Idle Time is a Good Thing for IT

Lots of good conversations recently about managing IT, Finance, and other constrained resources for projects. We have implemented tools to model available time; when trying to understand what new work can get added to the pile, it helps immeasurably when you understand how much time you have available, plus what else has been committed. This has become a powerful process for managing chronically constrained resources - but one side effect is that other folks on the team can find themselves…

The Hegemony of Large Numbers – Ignoring Common Sense

Ok, maybe I'm stretching the meaning there, but that's a cool sounding title, and what I see as an interesting phenomenon. People get excited about Large Numbers, and think they have meaning and importance simply because they are Large Numbers. Big Errors For example - years ago, when an application manager was whirling around the office in a minor uproar, worrying that that someone accidentally keyed in a $1B line item on an invoice. That's $1,000,000,000,000 - for the Unit…

Estimating Bird-Dogging Time for Project Tasks

9 January, 2011
Project Management
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New year, new projects, and new adventures in getting folks to think in project management terms. I've written before about Calendar time vs. Effort time, but this past week we came up with a new distinction that is worthwhile to call out. When working with the business and getting folks to estimate how much time it will take to complete a task, there are actually three different things that most people will talk about - and folks need to be…

Design and Change Management

14 September, 2010
Design, Change Management
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Over my career, I have developed a few strongly-held design beliefs, and one came up in conversation recently, during a spirited discussion on minimal quality requirements for a[ny] data mart. I hold that the data copied from source to destination must be provably correct and complete with little effort. When agile-ly rolling staged deliverables into production, I may not have all the attributes in place for full flexibility of drill down, but if you have [say] 1248 records in the…

A Little Too Literal (or, How to Teach Innovation)

Spoiler alert: It can't be taught ... One of the questions I get - and I'm getting this a lot lately - is how to get people to think more analytically, less literally. We need folks to stop focusing on the mechanical task of manipulating reports with Excel just to compute some answers. How about learning to use Excel, Access, and whatever native query / data download tools are available - to pull some data from the system, just to…

The Magic In the Middle – Practical Tactics for Digital Success

25 July, 2010
Purposeful Innovation, Change Management, Popular
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Most projects would be considered a failure if they only got 20% of their promised value. Then again, no one expects 100% success - some folks will never make the change. Is there a middle ground? Absolutely! Read on for practical pointers and targets to focus on - with examples of unexpected benefits.

Defining Business Benefits: Hard and Soft

6 July, 2010
Business Value of IT, Project Management
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All projects should have a clear objective, a practical plan, and an understanding of the costs and benefits to get the thing done. Easy to say, but a lot of project teams struggle to crisply and clearly define specific business benefits. One way to move the process forward would be to have a clear understanding of the types of business benefits you might claim. Hard benefits come from firm commitments to make measurable differences in the amount of revenue generated…

Theory of Constraints in IT: Keeping Busy, but Adding No Value?

28 June, 2010
IT Management
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A good conversation this week with some IT folks, talking about how Lean principles apply to IT work. The specific topic was the Theory of Constraints, and the example used was optimization of a production line. To fully optimize the whole line, it's entirely probable that we will be underutilizing a specific workstation. If we optimize every workstation (point optimization), we will build up WIP inventory at the slower points - therefore generating waste. For people on your IT team,…

The Sandpit

(via GNC, thanks for this one!) A bit of artistic inspiration; a visually stunning film, combining time-lapse and tilt-shift photography. httpv://vimeo.com/09679622 For the intellectually and technically curious - more information here. For the artist and the observationally curious - tai chi under the freeway? Nice.

A Hierarchy of Information Requirements

It's a common problem statement - 'I don't have enough information to (run my business unit, manage this process, identify opportunities, etc.)'. The solution designer, when faced with a question like this, starts with a little detective work; the problem is too broadly stated.