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Get VOCAL! Growing Profits Through Customer- Supplier Relationships
Author: Larry A. Brown Copyright© 2007 [sic] Cisco Systems, Inc. First Version: September 2006, Cisco Press ISBN: 1-58705-317-9 Price: $14.99 US
Is the relationship with one of your customers deteriorating or are you spending too much time firefighting?
Maybe you should "Get VOCAL".
VOCAL is a customer engagement process that can repair strained relationships with your customers by turning chaos into order. It is also an acronym where the letters stand for Visibility, Ownership, Communication, Accountability, and Leadership.
Larry A. Brown’s “Get VOCAL” covers it all – from case studies based on real-life experiences at Cisco to practical methods on how to build a strong and sustainable relationship between a supplier and its customer through applying structure, discipline and focus to deliver tangible results.
In “Get VOCAL” you will learn from a seasoned Program Manager what the VOCAL process involves and how to apply it. This is a personal account of hard lessons learned over three decades of work in the industry, the last eight years at Cisco, and it offers many practical nuggets of useful advice. Witty, honest, and inspiring, this is a digital publication aimed at Project and Program Management professionals and corporate and government leaders and managers alike.
It could serve you well with current supplier-customer relationships and on future customer engagements. The 61-page digital book is divided into two main parts. The first part consists of case studies and lessons learned, and it demonstrates what the VOCAL process is, how and why it works, when it does not work, and when and where to use it.
The author also mentions the way employees can waste time by “milling about smartly” and deals with corporate culture models – process-driven vs. the more ad-hoc cowboy culture. Photographs of Dodge City and its Peace Commission in the late 19th century illustrate a section on corporate cowboy culture. He is, however, quick to point out that his use of actual customer stories, where he assign fictitious names to real life customers, does not imply that these customers, or Cisco for that matter, are `cowboys` in any way. The author also wisely points out that too much process, i.e. too many procedures and control in the workplace, can cripple your corporation.
The second part of the book details best practices based on the seven steps to implement the process:
1. Line up your troops
2. Excite the customer
3. Scramble to get ready
4. Light the fuse!
5. Launch the teams
6. Brag to the execs
7. Keep weeding the garden
The author points out that a VOCAL engagement typically lasts between 18 to 24 months, when the problems or issues that it was created to address are either eliminated or handed off to newly minted normal business processes
Petra Goltz, PMP
Petra Goltz, PMP, is a Project Manager at SITA. She has extensive project, programme, and training experience throughout Europe and has worked as a contractor at leading edge, highly successful companies such as AT&T, BMW, IBM, Nortel, Siemens, Sun Microsystems and Unisource, and at financial institutions like the ECB (European Central Bank), and MasterCard.
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