B-SCHOOL NEWS: devoting increased attention to interpersonal skills development

As you may know, various studies highlight the growing dissatisfaction among corporations worldwide with the skills business schools are teaching to MBA students. For example, according to surveys conducted a few years ago by The Association of Graduate Recruiters (in the UK), employers continue to seek – and continue to find scarce – the personal skills that will make MBA graduates valuable employees. These surveys go on to point out that what employers seek most from new graduates are enthusiasm, self-motivation, interpersonal skills, team-working, and good oral communication – and that these skills are more important than specialist knowledge.

Earlier this year, Northeastern University’s College of Business Administration formally announced an overhaul of its full-time MBA program. The news here is that the school is focusing on working and partnering with the businesses that hire their MBAs in ways that most business schools do not. Moreover, a central tenant of this transformed MBA is a heightened focus on developing these personal skills through a unique combination of skills assessment and implementation of a personal development portfolio.

“Personal assessment is all the rage at business schools right now,” says Brendan Bannister, professor and head of the human resources group at the College of Business Administration at Northeastern University. Prof. Bannister was also in charge of the skills design team that spent two years planning the changes at Northeastern. “While things like our online personal development portfolio or learning teams are not unique in and of themselves, no other MBA program offers the combination of components aimed at both identifying and improving these critical personal skills.”

To show that this is happening on a national scale, I thought I would highlight what other MBA programs are doing in this area:

Tuck (Dartmouth College): utilize 3600 assessments, one on one coaching, study groups, career counseling, internship; strong focus on leadership potential and development

Wharton (University of Pennsylvania): heavy focus on Learning Teams including use of peer coaches

UChicago: heavy focus on Learning Teams including use of peer coaches

UVA Darden: use Learning Teams including peer coaches; second year peer coaches take a ‘How to Coach’ 3 credit elective while they provide facilitation/coaching to the Learning Teams

UCBerkley: utilize 3600 assessments and personal development planning

Last year, Northeastern University College of Business Administration (CBA) conducted over two-dozen in-depth interviews with Global 500 companies. “We had to push them to go beyond the platitudes, and to tell us what they really wanted, and where business schools were failing them,” said Thomas Moore, dean of CBA. “Very few universities take the time to identify corporate partners and work with them to understand exactly what skills-sets they want in the MBAs they hire. Based on corporate feedback, students will supplement a rigorous MBA curriculum with management intensives and skills modules to develop abilities in communications, interpersonal effectiveness, project management, and ethics.”

After talking with their corporate partners, the most frequently cited skills of effective managers (and leaders) were as follows:

Verbal communication
Managing time and stress
Managing individual decisions
Dealing with complexity and ambiguity
Project Management
Business Analysis
Recognizing, defining and solving problems
Motivating and influencing others
Delegating
Setting goals and articulating a vision
Self-awareness
Team building
Managing conflict
Leading positive change

To identify, assess and strengthen these skills sets of their students, CBA has created a skills program that goes across all the students’ course work, consisting of four key components:

1. Skills intensives
2. Learning teams, led by corporate coaches
3. Personal development portfolios
4. Corporate residencies

If you’d like to talk with the Dean, current students, or corporate partners of CBA about this unique approach to personal skills development, I’d be happy to facilitate an interview.

FINANCIAL NEWS: Murray Beach predicts that the Enterprise Content Management space will continue to consolidate

Murray Beach, president of Boston Corporate Finance, recently told Tamina Vahidy of Line56.com the folllowing:

"Open Text is the largest standalone company in the space...We see more consolidation coming. In this imminent consolidation, Interwoven or Vignette might prove to be attractive targets."

Please visit the following link to read the entire story: http://www.paradigmshiftpr.com/oracleacquiresstellent.htm

FINANCIAL NEWS: Comment on Keane (NYSE: KEA) as a good buyout candidate

Brad Adams, managing director at Boston Corporate Finance (www.bostoncf.com), was interviewed recently by Tom Taulli of Motley Fool: "he thinks that Keane(NYSE: KEA) would also make a good buyout candidate: 'It has a very attractive service offering, some fantastic clients and an interesting global delivery model that incorporates on-site, offsite, near-shore and offshore delivery capabilities," he told me. "Further, it has a sizeable presence in India, which we believe could be interesting to a number of acquirers.'

Visit the following link for the entire story: http://www.paradigmshiftpr.com/kanbaysellsout.htm

New software development lifecycle management software used by KeyBank, Champion Mortgage and others...

