excuse not to use them. Management and customer services should be on the list for automatic notification. This frees up your techies to deal with the problem first, and the entire business can react immediately.

6. Be redundant, but not complicated.

In many cases, duplication is grossly overcomplicated and unnecessary. Redundancy needs to be simple.

Most business don’t have the time to regularly test their backup or failover infrastructure, so simplicity helps make sure it still works when you need it.  The IT world is full of horror stories of fancy RAID arrays and automated backup/restore plans gone wrong.

Consider what critical functions need redundancy, and within those, consider if reduced functionality will suffice. If so, you have a much simpler failover system to build and maintain.

As an example, consider REST with queuing. It may require some investment, but it has many additional benefits. Your services become far more scalable, more maintainable, and more flexible from a strategic point-of-view. Matt Biddulph, of Dopplr, has a great presentation on this here.

7. Be watchful AFTER a migration.

Migrations are a time when you are most exposed to human error and planning failures. Plan to have extra people watching and ready during and AFTER the migration.

Migrations tend to cause glitches that are tough to spot right away. Sometimes, caching or permissions causes serious glitches to go undetected immediately after a migration. Your tests will pass, but the problems will crop up later. So watch carefully afterwards. If you have any processes that occur on a regular interval (say monthly) then be vigilant until you’ve run through at least one complete cycle.

8. Make sure you have redundant humans.

Many small businesses are over-reliant on a single tech person. This might be a necessary risk when you’re bootstrapping, but it’s a risk that must be managed.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking you need another techy of equal skill, time or knowledge. Critical emergency functions rarely require detailed knowledge of the entire system. In many cases, a server admin just needs to know how to build a few servers and install your software. That’s enough to have a second pair of hands at the ready, just in case.

Break your emergency plans into small chunks, and document them in phases. You’ll find the most likely causes of failure are easy to document and quick for someone else to learn.

For server administration, I’ve used Green Olive Tree for years. They charge $100 per server per month, which includes pro-active 24/7 monitoring and an expert pair of hands constantly at the ready.

9. Make sure you have redundant suppliers.

Organisational failure is becoming more likely, and sometimes the signs aren’t clear.  Many businesses are stretching their people further, and that can lead to unforeseen problems if you’re a customer. ISPs may have bandwidth cut off, or reduce their tech support response times without notice. Don’t put all of your infrastructure in the hands of a single organisation.

10. Make sure you have redundant bandwidth and routing.

Monitoring and DNS failover is very cheap and practical. If you consider your absolute minimal requirements, you can usually configure a server or two (or even a shared hosting package) at a different ISP which uses a different backbone, and automatically failover from the monitoring system.

As we move more towards service-oriented marketplace, SLAs have become more than a legal and architectural consideration. The marketplace is becoming more crowded, so downtime will have a greater and greater effect on your credibility and marketability. That means the impact of potential failure scenarios is rising.

At the same time, the cost of addressing these risks is lowering. The recent advanced in technology such as cloud computing, REST, monitoring and so on, now allow you to reasonably address these scenarios.

If you take a look at your services with fresh eyes, you’ll see many new opportunities to expand quicker and avoid disasters.