Go and ask for a quote for an IT solution delivery, and the first thing you get asked is: "What is the scope?" Seems fair - if you want to get a price commitment, you will be asked for a functionality boundary. But what does this actually do to the delivery of your solution? Nothing good, ...

Much has been said about agile, and much is continued being said. Agile deployments of software fail, and agile deployments of software succeed... And every so often an article pops up which contributes to the common misconceptions that create the weak foundations to build your agile deployment. Let...

On 19 and 20 September 2019, the Zoho team visited Sydney with the Zoholics customer conference. Every year, this conference gets bigger, and better. With this year a number of BIG announcements from the Zoho team with regards to the already excellent value offer of Zoho One. In this post we will br...

If you ever played a computer game, you know that great games start easy, and incrementally introduce new complexities. As Nolan K. Bushnell coined the phrase to describe the best games: "easy to learn, difficult to master". So what does this have to do with business applications? Surely, ...

When you offer IT support to multiple clients, or in a complex environment, you want to be able to do this in the most effective and efficient manner. No time wasted on finding the support emails - everything should be at the fingertips. Further, there are a myriad of server, client, and device oper...

I have been in the business of implementing business solution for over 25 years. During this time, I have been amazed at two things: 1). the incredible speed of innovation in this sector, and 2). the incredible inertia of silly requirements that keep us from utilising these innovations. No - this is...

When you change your business model from advisory to full software sales, implementation and support partner, it is not a trivial change. Added to that, a full technology change from Microsoft to Zoho, it is an opportunity that does not come without risk. The numbers are in, and it is looking very p...

Ransomware is creeping into business and government systems seemingly unimpaired by the counter measures they put in place. Antivirus and malware protection are not a luxury, but they can only keep up with the newly released infections, at best. The weak point remains the user as entry point, and sy...

Missed the webinar on Pipeline Management in CRM? No problem - this webinar was free, and is therefore posted on YouTube. You can find it under the Aurelian Group YouTube page (if you like the content, please subscribe). 

I would like to share with you two different experiences I have had dealing with support - in both cases the respective companies were represented by courteous support agents, willing to do what is necessary to resolve a ticket satisfactory. Yet the outcome and experience could not have been a bigge...

Over the last decade or so, many technology vendors have made significant investments in Customer Success Management Teams, but the definition of customer success varies from vendor to vendor. In his book "The Outcome Generation", Paul starts by clearly defining the three generations of su...

Customer success teams are here to stay. It is inevitable that the vendor of a subscription based software application takes a keen interest in the success that has been achieved with that software. After all, even the most specialised software application is in danger of being "commoditised...

Zoho has recently released MarketingHub - the one stop app for building and maintaining your marketing funnel. As we are used from Zoho - the MarketingHub is a powerful product in itself, managing the entire marketing funnel - but it is also integrated with other Zoho applications to provide an inte...

Webinars are an effective, inexpensive, and efficient way to share information - the webinar can be shared to audiences of varying sizes, and can reach anyone with a device that can reach the internet. But there are drawbacks to a lot of the webinar software as provided. Some software requires you t...

Zoho Expense is the expense management solution of choice for organisations ranging from very small to global enterprises. Many modern ERP solutions provide an expense management solution either as an add-on, or built-in. Still, a number of companies choose to implement Zoho Expense instead, due to ...

CRM  (Customer Relationship Management) Solutions have been around for over two decades (in one form or another - I started my journey in sales activity management (SAM) in 1996 - and the solutions have evolved significantly since that time). CRM may have evolved, a lot of the questions regardi...

"We know why projects fail; we know how to prevent their failure - so why do they still fail?" - Martin Cobb

If you are involved in delivering ICT projects, you must have heard this phrase coined more than once - I came across this well over a decade ago (and it was not a new discovery then...

Expenses - without incurring expenses, it is impossible to conduct business. Whether you are a sole entrepreneur, or a large enterprise - expenses are part of doing business. Whether you use petty cash, or a corporate credit card - the hidden costs of expenses are in the handling of the administrati...