Here we are once again, headed into a new week. What’s on your agenda for the next several days? I hope you’ve had a chance to read about the newly updated FTC guidelines for advertising. If you give away free products or services in return for reviews or endorsements (or pay for such services), the new rules will affect you. While it doesn’t go into affect until December 1st, it can impact you — so check it out before the holiday craziness makes you forget about it.
This past week I’ve seen a lot of posts about the new guidelines and …read more

With today being May Day, I decided to share business tools that could help you get to your pay day. I am sharing these tools as a way of providing business owners with suggested tools to help you run your business proficiently. The tools that will be suggested for you will cover a variety of topics and will help you streamline your business processes.
For those of you who don’t know, May Day is May 1st and actually is the host to many international celebrations. One of which is the International Workers’ Day which pertains to the the establishment of the …read more

If you work with a virtual team then collaboration is an important component for your business. Having successful collaborations can either break or make a team’s ability to reach its goals. As a business owner who uses virtual team members, I have found thant collaborating is essential so that communications are always open for my team members.
The following things important to the collaboration process.

Initial meeting to explain all the details of the project.
A way to track the project’s progress. Each member needs to be able to report on their progress
Make sure accountability is in place for each member.
Support for the …read more

For months the Innovations Are Under Your Nose post is the most viewed post on my blog. Funny that it only has two comments. Maybe you can help me out by telling me why it’s number one. Is it the picture of the nose? the revelation that most innovations are copied? or could it be that this is just a fluke of blogdom?
What say you?
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Funny how collaboration and communication, in and of themselves, are viewed by some as “strategies”. In my business (technology enabling business processes) you have to have something to collaborate about; i.e., a business process that is benefiting the company. In fact, “collaboration” and “communication” alone are never enough and seen as “me too” by the people we sell to. Everybody’s got collaboration tools- show me some valuable business processes that you can enable.
Even in blogging you must have content that is interesting, valuable if you will, before people will blog with you. Without the valuable content, or reason to interact …read more

Manufacturing Business Technology magazine’s article on collaborative innovation leads to an obvious question: how do you protect intellectual property when you involve many companies and associations in finding a link between a company with a problem and a company with a solution? Paul Stiros, CEO of NineSigma, a firm that links problems and solutions together, comments on this issue:
“Stiros says the entire process is conducted in such a way that neither party has to fear having intellectual property compromised. “The proposals submitted by solution providers don’t contain the actual solution,” he says. “They only contain the company’s capabilities for addressing …read more

For those of you who need a little summary of what WE blogged about in January 2008, here is a month-end sum up of projectmanagement411. There are many excellent comments/points of view on these topics- check THEM out and add to the conversation! (The topics are arranged to be sung, with appropriate breathing- first three words very slow and the rest “rapid fire”):
We… wrote…. about….. living standards, innovation, carbon trading, collaboration…..(breath), strategy mapping, tech trends, role of commitment and preparation…..(breath), social security, business leaders, statesmen, project queues…..(breath), language barriers, PMOs, BI drivers, and swamp draining.
Just click on the topic and …read more

Collaboration reaps many benefits but there are still many frustrations with the process and with the technology. Manufacturing Business Technology magazine reports on a survey of just over 400 (about 1/2 design engineers and 1/2 production/project managers) about collaboration as it relates to design and manufacturing improvements.
Only 20% were “satisfied” with current collaboration efforts citing two key areas of frustration:
1. Slow responses from those to whom communications are sent.
2. Clarity of communication.
90% regularly collaborate with internal to company people with only 30% going outside to customers and suppliers on a regular basis. This surprised the reviewers but seems to make …read more

My post on Overcoming Language Barriers facilitated some very nice sharing of resources. Executives and managers! You need to familiarize yourself with this information; you will benefit through improved understanding of what your IT projects should be doing for you:
1. Excellent discussion on Domain Driven development from Sensei at ActiveEngine’s Cool Stuff post. This is more than a software development discussion- it deals with how to attack problems from a value perspective as you develop “language” between technologists and users. I suggest reading the transcript and paying close attention to Eric Evans’ thoughts- great reading.
2. Great, and thankfully brief, agile …read more

Intelligent Enterprise article “The Seven Pillars of BI Success” closed with a success story where agile software development processes came into play. 1-800 Contacts, winner of 2006 TDWI Best Practice Award, first aligned their BI project with a call-center-incentive project. The agile software development approach fostered high value innovative ideas to allow monitoring and improvement of agent performance mainly by giving the agents a way to monitor themselves. A large part of the success was attributed to the agile approach to collaboration with users:
Before picture: “Business would shout, and IT would do a fire drill and throw something out there.”
After …read more