3X0-201 availability - Core Concepts and Practices (Level 2) Updated: 2023

  as a means of attaining it?  Studies consistently show that a disturbingly high number of non-management employees are disengaged, not working at full productive capacity.  Following are 7 practical suggestions - steps management can take to Strengthen productivity by putting employees in a more productive mindset.

Design economic incentives so employees at all levels of an organization can benefit from them.  There's a natural tendency for management to focus most heavily on senior-level economic incentives. While this is completely understandable, it's best not to neglect substantive incentives for lower-level employees... that is, if you expect them to be vigorously committed to an enterprise's success.  To the argument that this will be unduly costly, a program has to be carefully structured, of course, so additional payouts reflect clearly defined revenue and/or earnings targets.

Provide meaningful feedback in a constructive manner on a regular basis.   Feedback is a foundational management skill; the ability to provide regular, helpful feedback to employees in a manner that encourages, not discourages, is a cornerstone of effective management.  That's not to say feedback is always positive - that wouldn't be management at all - but that the communication is done thoughtfully... whether the occasion is encouragement for a job well done, or that course correction is needed.

Respect employees as individuals, in addition to the job they do.  Respect can be a simple but powerful motivator, just as its unpleasant twin, lack of respect, has the opposite effect.  When employees feel genuinely respected (always assuming it's warranted), they're much more likely "to go the extra mile" to help a company succeed.

Be sure management at all levels of an organization receives adequate training.  There's a tendency for companies to invest heavily in "leadership training" while focusing far less on supervisors and middle managers.  I can readily speak from experience on this one, having received considerably more training and development opportunities in the latter stages of my career than in the early formative stages, when I most needed it.

Provide support for employees when it's genuinely needed.  Valued support can take many forms: equipment when existing is outdated or inefficient; emotional support in the face of (occasionally) unfair criticism; flexible support for a reasonable level of work-life balance.   Management support in times of need won't be forgotten; it builds employee goodwill and loyalty.

Don't be emotionally stingy. There's nothing for management to gain by withholding praise and recognition when it's warranted.   A exact employee study I came across indicated that recognition is often a more powerful motivator than money.  While this may well be less true at senior levels as financial rewards escalate, this post is focused on general employee productivity...where the broadest gains can be made.

Ensure senior leadership models behavior that makes the rank-and-file proud to be part of the team.  Nothing demoralizes employees more quickly than seeing senior leaders act in a way they don't respect, and few things energize employees more than a senior team they admire.  Leaders are always being watched and judged; employees have keen eyes (and are keen data sharers!).  When leadership is "walking the talk," it will be quickly noted - but so will "talking the walk" without actually walking it.

To help boost productivity, employee engagement matters.  Ultimately, most employees would much rather be part of a team they're committed to, not just a member of an organization.  Developing and maintaining a consistent management approach that engenders esprit de corps is a key link in the productivity process.

Such management - balancing appropriate levels of results-orientation with understanding of employee needs - is neither easy nor unattainable.

It's also the thread from which the cloth of day-to-day productivity gains are made.

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How do you maintain five-nines uptime for tentpole event streams reaching hundreds of thousands or millions of users? Steve Nathans-Kelly, VP and Editor-in-Chief of Streaming Media and Video Publishing Director at Information Today Inc., discusses this Topic with Corey Smith, Sr. Director, Advanced Production Technology, CBS Sports Digital, Paramount, Joshua Johnson, Sr. Director, Solution Architects, EdgeNext, and John Petrocelli, CEO/Founder, Bulldog DM, in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2023.

Nathans-Kelly begins by asking Corey Smith, “What would you say in your experience are the keys to creating high availability service with large-scale streams and tentpole events?”

Smith emphasizes that developing detailed customer analytics is a major key for providing seamless high-availability streaming at scale. “You have to evolve your analytics to figure out the customer experience,” he says. “Because if you don't understand what the customer's going through, you can never improve, right? If you never analyze the data, your customer base is constantly in this turmoil of, ‘Should I even bother with this thing anymore?’ Like if I go to a streaming service for live concerts and it's constantly falling over, why would I go back? Why would I spend money to go watch a streaming concert when I could easily go down the street and watch it at Five Point Amphitheater here in Orange County or go somewhere else.”

 “I agree,” Johnson says. He points out that pulling real-time data is especially valuable. “It used to be that the data was so slow to get to us that acting on it was always detrimental. But now, actually, it is literally being fed in, and we're being able to make dynamic changes and choices as the situation goes on. But at the same time, if you look at the foundation of where you're at and the people…actually behind the scenes, that's key to it. Because if you don't have that foundational piece and they're not solid enough to actually provide the infrastructure or the inbound, then it doesn't matter how good the end is. You're not getting the initial piece in a qualified manner in any type of quantity [or] any type of quality.”

