More Free and Easy Org Charting...
Situation: Your Need an Easy, Flexible Org Chart Solution for Your Project Team. OrgPlusLive offers a quick (also free to try) way to build org charts that seems tailor made for project teams. Here are a few features that I thought were cool, beyond the typical, yet essential, drag and drop:Importing team names and titles from an Excel spreadsheet. So if you have a team list of 20 people with titles or other descriptive info, you can import it and "bang", there are all of your pre-populated people boxes. You just saved a grueling 20 minutes of data entry. Secure online storage This means you can store the chart online, where only your team can access it - with all of the "update once" abilities that offers. Flexible exports You can export the chart in a number of formats allow you to print and easily include it in other documents. Having a current org chart is a great thing. Particularly for team that are constantly changing. Often it isnt done, because of the additional overhead. I think this goes a long way toward solving that problem. |
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. |
