Gary Lee

Keep your sense of humor! If you've never seen: 1. Honda's Asimo robot's technology debut did not go as planned! 2. Elon Musk asking an employee to throw a metal ball to show the new Tesla Cybertruck's armored glass would never break (ouch!) 3. Apple's introductory launch of Face ID (which failed to work!) And so on. We've all seen and suffered through things not going as planned in presentations. So keep your sense of humor and work your way through the downtime to either move on without the presentation, find an alternative, or reschedule. Your audience will quickly forgive and forget, but will always remember if you are cool and collected through the process.

For managing this problem across the enterporise, I highly recommend leveraging software solutions in the market which go beyond what the operating system is reporting and dig deeper into battery health. B2M's Battery Essentials is one such software solution, but there are also solutions from Zebra, Honeywell, SOTI and others. These visibility / intelligence packages can troubleshoot both battery health and other factors such as charging events, changes in battery performance after an app or OS update and more.

Encourage readers to consider "The Eisenhower Method" attributed to the US President who said “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” Stephen Covey helped refine Eisenhower's thoughts and turn into a matrix. This 4-quadrant tool helps prioritize tasks by urgency and importance and helps one decide what to do first, what to schedule, what to delegate and what to ignore / delete / not do. I find it helps me prioritize which tasks need immediate attention / is urgent and what tasks are important but longer-term. One vendor I can recommend is Appfluence and their Priority Matrix app which works on mobile and desktop.

While this thread is focused on what an end-user might do, for anyone reading this looking at it from an enterprise perspective it's a horrendous problem. We know from an annual survey we conduct that regularly-occuring app stability / crashes are one of the top 3 issues end-users working in an enterprise and depending on a stable mobile device experience. Today's toolkits such as MDM / EMM do not easily capture these problems which usually result in a reboot. This leaves IT and Operations leaders dependent on help desk calls (which may never come) to see the problem. New Mobility Intelligence™ solutions from B2M Solutions, SOTI, Zebra, Honeywell and others have emerged to give the insights needed to find and fix these problems.

Love this Chris! We see this all the time in the "path to innocence". It's one of the reasons our Elemez software suite is proving useful - we can look at real-time at analytics around the device, network and other key metrics. We had one situation where an app developer was being blamed for a pretty hairy bug (and the device manufacturer and cellular provider as well). No easy resolution until our software determined the cellular network was very often returning a bad clock to the device - causing the date / time to be wrong just when the app needed it. A hard problem to find without the proper tools in place. Information trumps emotion any day of the week! Seek to uncover the facts using tools available.

Since this post is in the topical area of Mobile Device Management, it's critical to select the RIGHT tools for data analysis of mobile devices, mobile applications, network connections and more. Mobility Intelligence™ is a relatively new analytics field led by B2M Solutions, SOTI, Zebra, Honeywell and others. The software tools provided by these vendors vary, but are designed to provide the analytics needed to analyze the performance of mobile devices, apps, network connections, batteries and more. Tools such as B2M's Elemez allow for easy integration with Microsoft Excel, PowerBI and other analysis tools to produce comprehensive analysis on performance and utilization of these assets to make the best decisions.