Creative Project Management...
| Situation: Your Head is Full of Ideas That Don't See a Lot of Action. |
Indira Gandhi said, "Ditch Your "Cut and Paste" Executive Dashboard...
Situation: You Spend a Lot of Time Building Reports Using Data from a Variety of Applications. Ratchet-X is an integration platform that allows you to pull data and functions from different applications without programming. It's a Godsend for those who spend hours piecing together executive reports for management by cutting and pasting or keying in data from a variety of applications. This sort of thing happens a lot in PMO environments, where timely reporting is critical but even with high-end tools we often end up doing a lot of tweaking and combining of data sets to make the reports meaningful. |
Defining User Requirements the FUN Way...
Situation: You Need to Get REAL Requirements in a Way That Makes Sense. The Design industry is known for understanding what people need and how to satisfy those needs - that's what they do. Many of their approaches to defining those needs are stripped down versions of the sort of things we do in IT. Sometimes we immediately dive down into the details of requirements gathering exercises without stopping to figure out which of those exercises would be best given what we are trying to accomplish (our business results).Ideo Method Cards are a tool developed in house for the folks at Ideo. They use them with clients and also sell the cards for about $50. They are essentially flash cards that offer quick methods for understanding user needs, broken down into four categories of exercises: Learn, Look, Ask, and Try. Under each category are about 10-14 method cards. For example, Learn is "Analyze the information youve collected to identify patterns and insights." The cards under that category include: - Activity Analysis - Affinity Diagrams - Anthropometric Analysis - Character Profiles - Cognitive Task Analysis - Competitive Product Survey - Cross-cultural Comparisons - Error Analysis - Flow Analysis - Historical Analysis - Long-Range Forecasts - Secondary Research The other 3 categories include other methods, but you get the idea. Each method card inlcudes a description of the technique. So you sit your team down around a conference table and thumb through the cards and figure out exactly what sort of analysis would be helpful in the context of your project. The net result is a well thought out approach to requirements gathering. |
Watch and Learn...
| Situation: You Want to Learn Something New and Have No Training Budget. |
Where DOES the Time Go?
Situation: You Come to the End of the Day and Have No Idea How You Spent it... Rescue Time is essentially web-based time tracking software that tells you how you spent your day. You never have to enter what you are doing, so it's not the overhead-intensive sort of thing you might expect. It watches what you do (what apps you are using, what types of activities you are engaged in, etc.) and creates nifty charts that you can check out as you work through your day. The idea of using the individual version to tweak up your time management efforts is pretty cool, but I'm not sold on the team version. It not only seems too "big brother", but the way it would stifle creativity and process improvements would be too destructive. Anyway, its a cool approach to a very real problem. |