Smith says, “Oh, a hundred percent.” He also highlights that a wide view of audience location is essential to choosing the correct providers in the first place for large-scale streaming events. For the continental US and North America, he says, “You're looking at the typical providers, Akamai Limelight, etc. if you're going to do your CDN distribution. “But what do you do for a global international audience? What partnerships do you make there? How is the client telemetry influencing making decisions on constantly connecting the customer to the best stream possible? It's really the things around streaming delivery and load balancing across multiple CDM providers in different areas of the world that really hasn't changed much, from the three-tier architecture model of how an application is built in a data center somewhere…you have a load balancer. You have to spread out your application servers, you have to spread your middle-tier business logic, and your databases. It's basically the same thing: origin, origin, shield, edge…”

Johnson concurs with Smith about the importance of knowing the dominant players in a specific geographic region. “Which provider is the dominant player in that general area, who's got the infrastructure?” he says. “And are you actually relying upon them, or are you relying upon them and their partners, and do you actually know who their partners are? And then it becomes a question [of] do you see that partner as a value?”

Smith notes that, “A lot of those partnerships are only as good as their peering agreements, so at some point, it's still a business conversation on paper. Theoretically, you can get bits to anybody in the world. It's how you best optimize those routes.”

John Petrocelli says that while all of these aforementioned factors are crucial, many players who initially swept into the live music streaming realm during the pandemic were ill-prepared for the various technical hurdles that come with international-scale live streaming events. “I think about 100 to 200 companies went out and got venture funding and kind of ran into that market thinking, ‘Oh, this is no problem, I can pull this off,’” he says. “But what we saw was this is not an easy thing to do. And because you got some funding, I don't think you're going to figure it out in 90 days or even six months. And people weren't contemplating things like redundancy and serving to, first of all a big domestic audience, but potentially given who the talent was, it could be a pretty massive international audience. And it was a rude awakening for a lot of these companies.”

Petrocelli says that this reckoning ultimately was a test for who could be adaptable and wide-viewed enough to learn from mistakes and adjust quickly, and that this period served as a positive catalyst for improved tech and growth in the live streaming sphere. “I think that's consolidated back to reality, now that the people remaining in that space kind of understand the undertaking and what a best practice approach is to pull the experience off, but then to do it in real-time, and to scale it to a potentially pretty significant simultaneous audience.”

Learn more about high-availability streaming at scale at Streaming Media East 2023.

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Customer-centricity is an often-misused term, but it actually has a pretty straightforward definition: Put the customer at the forefront of everything the business does. That means that you take the time to understand your customer and don’t make any decisions without thinking of the impact it could have on her.

I often like to say: No discussions, no decisions, no designs without bringing in the customer and her voice, without asking how it will impact the customer, how it will make her feel, what problems it will help her to solve, what value it will create and deliver for her. 

To get your company thinking differently, you have to first know and embrace the principles and the practices of customer-centricity, and you have to ensure that they remain aligned to achieve the desired outcomes of designing such an organization.

The following outlines the eight principles of customer-centricity and their corresponding practices.

1. Culture: Culture = Core Values + Behavior. You have to have the core values in place to support a customer-centric culture. You must deliberately design a culture of customer-centricity. And that only happens when there’s a commitment from the top to put the customer and the customer experience front and center. It then shifts the organization’s mindset, behavior, and ultimately, the culture.

The values must be socialized and operationalized. Acceptable behaviors must be outlined to help employees and executives know what it means to be customer-centric. And no processes or policies should be developed without the values (and, hence, the customer) in mind.

2. Employee Experience: You cannot be customer-centric without putting employees first. We know that the employee experience drives the customer experience, so you have to design and deliver a great experience for employees first in order for them to take on customer-centric behaviors.

Putting employees more first means that you will take the time to understand your employees, their needs and their pain points so that you can design a great experience for them. This includes ensuring they have the tools, training, resources, processes and policies to be customer-centric.

3. People Before Products: Customer-centric companies put the customer into all they do, including when they design products and services. For whom are you developing the product if you don’t consider the customer and understand what problems your product will solve for her?

As such, you must bring your understanding of customers’ needs, problems to solve and jobs to be done into product design and development. Help your customer solve problems; don’t just create products and add features and functionality (which often add complexity) without customer understanding.

4. People Before Profits: Customer-centric companies take a different stance when it comes to business. They realize that when they take care of their people, the numbers will come.

They approach business from a different lens: They focus on taking care of employees and delivering a great employee experience, understanding the employee experience-customer experience connection. They create and deliver value for their customers and for the communities around them, knowing that the outcome is that shareholders will achieve value, too. They look at the full equation, not just on that latter component.

5. People Before Metrics: I often cite Bain’s delivery gap and, importantly, the reasons for that gap when I offer up this principle. When companies have a disproportionate focus on growth (i.e., acquisition over retention), then they are focused on metrics to satisfy analysts and shareholders. And when companies focus on moving the needle on their customer metrics (e.g., net promoter score or customer satisfaction), they do things differently and do different things than when they focus on the people and doing what’s right for them (resulting in a moved needle).

