“There are days when your absence is the loudest silence I have ever heard” (Joanne Cacciatore).
It didn’t take too long for Mike to get back to me about the idea of a management meeting. In the meanwhile, I had already arranged with a restaurant in the Merivale Mall and other PMs were informed about it.
The first meeting was dedicated to chatting about the format of the meeting and didn’t get into any specific projects, but we all understood that the time allocated to each PM had to be utilized properly. Right after the meeting when we were walking to our cars, Mike came up to me and said thanks for organizing the meeting, and I appreciate your efforts.
I finished reviewing documents on both projects and decided to hire a couple of senior consultants for those two projects. Mike supported the idea and approved the funds required to proceed. The question was where I was going to find the kind of consultants I wanted to hire.
There was a list of consultants maintained by the Project Office along with related resumés. I found one potential candidate who just finished working on something for the other directorate. His name was Tom. I met with Tom and decided to hire him.
For the other project, I thought I should get in touch with David Niles in Fredericton to check out if he would be interested in coming to Ottawa and working for me. I knew David from Fredericton when I worked there. He was my contact when I accepted the job with them to open a branch in Ottawa.
David got back to me immediately and said that he would be in Ottawa within a week. When he showed up in Ottawa, I told him that he could stay with us until he found a place to live. We had a three-bedroom house, and we decided to let David stay in our guest bedroom.
It took another couple of weeks to get the two projects organized. I decided to cut both David and Tom loose to start analyzing the documents that I had already gathered for them.
We ran out of office space in our current location. Mike told me that they had rented a couple of houses not too far from where our offices were. He also told me that I must move my office out as they had allocated a reasonable number of bedrooms for my projects.
On a personal level things were reasonably good. We were getting used to living in Barrhaven. Adam was 15 years old, and he had already found a summer job which had to do with the marketing of some products in the malls.
As soon as we got settled down, Mom came to stay with us. We used to take mom to the ByWard Market on weekends to do the shopping and have breakfast.
The ByWard Market District is Ottawa’s unique heritage destination for cuisine, shopping, arts, entertainment, and professional services for residents and visitors alike – making it the number one tourist attraction in the National Capital Region. The area is home to a year-round public market packed with artisans and culinary delights. With over 600 businesses in the district and an average of 50,000 visitors per weekend during the high season, the ByWard Market has something for everyone.
Between May and October, the market’s vibrancy spills out onto the streets. Small business owners gather outside the Market Hall, turning the area into a bustling outdoor market metropolis. Music and art can be seen and heard throughout the area, delighting the senses of all who experience it.
The ByWard Market reminded mom and Lynda of a place right in London where they used to go on weekends to help Charlie. Charlie used to have a stall to sell things on the weekends. In addition to having their hardware store in town, Charlie used to make additional money there to support the family.
One day when I came back from work, Lynda said to me there’s an advertisement in the local paper about several mobile homes or cottages that are for sale in Florida. This advertisement is focused on Canadians who spend several weeks every year in Florida to deal with the harshness of winter in Ottawa.
I remember asking Lynda what that had to do with us. She said she was just wondering if we bought a couple of mobile homes in Florida, we might be able to spend at least a few weeks there every year. The mobile homes could not possibly be as expensive as those condos that we had been interested in buying in the Pompano Beach, Florida.
I said perhaps it wasn’t a bad idea. Now that my consulting practice seemed to be working alright, we could afford to explore those possibilities. The asking price appeared to be so reasonable that we thought it was an excellent opportunity to invest in something we could use for our holidays as well as rent them out reasonably every year.
It took a couple of weeks for us to get in touch with the owner of those mobile homes in Florida. We decided that I should go to Florida on the weekend to look at the mobile homes before we decided to do anything.
I ended up going to Miami, Florida. Somebody called Fred came to pick me up at the airport and drove me to a motel in Miami close to the Mobile Home Park. It was too late in the night to do anything; therefore, I asked him to come back in the morning and I would go with him to look at the properties. Fred was very cooperative. He came back in the morning and had breakfast with me. He was supposed to pay for the breakfast following his boss’ instructions. His boss used to live somewhere in Florida and Fred oversaw looking after the site. But I decided to pay for the breakfast just to recognize his cooperation.
I went to see the properties on the site. There were several mobile homes for sale in the park and they were not in the best shape. Fred told me that he would fix for a reasonable price any mobile homes that I might decide to buy. Of course, he was in the business to make money. He was the caretaker for the park and he also was responsible for fixing mobile homes. Fred was given a cottage where he used to live with his wife.
I asked for Fred’s recommendations, and he suggested five mobile homes which were in better shape than others. I assumed that they would require less work to fix.
Perhaps the most important thing to consider was the monthly rent for parking those mobile homes. However, Fred convinced me that if I bought 5 mobile homes, he would fix them for a flat fee and they would be available to rent out to Canadians coming to Florida in the winter.
