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…
A recent gift from Google Labs - the NGram viewer, a fascinating tool that searches the Google Books database for words and phrases, and charts their relative frequency. For example - let's take some of the themes of this blog ... Apparently, Art and Science have grown closer, and enjoy a somewhat parallel existence together. Design (Inspiration) started strong, had a bit of a lull, but is enjoying a bit of a renaissance (as it were). And unfortunately, "management" is…
No, I'm not a Christmas fanatic - but when you live in Chicago, you learn to look for nice weather in the weeks approaching Thanksgiving, to put up the lights before the wind and cold conspire to make it a painful experience. Basically, I gotta burn a vacation day - but why not? It's an opportunity to get away from the hassles of work in Corporate IT ... ... except this year, I finally had to deal with my outdated…
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…
via Geek.com - yes, I subscribe to stuff like this in my RSS reader ... httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8g-iYGHpEA I thought this was interesting on two levels ... The Engineering student within appreciates the differences in sorting techniques (although I think I could speed up that bubble sort ...) I also think these videos provide a simple illustration of the power of multi-media information sharing; the audio helps the animated "description" of the sorting techniques httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXAjiDQbPSw I freely admit to be a bubble-sort…
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…
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.
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…
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,…
How can I go from "obvious idea" to tangible business ROI? Read on for some specific ideas on making the soft stuff worth your time. (Part of a series)