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. |
A New Development Environment You Need to Know About...
Situation: You're an IT PM on the Leading Edge of Tech... Microsoft's new Silverlight technology is making quite a splash in the developer community. It can be used as:- a great way to deliver video - a higher end replacement for Flash as a development environment (see examples) - a way to make your existing code, like Javascript, run much faster (by just dropping it in) Take a look at the TechCrunch review for more details. |
A Cartoon Lesson in PM...
| Situation: A Project Manager in Your PMO Could Be a Little More Collaborative... This little snippet could help you hint at a problem without being too confrontational. |
Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration...
Situation: You Want Something Between a CMS and Home Grown Web 2.0 Tools... ClearSpace is an interesting software package that I ran across at the Web 2.0 Expo a week ago. Most of these tools don't even consider the tools you already have in place. Things as basic as email are off in a separate silo. ClearSpace integrates email and seems to offer a great core set of document management capabilities (without getting too complicated). Even better, it offers view of team-based interaction and enterprise knowledge that is topic focused, versus file or folder focused.I the same way that Google Desktop frees you up from the administrative tasks of constantly organizing things, Clearspace had the potential to make team and enterprise knowledge accessible without a librarian. Here are some features that might feel useful to you: - Integrating a lot of project-specific interaction that is only available in email threads with the rest of the project's documentation. This way you don't have to search around as much when you're trying to remember what happened a month ago. - Blogging with RSS capabilities to provide constant (and time-stamped) status reporting. - Version control of Word and Excel documents. - User profiles that could be very useful in the context of a PMO. - Automated reporting of team participation. |