Last week, QAVantage, a leading provider of software development lifecycle management software, announced the release of version 4.0 of its RTIME™ product. You will notice that a number of prominent financial institutions, including KeyBank and Champion Mortgage, are users of RTIME.

Some of the benefits of this solution include:

- Enforces development and change management process/methodology
- Enforces IT compliance
- Prevents software defects, improves software quality and lower costs
- Reduce development cycle times lowering costs and bringing products to market faster
- Facilitates team collaboration and visibility across all stakeholders to ensure project success, and software meets business needs and accountability

A copy of the news release appears below.

QAVANTAGE LAUNCHES RTIME 4.0 –
A USABLE, FLEXIBLE AND AFFORDABLE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT AND TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT PLATFORM
With a proven track record at Key Bank, Champion Mortgage and other leading firms, RTIME is improving process methodology and helping to enforce IT compliance.

Parsippany, NJ – Nov. 13, 2006, QAVantage, a leading provider of usable, flexible and affordable software development lifecycle management software, announces the release of RTIME™ version 4.0. Selected by Key Bank, Champion Mortgage and other leading firms over competitive solutions, RTIME’s usability and affordability ensures involvement by all Business and Technical stakeholders. RTIME delivers the collaboration, visibility and traceability teams need to minimize defects, reduce cycle times, lower costs and ensure technology project success. Software vendors and commercial organizations alike will benefit from process enforcement over multiple initiatives including new application development, change management and IT compliance in a single application.

“We selected RTIME to help us manage our largest web-based initiative in 2002. RTIME allowed us to accurately capture the requirements up-front, avoiding misinterpretation while helping to forecast the level of effort for testing. Along with defect tracking and solid reporting, RTIME was critical to managing the tens of thousands of requirements that were part of this project. We also knew we would see substantial savings ensuring overall quality prior to roll-out” said Lorri Shipman, Manager, Central Testing.

RTIME provides a single centralized solution that succinctly manages a company’s Releases, Project Costs and Estimates, Requirements, IT Controls, Technical Specifications, Test Cases, incidents and more providing senior level management with a web based dashboard for complete visibility. In addition, RTIME is completely configurable to meet the needs of various methodologies with “Out of Box” integration to commonly used applications such as MS Visual Source Safe, MS Project, MS Outlook, Lotus Notes and industry leading testing tools.
“Many companies struggle with the visibility, collaboration and process methodology enforcement required to effectively manage software development and technology projects. And now more than ever, compliance is driving organizations to adopt new methods for better visibility and control over and across multiple initiatives. Since 2002, RTIME has been helping customers address these common challenges while reducing cycle times, lowering costs and improving software quality”, said Paul Schwartz, recently appointed CEO of QAVantage.
New features in RTIME 4.0 include:
- A web-based reporting dashboard delivering graphical and tabular reporting to further improve individual and cross project visibility
- Enhancements to the RTIME MS Project Gateway for even greater control over budget management, time and cost estimates and resource management
- The ability to manage technical specifications with linkage to business requirements further improving overall traceability
- Templates to jumpstart configuration, for various development and IT compliance methodologies
Developed and enhanced through nearly a decade of real-world project endeavors, RTIME’s feature-rich technique is both usable and practical at a price point that any size organization can afford.

About QAVantage Founded in 2006, QAVantage, based in Parsippany, NJ is a software company that provides RTIMETM, a ground-breaking project management and software development lifecycle management platform. RTIME, initially developed and used as a servicing tool in 1997 by LastCall Solutions has been in production as a packaged product since 2002. LastCall Solutions, a Quality Assurance consulting company, formed QAVantage to focus exclusively on bringing RTIME to a broader market at a price point any organization can afford.
For more information on QAVantage or RTIME, visit http://www.QAVantage.com send an e-mail to contact@QAVantage.com or call 1-800-573-1983.
QAVantage, the QAVantage logo and RTIME are trademarks of QAVantage. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Media Contact:

Dennis O’Connor
Paradigm Communications (for QAVantage)
(508) 650-0100; cell: (781) 883-5109
Dennis.oconnor@paradigmshiftpr.com

NEW BOOK: The Fast Path to Corporate Growth

A new book by business school professor Marc Meyer offers a new framework to enable large corporations to generate internal innovation by developing new product lines that address new market applications and generate new revenue streams for these companies. Prof. Meyer’s new book, The Fast Path to Corporate Growth, presents examples a global companies such as Honda, IBM and Master Foods, that have put this framework to use. Below is more information about this book.

