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Project management tool threatens “central planners”

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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 of them. He’s using transparency and collaboration.

Liquid Planner, the cloud-based insurgent — “a Wikipedia for projects” — has its roots in Seybold’s experience organizing Expedia’s first project management office. Every time the 40 or so projects under his watch got rolled up, he says, there was “a new distortion of reality.”… Read the rest “Project management tool threatens “central planners””

Self tracking is business intelligence

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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 is personal, it’s messy, and it’s the essence of business intelligence: collecting data and reading it for guidance in business activities that matter. Is there anything that matters more to an organization than productivity of its people? For a small office or home-based business, this might be the best BI there is.… Read the rest “Self tracking is business intelligence”

“Efficiency” can cost too much

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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 an economic point of view. (The people who are let go are usually of a different opinion.) The catch is that this will increase the queues in the system. This increases lead times. Consequently, cost associated with lead time will also increase. (In manufacturing there is also a considerable storage cost due to increased inventory, but we will ignore that for the purposes of this blog post.)

… Read the rest ““Efficiency” can cost too much”