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FAQs
We
Value Your Input
We are constantly working to improve our services, and we keep your comments and questions in mind.
If you have questions or comments to share with us, please mailto:greg@blueoakmountaintech.com
We will respond as quickly as possible.
F
A Q s
Here are some Frequently Asked Questions from our new customers:
(Go to FAQs for: Licenses or Other Consulting)
Business Practice Documentation FAQ
Question:
What is
business practice or core business operation
documentation?
Answer: A job description is probably the business practice document that most people are familiar with, however, it is not the only one there is. There are also procedure documents that describe the core business processes of an organization and work instruction documents that detail how each task in a business procedure needs to be carried out, including how success is measured.
Question:
Why do
organizations go to all the trouble to write these
documents?
Answer: Well, most actually do not. But for those that do, the short answer is to manage their business better to improve their bottom line. Information needed by many different people in an organization is useless if it exists only in one or two peoples' minds. Core business policy and practice information needs to be objective, and it needs to be stored in a way that everyone who needs access to it can have that access whenever and wherever they need it. Also, many organizations are implementing business management systems such as ISO 9001:2000 or Six Sigma, and these systems depend on clear, concise documentation of core business policies, operations, and job descriptions to function.
Question:
How
does business practice documentation relate to profit leaks,
and what is a "profit leak" anyway?
Answer: A profit leak is any unnecessary expense that a business incurs due to disconnects in its policies or operational procedures. For example, say an organization makes a deal for special pricing on office supplies with vendor A. But due to poor internal documentation of the policy to buy only from vendor A, some staff members are not informed, and so they pay higher than necessary prices for office supplies from vendor B. That is a profit leak that directly affects the bottom line. It is a completely unnecessary expense.
Clear, objective, accessible documentation of core business policies and procedures can help avoid these and many other kinds of losses. In a well managed organization, core policies such as where to get the best price on office supplies should be common knowledge to regular staff and easily accessible in a network based business management system for new staff members.
Question:
What
is a knowledge gap?
Answer: A knowledge gap is the difference between what a staff member needs to know to do their job profitably and what they actually do know about core business policies and procedures. Every knowledge gap has an associated skill or job performance gap because a person cannot act on something they do not know about. That is why performance based training is so important to good management. It focuses on both knowledge and job performance gaps and makes sure they are filled.
Training Course Development FAQ
Question:
Are you
saying that training course development is related to
business practice documentation?
Answer: Yes. For many people, business practice and operational documents are not easy to write because they have many knowledge gaps about how their organization actually works. Once the knowledge gaps are filled, people need to be trained to write these documents properly, and there are a number of issues they must learn about how to access and use the documents, once they exist. In addition, to remain useful, business practice documents must be updated from time to time, and they also must be actually used on a day-to-day basis to be effective. In most organizations, training courses are needed to communicate the specifics of how to deal with these issues to the appropriate audiences. This is especially true when there is a large change in the way an organization operates, such as in the case of a reorganization, a downsizing, or a merger.
Question:
Are
White Papers related to training course development
too?
Answer: Yes, again. White Papers tend to be very abstract, highly technical descriptions and explanations of the science and technology that products or services are based on. They explain the wider technical context for the product or service space, as it is sometimes called. In that sense, White Papers are source or reference documents for information that defines the context boundaries of training course content. They also perform a similar role in an organization's business management system.
Question:
Why
do you consider training courses to be technical
communication tools?
Answer: Well, like it or not, a business is a highly technical system. It is actually more complex than a computer system because its main processing components are people, and unlike machines, people have free will. In other words, people can be unpredictable, as opposed to machines which are nearly always predictable.
Then there is the issue of context. A business organization is an integrated whole. It cannot function any other way. Most people take this for granted, but in fact to describe and explain the operation and inter-relationships of the policies, procedures, and jobs in a running business is actually much more technical and difficult than doing so for its products. In fact, that is one reason why so few businesses actually do so.
Question:
What
type of training courses do you develop?
Answer: Well, obviously, those relating to business practice documentation. But we will develop any type of training or presentation our customers require, including sales and marketing presentations. Another specialty of ours is highly technical, abstract training material such as is required to train support engineers on networks, data encryption, operating systems, data replication, or artificial intelligence products. We love to do courses about any highly technical subject matter, really. We have done a few courses for high tech companies outside the computer field and would like to do more.