You must shift the balance to focus more on doing what it takes to retain customers. That means focusing on the customer experience. The metrics will come.

6. Customer Understanding: Customer-centric companies know that customer understanding is the cornerstone of customer-centricity. You cannot bring the customer and her voice into the business if you don’t take the time to listen to her, get to know her better, and understand her pain points, problems to solve, and jobs to be done.

You can achieve customer understanding in three ways: listening (feedback and data), characterizing (research-based personas), and empathizing (journey mapping with customers).

7. Outside-In Thinking Versus Inside-Out: Customer-centric leaders must acknowledge, accept, and advocate for bringing the customer voice into all they do. That’s outside-in thinking and doing. When leaders use inside-out thinking and doing, they believe they know what’s best for customers and act on their ideas and thoughts rather than on customer feedback and input. This is the antithesis of customer-centricity!

Remove the phrase “We think customers …” from your corporate vocabulary and replace it with “We know customers …” because you actually know customers! You’ve done the work.

8. Platinum Rule Over Golden Rule: You might be shocked to read that statement, but the Golden Rule is also the antithesis of customer-centricity. It states: Treat others the way you would want to be treated. That’s inside-out thinking and doing; that says that you assume to know how others want to be treated.

Instead, shift the behaviors and use the Platinum Rule: Treat others the way they want to be treated. Again, you can do this because you’ve done the work to understand your customers.

If you think focusing on culture as a solid foundation for your business is all fluff, consider this: Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business conducted some culture research a few years ago, the details of which are outlined in two papers: "Corporate Culture: Evidence from the Field" and "Corporate Culture: The Interview Evidence." The benefits and the outcomes are real, for employees, for customers and for the business!

The New Jersey Devils practice Friday at 12:30 p.m. before a back-to-back weekend showdown against the New York Rangers Saturday and Sunday afternoon to finish out the season series and Hudson River Rivalry Week. 

There were no updates on the health situations for forwards Pavel Zacha (undisclosed) and Jesper Bratt (lower-body). 

"They're still day-to-day, but unlikely either will play (Saturday)," Devils head coach Lindy Ruff said. 

Ruff added that defenseman P.K. Subban was given a maintenance day Friday and the team is "hopefully" he'll be able to play Saturday. 

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South Suburban Family Sports Center
6901 South Peoria Street
Centennial, CO 80112

The practice and training camp home of the Colorado Avalanche is located inside a 150,000 square foot family entertainment center containing two National Hockey League ice rinks and 37,000 square feet dedicated to family fun.

Located in southeast Denver near the intersection of Arapahoe Road and Peoria Street, Family Sports also offers a snack bar, hockey and golf pro shops, a heated driving range, a nine-hole golf course, miniature golf, and a full service bar and restaurant. Upon entering the lobby, patrons will be treated to one of the finest entertainment venues along the Front Range. Rows of state-of-the-art video games, a laser tag arena, and a climbing wall are just some of the attractions which will appeal to children and adults of all ages.

The Avalanche portion of the facility is on the west side of the complex and contains administrative space and dressing room facilities dedicated solely to the hockey club. The second floor houses offices for the Avalanche Hockey Operations staff, a video room, and a newly expanded weight room.

The main level of the building features the Avalanche dressing room, which includes a changing area, players' lounge, training room facilities complete with a steam room, whirlpool, and hot tub, equipment storage space, and direct access to the ice.

Hockey players of all ages and skill levels will enjoy the facilities available at Family Sports, home of the Arapahoe Youth and Adult Hockey Leagues, offering 1,200 players the opportunity to play the game of hockey. For more information on the programs offered at the South Suburban Family Sports Center, call 303.708.9500, or visit http://www.ssprd.org/Family-Sports-Ice-Arena.

Avalanche Practice Schedule

Practices at Family Sports Center are free and open to the public. Please be aware that all practice times and places are subject to change.

Avalanche Practice Times

During the regular season, the Avalanche typically practices on non-game days when the team is at home. All practices will take place at Family Sports and are free and open to the public. Practice times are usually 11:00 a.m.

The Broncos will host the Rams in Week Three of the preseason, and beforehand the two teams plan to get together on the Broncos’ practice field.

Broncos coach Sean Payton said that after seeing the Broncos’ preseason schedule, they reached out to the Rams to begin arranging joint practices.

“We’re on the road with two games, and I think the goal is to have a joint practice with the Rams,” Payton said. “[Rams head coach] Sean [McVay] and I have talked, and then I know that obviously the ownership groups are connected, and [Rams general manager] Les [Snead] and [Broncos GM] George [Paton]. There’s been no announcement made, but I think our hopes and goal is to have a chance to practice here. . . . So our goal is to have a joint practice with Los Angeles and then play that third game.”

Over the last 10 seasons the Broncos have had a joint practice every year, with the exception of 2020, when the preseason was canceled and no teams had joint practices.