Dealing With Vacation Schedules
Situation: You're Having Trouble Keeping Track of Who is in the Office... Large organzations typically have some sort of mechanism to deal with this. So maybe this is more of a small business solution.Whosoff is a free online service that gives you the ability to track and approve vacation schedules, holidays and sick leave. How many times have you wondered whether someone you work with will be in today? -- especially this time of year. |
Are You Stuck in The Dip?
| Situation: You're Deciding Whether Your Current Project is Worthwhile... |
Org Chart Wikis - How Do They Help?
Situation: You need to get some background on someone... Since the dawn of time salespeople have used Hoovers as a way to uncover contact info for people they need to sell to. You might have found yourself on the receiving end of this phenomena. Now there's CogMap, a new type of wiki that helps you find information on people and how they fit into organizations.As a PM, this can come in handy for: - Interviewing prospective employees. It can help you see what positions they have held and ask questions about specific relationships and people they worked with. - Seeing where business partners and vendors fit into their organizations. If you want a better deal from a vendor, why not contact their superior? |
Does Six Sigma Kill Creativity?
Situation: You have some doubts about the way your company runs Total Quality efforts. The cover story in the current issue of BusinessWeek is of interest to many of us - particularly those in Fortune 500 organizations that are really bought into Six Sigma efforts. The article, entitled 3M's Innovation Crisis looks at whether the Six Sigma approaches they have put into place since 2000 have stifled the groundbreaking work they are known for, including Post-it Notes, Thinsulate, and more.I think its worth a read for anyone touched by Six Sigma, not because threapproach is bad - but rather I think the article gives you some food for thought for business areas that might be better left alone. There are a few lines in the article that really stood out for me: On invention versus structure "Invention is by its very nature a disorderly process," says current CEO George Buckley, who has dialed back many of McNerney's initiatives. "You can't put a Six Sigma process into that area and say, well, I'm getting behind on invention, so I'm going to schedule myself for three good ideas on Wednesday and two on Friday. That's not how creativity works." Indeed, the very factors that make Six Sigma effective in one context can make it ineffective in another. Traditionally, it uses rigorous statistical analysis to produce unambiguous data that help produce better quality, lower costs, and more efficiency. That all sounds great when you know what outcomes you'd like to control. But what about when there are few facts to go on—or you don't even know the nature of the problem you're trying to define? Defenders of Six Sigma at 3M claim that a more systematic new-product introduction process allows innovations to get to market faster. But Fry, the Post-it note inventor, disagrees. In fact, he places the blame for 3M's recent lack of innovative sizzle squarely on Six Sigma's application in 3M's research labs. Innovation, he says, is "a numbers game. You have to go through 5,000 to 6,000 raw ideas to find one successful business." Six Sigma would ask, why not eliminate all that waste and just come up with the right idea the first time? That way of thinking, says Fry, can have serious side effects. The obvious reason it happens "If you take over a company that's been living on innovation, clearly you can squeeze costs out," says Charles O'Reilly, a Stanford Graduate School of Business management professor. "The question is, what's the long-term damage to the company?" |
TimeXChange, timesheets and reporting - now free
Situation: You run a small to midsize consulting firm and need a free way to track billable hours...  I received this email tonight. I'm in one of those crunch-periods, so I can't do an interview at the moment - but I do think TimeXchange is worth a look. Here's (their President) Joe's message to me... D- Dave,
I hope you remember me. We exchanged a few emails earlier this year regarding our project reporting solution known as timeXchange.net. We are nearing the end of our public-beta period and getting ready to announce the “timeXchange.net Human Capital Reporting platform”. Lots of user comments later we are releasing our member-based free service where anyone can originate a project and invite team members (workers, managers, admin, and/or clients) to join the project. Just answer a few questions, enter team member’s email addresses, cost rate, billing rate, and project hours budgeted and we handle the invitation process, time tracking, routing, approval, and reporting. Project team data can also be routed to other Human Capital Management systems such as project management, payroll, billing, ERP, or other HR systems.
We are very excited about this release and are anxious to provide the world’s first time reporting platform that is agnostic about anyone’s organizational affiliation or business purpose of the reporting. I hope you will take a look and please let me know if you have any questions.
Joe Piekarz | President ActusTech Inc | www.timeXchange.net |