THE FAST PATH TO CORPORATE GROWTH
Leveraging Knowledge and Technologies to New Market Applications
Marc H. Meyer

Every company understands the importance of growth. Yet, few successfully craft and
implement long-term growth strategies; instead, they spend their time on incremental innovation or rely on acquisitions. Still, organic, internal growth, accomplished through product
line renewal and new service development, is essential to the long-term vitality of corporations
across all industries.

The Fast Path to Growth takes on the challenge that large corporations face in generating
internal innovation: developing new product lines that address new market applications and
provide the corporation with new streams of revenue. The development framework that
Meyer offers to address this challenge integrates the key disciplines—new product strategy,
user research, concept development and prototyping, market testing, and business modeling—
needed for enterprise growth.

The book illustrates this integrated framework with in-depth examples of companies that
have generated impressive results by leveraging their core technologies to new markets and
new uses. These include IBM, Honda, and Mars. Many examples contain actionable templates
that readers can use in their own projects. The book also addresses the human side of
new market applications, providing advice on what executives and innovation team leaders
must do to execute the steps of Meyer’s development framework.

Marc H. Meyer is Matthews Distinguished University Professor and Department Chair, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group of the College of Business at Northeastern University. He is also a Visiting Scientist in the Engineering Systems Division at MIT.

Chair of SOX Institute comments on SEC/PCAOB reviewing section 404

Below are some comments from Sanjay Anand, chairman of the Sarbanes-Oxley Institute ( www.soxinstitute.org ), pertaining to the plans of the SEC/PCAOB to review the burdens of SOX in general and section 404 in particular:

It is about time that the SEC and PCAOB took a hard look at the burden of SOX (in particular section 404), and not just for political reasons, but for actually doing an unbiased and effective cost-benefit analysis. While it is impossible that SOX will be repealed (we're too far deep into it not just in the US, but around the world), the expectations going forward do need to be revisited. In particular:

1. For accelerated filers (who are already 404 compliant) ... How can the burden of audits be reduced? That should be a combination of (a) more guidance around the expectations of a top-down risk-based approach, and (b) fewer SOX audits (similar to what some other countries are doing).

2. For non-accelerated filers (whose deadlines are coming up) ... Do they really need full-blown SOX audits? And can we really expect the same level of due diligence from their SOX implementations as we do from those with deeper pockets and larger organizations where segregation of duties and the like are much more likely.

3. Recognition of the fact that companies have spent a lot (in the millions per company, or close to $20 billion collectively over the past 3 years), and admission of the fact that the legislators were off by two orders of magnitude in their estimates and expectation-setting around the cost of compliance.

Although the "word on the street" is that foreign companies are preferring to delist from the US exchanges en masse and re-list on London, Tokyo, HK etc. because of SOX, there is some element of exaggeration in those claims. While SOX is part of the reason, there are other reasons as well (e.g. weak dollar, more capital overseas, risk propensity etc.). In fact, we are seeing a number of Chinese companies come right back to the US to tap into the world's largest capital market (America) despite their initial adverse reaction to SOX.

Point is: SOX has gotten a bad reputation. Much of it was well-deserved, but some of it is clearly exaggerated, and I hope the SEC and PCAOB will take a rational (rather than dramatic or emotional) approach to coming up with a "solution" to the 404 problem. I do expect they will be pragmatic about it, but political pressures can sometimes thwart the best of intentions, and that is my biggest concern. Case in point: SOX. SOX was the result of politicians and legislators trying to solve business problems. Not a bad thing in itself, but can become a disaster and a nightmare if not done in collaboration with those that will be impacted.

So here is the real question: Will the SEC and PCAOB get and use the input of those impacted by SOX, namely the companies, the exchanges and the economy at large, or will they make their decision in a vacuum. I know that they are trying to get as much input as they can. But how do we know that they will use it? And how do we know that they will not be biased in their decision? That to me is the real question.

Like many others out there, I too have my fingers crossed that SOX, albeit not repealed, will take on a shape and a message that will encourage companies to IPO and to list in the US. And it is not just the words and the announcement, but then the follow-through and the implementation that will really make the difference. I think December 13 is just the first day in a new year-long saga. Hopefully, this new saga will have a favorable outcome and a happy ending unlike the saga of 2004 (which is when the first companies had to demonstrate 404 compliance).