I thought it would probably work as Lynda was very good with people renting out cottages on a weekly basis, and Fred would look after those Canadian tenants.
I spoke to Lynda on the phone. She liked the idea. She asked me about the condition of the cottages. I told her that they required some fixing but Fred was capable of fixing them, for a price. I pointed out that it also would require us to spend money to furnish them. I assured Lynda that tomorrow I was going out with Fred to purchase bedsheets, towels and anything else to make those cottages livable.
Lynda wanted to know how many cottages I was going to purchase, and I told her perhaps five. Lynda appeared to be happy with the suggestion.
The next day, on Monday, I asked Fred to take me to any branch of the Bank of America. There I would like to open an account. I would transfer money from my Canadian bank to pay for the purchase, as well as for the monthly rent for those cottages.
When I was talking to the people at the bank in order to open an account, the guy who was helping me entered my Social Security number in the system. He said I already had an account with them. He said I opened an account in Chicago in the month of August, 1968. As a matter of fact there had been a few hundred dollars sitting in the account for all these years.
I was shocked to learn about that. I told him that I thought that after a certain time all inactive accounts got closed, regardless of the amount of money in those accounts. He said yes, we do that. But the money I had in in my account exceeded the amount they were allowed to deal with. Hence, my account was still active.
To make a long story short, I returned home after spending three days in Miami. Fred and his wife treated me just like a member of their family. One night Fred had a barbeque in my honour and invited their friends who had been living in the park for years. Everybody seemed to be happy with Fred’s services and they welcomed my intention to purchase mobile homes.
It only took two weeks for us to complete the transaction. We ended up purchasing five mobile homes which were supposed to be fixed and furnished for renting out to Canadians.
It turned out to be an interesting experience for us and we ended up losing a significant chunk of our savings.
We were into April of 1991 and at that time I was working for a small consulting company in Ottawa. When I left Canada Post at the end of 1990, the two projects that I had initiated under Mike Wallace’s leadership were still there. David was managing one of those projects and I was still making money on that assignment.
If I remember correctly, in June 1990 I bought the Cadillac from David. David was interested in having a BMW. He was leasing the Cadillac and instead of returning it to the dealership, he sold it to me. It was a reasonable price and the car was well maintained.
Adam passed grade 12 with high marks in 1990. He had chosen science in grade 11 and 12 with Biology, and he was accepted in a number of universities outside of Ottawa. He decided to go to the University of Ottawa (Ottawa U). He wanted to be a medical doctor. He managed to get admitted to Biochemistry at Ottawa U without any difficulty.
While things were going reasonably well at Canada Post, I decided to make a move and went to work for a small consulting company called IOTA. I got a couple of contracts with Supply and Services for the company, as I was marketing as well as working as a consultant. These contracts were for only a few months. Then I had an offer from a medium-sized consulting company in Ottawa. I was offered a relatively senior position with the company. I marketed the company to various departments and assigned consultants to a number of projects. There was a time when I was responsible for five projects. I moved from one department to another to ensure those projects were on time and under budget.
I knew that my 50th birthday was coming up soon but never realized that Lynda, with the help of her sorority sisters, had organized a party for me. She managed to invite my boss and a couple of my colleagues, too.
Lynda rented a party room where they all hid. She came up with some excuse to get me there. All of a sudden everybody and his brother came out to say happy birthday. The food was nice. I had no clue about it.
My current boss from the consulting company I was working for was also invited to my birthday party. She had no direct experience with the services the company offered. She hired me based on my references and I was hoping that they would be interested in promoting and establishing a set of services to offer EDI- (Electronic Data Interchange) related services.
EDI is the computer-to-computer exchange of business data between companies in a standard electronic format; things like orders, delivery slip, and invoices.
I had published several articles on the subject to promote the replacement of the faxing and mailing of paper business documents. Manual exchange of paper business documents introduces errors and slows down exchange of the documents.
I guess I failed to convince the organization that sooner or later this concept would take off and if they wanted to be the leaders, they needed to act right away. Generally, organizations are interested in technologies that are not necessarily expensive but guarantee the benefits of data accuracy, speed, efficiency, and visibility.
I left the company to join a group of so-called independent management consultants who didn’t have appropriate experience to support the services they were offering. One of the associated consultants approached me with a proposal, suggesting that he wanted to work with me. He offered his home for the office without any rent and he wanted me to be the president of the company based on my extensive experience.
I liked the idea and when he took me to show me his house (a bungalow); I was impressed with the location and the space he was going to allocate for our office.
His name was Mark. He had been married before and had two kids who lived with their mother. Mark and his current wife had no children. They didn’t need a lot of the space in their house. Plus his wife was working and we had the house to ourselves all day. Therefore, Mark suggested we use one of the bedrooms for our office and use their living room for meetings, which was a very generous offer.
