performance

Project management tool threatens “central planners”

January 11, 2011

In the rebellion of the business users, in which top-down gets tipped over, even stodgy old project management is coming alive. “Most of the decisions made in project management,” says Liquid Planner CEO Charles Seybold, “happen under the surface.” He’s now trying to win over the people who work on projects but haven’t run many [...]

Read the full article →

Self-tracking: “If man were meant to fly” and other objections

June 7, 2010

Self tracking for performance has a place on the map now thanks to the May 2 New York Times Magazine article by Gary Wolf. But along with praise and interest, “The Data-Driven Life” also drew harsh, skeptical reactions. Many of the objections were of the “if man were meant to fly, he’d have wings” variety. [...]

Read the full article →

Self tracking is business intelligence

May 10, 2010

Back when secretaries were common, you could have had yours track your day in 15-minute increments. In his book The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker suggested this as a way to find out what you really did all day. The results were usually, let’s say, a starting point for improvement. Tracking your time then and now [...]

Read the full article →

“Efficiency” can cost too much

January 6, 2010

See Henrik Mårtensson’s “The Cost of Queues” on how an extreme focus on “cost effectiveness” can damage an organization. (Thanks to Jack Vinson for the referral on his blog “Knowledge Jolt with Jack.”) If you try to become more cost effective by reducing capacity, and thereby capacity cost, all will be well at first, from [...]

Read the full article →

Buytendijk, from the outside

May 11, 2009

You could say that Frank Buytendijk, the Dutch performance expert, thinks outside the box. Consider last week’s advice to BI metrics makers. What you probably didn’t realize is that he was born with a name to suit: Buytendijk (pron. BAW-ten-dek) means “outside the dike.”

Read the full article →

Perfect BI tool is one that people actually use

May 7, 2009

People want to perform well, Frank Buytendijk believes. Management gets in the way with stupid, top-down games. It would be better to join people’s natural passion with corporate goals.

Read the full article →

BI for the lone wolf

April 7, 2008

Who says one-person operations can’t use business intelligence? I don’t want MicroStrategy to outfit my tiny office, now near San Francisco, with its latest and greatest. No, but I do want a company like Intuit, ever more interested in the one-person market, to understand that money isn’t the only data individuals should track.

Read the full article →