Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
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For Your Super Team
Categories:
Time Killers
Categories: Time Killers
| Situation: You need a quick and free team building exercise... Here's a quick online teambuilder/icebreaker. Have everyone take five minutes before the big meeting to go online and figure out Which Superhero they are. This went around our office a month ago. It was great fun and generated a lot of conversation about how "right" the answers were. It's a no cost way to help people get to know one another a little better. Here's mine... Your results: You are Green Lantern
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Posted on: December 30, 2006 09:40 AM
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What's a Good Word for...?
Categories:
Personal Productivity
Categories: Personal Productivity
| Situation: You need a quick and useful dictionary or thesaurus...
I had heard about this app from a couple of friends who gave it rave reviews. It's also highly rated on CNET by editors, but EVEN MORE HIGHLY RATED by users. |
Posted on: December 30, 2006 09:26 AM
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Attachment Issues
Categories:
Personal Productivity
Categories: Personal Productivity
Situation: You need to send someone a large file ... This morning I ran into an age-old problem. I had to send a 8 MB PowerPoint file to a business partner. Knowing that no email system was going to accept my bulky attachment, I needed a quick (like right now) solution for sending it over.Send this file cost me about three bucks and took care of the problem in about 3 minutes. If you absolutely positively need to get it there in a few minutes - I would highly recommend this service. (It's also free if you have no security concerns - which wasnt the case with me.) |
Posted on: December 27, 2006 01:14 PM
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Product Update - Copper Enterprise 2007
Situation: You're looking at new ways to manage resources across the enterprise... I often like to ask software vendors "what's unique about your product?". Yesterday I asked Ben Prendergast that question about the new version of Cooper Project. His response, "...in our new enterprise product we've - for the first time - rethought the entire Project Management process, and our resourcing structure is unique to our product and we're confident it is going to provide new insights for our customers, not to mention some natural improvements to the collaboration process (via some real resource visibility). "When I asked for more detail, here's what he came back with. Hi Dave, We haven't released anything as yet. However here's an overview:
Effectively, we've restructured our resource tables so that we have a resource table, a task table, and even a day table (yes, every day for 12 years has its own ID, which dramatically reduces db overheads).
Firstly you set the availability of a resource, either via the availability wizard (e.g. This resource is available on weekdays for 8 hours a day) or via the users calendar (setting/tweaking hours available for each day).
Then create your project/tasks. Our new drag/drop timeline allows you to set start/end dates for each task/project, as well as set the estimated 'effort' required. So in terms of estimating, the new timeline allows for a really intuitive process both for set-up and ongoing tweaks.
Then you can allocate your resources. When allocating a resource to a task, you can only add hours when they are available for that resource, so we get around the cumbersome and inaccurate 'percentage utilization' that other tools use for resourcing.
When hours are allocated, they are shown in the calendar (so the user/manager sees an accurate breakdown of what is required for any day) and in the timeline as 'committed' hours (a white line intersecting the task block).
Then, as each resource undertakes the work this 'actual' time is recorded for timesheets/billing, and is displayed in the timeline as a darker line. This means that during the project you can see what was committed vs what was ACTUALLY completed, and can tweak/refine the timeline as the project progresses.
At first we were unsure about how much of an impact this would have on both the overheads in keeping data up to date, and the visibility of project progress, however having used the new structure for a few months we now have a MUCH better project management flow (aptly, we use Copper to develop Copper). People are going to love this new structure.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks,
______________________________________
Ben Prendergast
Element Software, Inc.
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Posted on: December 19, 2006 10:24 PM
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Who Has to Know? (just for fun)
Situation: You're a remote worker and want people to think you're productive... I picked this one up out of the current issue of BusinessWeek. ThrivingOffice solves the problem of clients thinking that you're being unproductive while working at home. Yes, it's kinda goofy and somewhat deceptive - but if you think about it, this sort of thing just puts people at home on a more equal footing with people at the office. Show me someone who works at home that doesn't worry about the political issues that impact them and I'll show you a temporary worker. |
Posted on: December 17, 2006 12:43 PM
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