FOUR WAYS TO ENHANCE BUSINESS EXCELLENCE

Fujitsu is the third biggest player in the global IT services market, with sales of US$50 billion and 172,000 employees in 60 countries. It also has a long and distinguished track record as a technology pioneer. And yet, it remains little known outside of Japan. Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove, gained unique access to examine the art of Fujitsu management:

1.Customer first The fashionable business ideas of our time suggest that customers are unreliable guides.  Simply, they do not know what the technology is capable of, so how can they tell you what they want or would like?  As a result, the emphasis of recent years has been on retaining talented individuals rather than attracting and retaining high spending customers.  Fujitsu is old fashioned in its adherence to the edict that customers come first.   All Fujitsu executives talked about the vital importance of staying close to customers.

THREE WAYS TO INCREASE YOUR TEAM EFFECTIVENESS

When Ed Scanlan founded Total Attorneys in 2002 to make customer-relationship-management software for law firms, he and a handful of employees would write code on the fly. Projects were completed quickly, and employees often worked late nights and weekends to launch new features and fix bugs. But as revenue grew to $24 million, the company abandoned the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach in favor of a more formal system. Sometimes referred to as the waterfall model, this system divides a software project into sequential stages, in which the work is handed off from designers to coders to quality-assurance testers. But Scanlan found that the waterfall model made Total Attorneys move a lot more slowly -- so slowly, in fact, that in some cases clients' needs had changed by the time a piece of software was complete.