March 2009 Newsletter - Newsletters

Connections Online March 2009 Newsletter

Connections Online Monthly Calendar of Events

Connections Online 4.0 Migration Webinar I

Wednesday March 11^th
at 1:30 EST

This 30-minute training webinar highlights the new functionality of Connections Online 4.0. Click here to register.

Connections Online 4.0 Migration Webinar II

Wednesday March 25^th
at 1:30 EST

This 60-minute training webinar dives deeper into an overall “how to use” Connections Online 4.0. Click here to register.

Jim Cardwell’s Educational Webinar

Thursday March 26^th
at 1:30 EST

For this 30 minute discussion, entitled “Surviving Hell Week” -- How to keep the team focused and heading in the same direction in troubling times. Click here to register.

2009 Users Roundtable

June 14-16

This year’s Users Roundtable will be held in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand Hotel. We have reserved a block of rooms for only $69 per night, plus taxes. We will hold a kick-off dinner on Sunday, June 14^th. The User Roundtable will be from
8:00 - 5:00 on Monday, June 15^th and from 8:00 - Noon on Tuesday, June 16^th. Please call Linda Schmidt at
800-395-1410 or email her at lschmidt@cardwellgroup.com for more information or to register for the User Roundtable and to secure a hotel room. We will be sending an agenda for the Roundtable to those who have registered in the near future.

In January 2009, we announced the migration from Connections Online 3.2 to 4.0. Since that announcement, we have completed a number of upgrades and are scheduling more. Our clients are very happy with the new features and functionality.

If you have not already done so, and are ready to migrate to 4.0, please contact Karla Norwood at 800.395.1410. For more information regarding what has changed with 4.0, you are welcome to join one of our Connections Online 4.0 Migration webinars. (See Monthly Calendar of Webinar Events link below.)

Jim Cardwell’s February Educational Webinar – Kevin Foster-Keddie Guest Speaker

Washington State Employees Credit Union CEO, Kevin Foster-Keddie, displayed his “directive leadership” philosophy to address today’s stressed economy in Cardwell’s complimentary “Connect with Leaders” webinar on Thursday, February 26, 2009. His philosophy was an inside view on how he used Cardwell’s Connections Online strategic execution tool to focus his credit union on certain tasks, re-align operation priorities, and raise the level of staff confidence during this economic crisis.

“We’re trying to educate our staff about the current economic issues so they understand,” Foster-Keddie says. “We have found that people feel much better when they understand the issues – and Connections Online has helped us keep everybody within the credit union engaged and informed.”

Other points made by Foster-Keddie in the webinar include:

· Re-examine your Critical Measurements to ensure you are measuring factors that align with your focus.

· Reduce the total number of “current” project priorities, therefore allowing more capacity to address change in a timely and focused fashion.

· As the CEO, you have to be ruthless about taking projects off the list. Project Leaders have a vested interest in not stopping the things they are working on because project work can get tangled up in their view of their job performance. No one wants to lose their job. Project re-prioritization is a business issue; it is not personal.

· Organization Dialogs are critical for reviewing strategy, which involves reviewing the recent wins and reinforcing a new focus.

· Discuss what the strategy is; educate on what it means; and debate decisions in the context of the strategic focus.

· Staff members leave the Organization Dialog with talking points, which allows key messages to be shared throughout the organization. And when you walk into a branch and hear the same messages that were shared in the Organization Dialog a few days before, you know it is working.

· Storytelling is a positive way to help people see the purpose of the change, a picture of the situation, and the part they (and other leaders throughout the organization) need to play.

· During a time of transition, it is important to revisit team decision rules, identify what they are, and what they mean.

To hear Foster-Keddie’s many timely points a credit union can use in the “Connect with Leaders” 30-minute webinar, visit https://asp.connectionsonline.net/docs/kfk.wmv .

Foster-Keddie also used an avalanche metaphor to describe the current economic situation, adding that the credit union cannot sit and wait for it to bury them. “We have to get out of our comfort zone and do something different to survive,” he says, “which means helping out even if it means doing a different job within the credit union.”

“It was great to get an inside view of how Kevin Foster-Keddie is using the Connections Online process to focus his organization, re-align priorities and build team confidence during the economic crisis,” says Jim Cardwell, CEO of Cardwell. “We look forward to continuing this discussion and more next month in our monthly webinar series.”

New Client Care Process

We are building our educational and training library. We will be adding instructional movies and webinars regarding entering data into the major modules on the application. We will be providing you access to this library shortly and will add movies and webinars as they are completed.

4.0 Tip of the Month

Here is a link to instructions on how to print detail for a metric (so you can print trend data, trend lines, and comments) as well as project task detail (so you can print task comments, or save them to .pdf format). https://asp.connectionsonline.net/docs/printoptions.doc

We released an update to Version 4.0 on March 2^nd. The primary changes were related to archiving sites with large numbers of metrics and projects. If you want the update detail, please click this link https://asp.connectionsonline.net/docs/updatecol3-2-09.doc