I suggested we buy furniture including two desks, chairs and filing cabinets. I also suggested that we should pay for the cleaning service initially and eventually pay a reasonable monthly rent depending upon how successful we became.
We incorporated the company as AIM – Automated Information Management – with me being the president and Mark Bow as vice-president.
I had been publishing articles on the subject of Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) for a while and desperately tried to get a project or two to demonstrate the associated benefits. However, it was hard to promote the concept as we were an almost unknown company in Ottawa. Therefore, I decided to change my way of thinking and to approach big companies like IBM, Texas Instruments, CGI, Systems House, etc.
Just as a background, BPR is a strategic management approach. It is centred on fundamentally rethinking and redesigning core business processes to achieve significant improvements in performance and efficiency.
BPR focuses on optimizing end-to-end processes and eliminating redundancies. By critically examining and redesigning business processes, BPR improves efficiency, effectiveness, and performance. These improvements can impact various aspects of the business including cost, output, service, speed, and quality. BPR is not a one-time project, but a continuous journey of innovation and optimization. Organizations must continuously evaluate and refine their processes to adapt to evolving business environments and maintain a competitive edge.
BPR implementation can be effective in organizations of all sizes and industries. Its purpose is to streamline workflows, eliminate unnecessary steps and improve resource utilization to optimize efficiency and effectiveness. BPR involves radical changes that challenge existing norms and methods within an organization. It should not be confused with business process management (BPM) or business process improvement (BPI), which initiates more incremental change.
To implement BPR, companies first analyze processes to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement. Techniques such as artificial intelligence (AI)-powered process mining analyze information systems for insights. This assessment guides decision-making about how work should be performed, including consideration of using business process outsourcing (BPO) and redefining third-party roles. BPR aims to fundamentally reshape how work is carried out. Using IT for automation and integration to optimize workflows, BPR eliminates tasks that don’t add value and restructures or replaces existing processes.
Successful implementation of BPR requires strong leadership, effective change management and a commitment to continuous improvement. Leaders must champion the BPR initiative and provide the necessary resources, support, and direction to enable meaningful change. Also, organizations must invest in change management strategies to mitigate resistance and ensure that employees are engaged and empowered throughout the process.
I was not totally convinced that any of those companies were up to date with the use of BPR in their practices. Thus I was hoping that I could get connected with some of them.
Finally, somebody from Texas Instruments got in touch with me. He suggested we have coffee to discuss the possibility of promoting the use of BPR to their clients in the federal government.
I was excited about inviting him to our office a few miles away from downtown. He came to the meeting and was very impressed with our office: the huge living room as our meeting room, as well as the way we had organized the overall office space.
Mark was not strong technically, nor had he much experience in the field of management consulting. Hence he trusted me to take the lead in meetings with potential clients to explore the chances of working together. Nevertheless, Mark did have a bachelor’s degree in Arts from the University of Ottawa.
After chatting with the guy from Texas Instruments, I thought he was there to check me out. I figured he wanted to make sure that I knew enough about BPR. Without telling me anything more about his company or their service offerings, he concluded the meeting by saying that he would be in touch with us as soon as he found an appropriate opportunity.
He was also concerned whether I had any technical background. The application of BPR includes all business aspects and functions within an organization, including the Information Technology (IT) department.
He asked me if I had any experience dealing with a modeling tool. I had to be honest. I told him that I never ever worked with any modeling tools related to BPR or any other discipline. He ended our meeting by saying that he didn’t see any problem with getting me involved where a modeling tool could be used to promote the concept of BPR. He knew that I had spent my entire career dealing with IT and had managed reasonably complex situations in different organizations.
The next two weeks we spent making calls to various departments. We wanted to find out what the best way would be to get on their lists of consultants who had access to their requirements through a process of “Request for Proposal (RFP).
If I remember correctly, it didn’t take too long to hear from the guy from Texas Instruments. He basically asked me if I would like to make a brief presentation to a branch of Department of National Defence (DND) which dealt with scientific activities. My logical response to that question was YES. However, I didn’t hesitate to tell him that I didn’t know anything about the BPR modeling tool he was talking about.
He said he was going to set up a meeting with DND the following week. In the meantime, he would like to see me at our office to demonstrate the use of the modeling tool. As well, he wanted to load that software on our system so that I could play with it as many times as I liked before I made the presentation.
I was totally happy with the suggested approach. I spent a great deal of time working with that BPR modeling tool.
The presentation to DND went smoothly. At the end of it the guy who was in charge said he would let us know if there would be any opportunity for us to use the modeling tool in their department.
After a week I had a telephone call from Texas Instruments. They got a contract from DND. They wanted me to help them make presentations throughout the department to promote the tool.
Mark and I were delighted to hear about that. Mark suggested that even though they paid only me for the contract, he wanted to be with me all the time so he could learn the tool and help me to complete our first project successfully.
It was indeed an excellent opportunity to start working together.