Question:
How
will you get the material you need to develop business
practice documents or a training course for us, and how will
you use it?
Answer: After establishing your needs, we will meet with your subject matter experts, and then we collect the relevant policy manuals, job descriptions, flow charts, white papers, product and service manuals, and other documents. We then use performance based instructional design techniques to transform the information those documents contain into training course materials such as student guides, resource guides, web based training (HTML), and so on, or into whatever presentations or documents are required.
Question:
How
does writing business practice documents differ from writing
training courses?
Answer: For training courses, we use your organization's information and write the course manuals or other media for you. You and your staff write business practice documents yourself, with our help. The reason for this difference is that business practice documents must be your own, they must be documents that you will use on a day-to-day basis. If we write them for you, you will never achieve the intimate familiarity with the documents that you will need to use them effectively to better manage your business better.
Question:
How
will the we agree on presentation, document or course
content, format, and project management issues?
Answer: In either face to face meetings or via email, we will create and agree to a documentation and/or training plan that includes the scope of the project, the document or course audiences, document or course goals and objectives, content outlines, formats, development milestones, price and payment terms, and other similar issues. Then, once a purchase order has been issued to us, the document or training plan we have agreed to will be implemented.
Question:
What
if changes occur during the documentation
or
training course development cycle?
Answer: In that case, we will renegotiate the document or training plan to accommodate the changes. This usually involves changing the development time line, though sometimes the dollar amounts of the milestones must be changed as well. As a rule, it is fairly easy to negotiate the appropriate changes to a documentation or training plan.
Question:
How
do you charge for document
or
training course development and other types of
consulting?
Answer: We usually fix price our projects since most organizations prefer to do business with contractors in this way. This means in effect, that once a dollar value is agreed to for the project as whole, the figure is then divided up between the project milestones, and we submit an invoice at the completion of each one. Since we are a California "C" corporation, our relationship is of one business invoicing another, so there are no 1099 issues involved. We also have the multimillion dollar insurance policies that most large organizations require.
Technology Licensing FAQ
Question:
If
your specialty is consulting for technical communication
tools, how do the new technologies you are offering for
license fit in to the business?
Answer: The technologies we license are a separate part of our business we hope will provide a new area for future growth. In addition, since our plan is to license these technologies, rather than sell them directly, our licensees will need consulting for technical support from us, as well as training courses for their own people and for their customers. And we plan to offer those services to our licensees at a future date.
Question:
What
types of consulting will you offer to your
licensees?
Answer: To be successful, our licensees will need to be clear on exactly how our new technologies work because they are software architectures, not finished applications. As with any new ideas, there will be misconceptions that will need to be clarified or product development details that need to be worked out, and that is where the technical support consulting we will offer them comes in. Moreover, once our licensees develop products for sale, they will need support readiness training, and here again, we can offer the instructional design and training course development services they will need. Blue Oak will be the most qualified to do so because we created the technologies in the first place.
Question:
When
will licenses for your new technologies be
available?
Answer: Licenses are available now. We need only to negotiate the specifics and have our lawyers draw up the agreements.
Question:
How
do the patent pending technologies you are offering work,
and how can I learn the details about them?
Answer: That question requires fairly long and complex answers. The best way to get those answers is to go to the relevant parts of this web site and read the materials offered there, which describe and explain these new technologies in detail. Go to the pages: Q-AI Expert™ or Q- Al Assistant™ to get the specific information your need.
Other Consulting FAQ
Question:
What
other types of consulting will you offer?
Answer: We are still defining those services at this time. We are considering expanding our consultation services to Mexico, but our plans are in their very early stages and will initially focus only in Cozumel, Mexico. However, we hope the relationships we are building there will eventually lead to other areas of Mexico and Central America, which is a growing market. We are planning to offer marketing services and technology consulting to various small enterprises to learn how business is done there, the language, and the business customs. The best way to learn about our business plans is to start with the descriptive information on the about Consulting in Mexico page on this site, and then follow the links to the other sites listed.
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