Where to Start? (1 of 2) Process and Procedure

5 August, 2008
Tech Management
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If you need a one-slide, three-bullet, PowerPoint special for describing the basic tactics for "How to Achieve Operational Excellence", try these: Process and Procedures Metrics and Measurements Continuous Improvement The first two are nicely alliterative, but you might consider substituting Standards and Processes as your lead-off if we're talking about an IT, Finance, or Engineering department. Now What? Of course, now you have to generate the details; the "motherhood and apple pie" routine only lasts thru the first meeting. Here's…

Enterprise 2.1: Exiting the Trough of Disillusionment

"What will you do with that car if you actually catch it?" -- what the cat asked the dog (from the Chicago Reader, circa 1989) So you've gone all "Enterprise 2.0", spinning up a wiki, a blog, and a SharePoint or Drupal server inside your firewall. Now what happens? The groundswell of interest in "cool tools" brings a wave of users and a burst of feed reader activity - for a few weeks. Before long, however, the organization will get…

Don’t Accept Snap Answers Too Quickly

A few years ago, I was working on an interface project, and wanted to have the ERP system send copies of any and all transactions that have changed over the past few days. I've done this before on other platforms, so I asked the lead developer what I thought was a no-brainer request: Do the transaction files capture a date/time stamp somewhere in the record, each time the record is modified - DateLastUpdated, something like that? His answer came back…

IT and the Business are Closer Than You Think

A few passing observations from the last few months; contrary to what many (IT/business) folks believe, they are just as good or just as bad in managing processes and projects as their counterparts in (business/IT). Problem Resolution is Everybody's Problem A few weeks ago I was discussing issues that came up with one of our systems, and the team was a bit dismayed that the user community was still finding errors (we should be trapping for that stuff!) I pointed…

Data Visualization: ‘Life’ of Open Source Projects

Part of the "art" of communicating IT and business abstractions - technical challenges, project roadmaps, budget performance, customer relationships, IT effectiveness - is landing on the right visualization. A picture tells a thousand words, and if you can draw the picture well, your target audience will grasp these concepts quickly, and (potentially) get insights that were otherwise difficult to attain. I have a large backlog of web links to point to, posts to write that I'll probably start cutting into,…

Opportunistic Insights from the RSS Stream

I've written about using RSS for internal as well as external information sources. This past week, I found a couple of interesting tidbits in my feed reader (behind the firewall) ... Eyes on the Skies: It's that time of year again; oil price volatility will continue if any big storms create problems for refineries in the Gulf - something new to keep an eye on. Never fear - our friends at NOAA kindly put out an RSS feed for storm…

Can you, should you, bother Executives with The Details?

In a recent post on Thinking Faster, Phillips expresses concern about the apparent propensity for project sponsors to skim over the details and jump to quick answers. He's talking about [what I believe is] a peer relationship, when external expertise is brought in to develop the solution that they (the sponsors) are responsible for "owning" (vision, design, execution, and ongoing support). I've seen the same sort of thing in multiple organizations, especially when talking with executives about projects and initiatives…

Politically Correct Euphemisms in IT – Translated!

26 May, 2008
Communication
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I recently attended a professional seminar, and noticed a propensity for politically correct euphemisms to describe life in corporate IT. This was a typical group of IT professionals, representing a variety of companies - small and large, public and private. As with most group meetings, we started with a trip around the table; quick introductions, plus some highlights of "what's hot" for IT these days. The careful language wouldn't fool the experienced; however, a casual listener might see the knowing…

When is a project a Project? How to prevent the buildup of backlogged requests

I just wrote something up (internal wiki) that I thought was common knowledge, but I think it's one of those soft-skills things that makes total sense once you hear about it - but somebody needs to tell you. I think of one of the reasons that IT (at times) intimidates the business - or why IT gets the cold shoulder when it comes to process improvement efforts - is that we can get a bit too wrapped up in the…

The Right Web2.0 Tool for the Audience (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook)

9 May, 2008
Web 2.0
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The volume of Twitter posts popping up in my feed reader is ticking upward, a phenomenon I find interesting because of something I noted recently on LinkedIn. A few weeks ago, a new feature appeared, enabling me to report what I'm working on - Twitter for the office crowd. Always willing to try some flair, I jumped on the bandwagon, and set up a recurring ToDo for updating my LI-net on the day's focus. That lasted less than two weeks…