I read with some pain, but also a chuckle or two, CFO on-line’s sloppy spreadsheet practices article. I like to be organized, send files with naming conventions (source, date, and revision numbers), and like to assist the user of my excel files by using borders, bolded titles, and generally making them readable and printable. Amazingly, according to the article, most students and employees seem to simply send very poor looking documents that at first are unprintable. It’s simply work-creating laziness!
This creates an amazing amount of waste especially if you send your files to two or more people who have to …read more

Very interesting issue popped up the other day as I was speaking with a food manufacturer. They are very high quality and taste is everything. They therefore cringe when talk of continual improvement comes along because they do NOT want to mess with the process of food preparation even though they are a manufacturer and not a restaurant. Efficiency, as it relates to continual improvement, can lead to what they call recipe “drift”. In other words, many companies have started small with taste and quality of their food as the key differentiator, only to inexplicably lose that taste edge as …read more

Becky at www.myorgnanizedbiz.com recently wrote about the value of calendaring your “biz” and your life. One thing that stuck out was her proposal to try a two week experiment that could change your life:
Becky: Try this for the next two weeks: each day, figure out the five most important things that you need to accomplish that day. Then schedule time for them on your calendar. Schedule it around meetings and e-mail and errands. Actually block out time where you concentrate on that task.
And when that time comes, work on the task. If you only have a 1/2 hour, then see …read more

Marketing message experts, driven by global warming fever, are more often linking green with lean. The Association for Operations Management’s annual conference brochure (no link but check out www.apics.org) indicates that “green is the new lean”. It can be if you use lean approaches, concepts and culture change.
Value stream mapping, a lean analysis approach, is used to link wasteful production practices to reduced energy use. Consulting firms and companies have put together excellent lean programs focused on reducing waste which includes energy. But to say that all of “green” is the new lean is to attempt to piggyback an ill-defined …read more

My fascination with how global warming and green messages are being used and abused by companies continues with a brochure advertising The Association for Operations Management’s annual conference (go to www.apics.org for more info). In it they promote a “learning path” called “sustainability/green” (my emphasis provided):
“Green is the new lean. Attend this Learning Path to discover how you can apply green concepts to your daily work. Examine the financial implications of sustainable purchasing. Evaluate models and methodologies for greenhouse gas emissions and “greening” your supply chain. Discuss how to develop a successful and sustainable plan for your company.”
The first time …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

Harvard Business on-line’s post by Tom Davenport seems to deal with culture when describing two extremes to strategy development and execution:
1. Strategic Engineering- strategy is an engineering exercise with employees being the cogs in the machine.
2. Strategic Anarchy- executives get out of the way of employee’s entrepreneurial and innovative energies.
He suggests that a reconciliation of the two must take place.
While I see it as a culture issue I also see it like one of the commentors as not so much a reconciliation problem but one of creating a flexible environment controlled by standardized business processes. Letting elements of anarchy prevail …read more

My post on the PMO relieving pain prompted a response by ActiveEngine about pain being crucial to gain people’s attention. Pain and uncovering it can be a multi-layered process seemingly without end- i.e., dealing with one problem inevitably leads to having to deal with others which can get discouraging. This is probably because the “swamp is being drained”. Read my response below:
Pain is an interesting phenomenon. One of the analogies used for improvement is “draining the swamp”. When you drain the swamp you start seeing a bunch of ugly rocks. In project management this means getting rid of the projects …read more

Margaret Rouse at IT Knowledge Exchange continues our conversation on PMOs. We started by talking about how a PMO relieves pain, then the PMO’s role in dealing with the dreaded mythical queue of projects, and now language barriers in agile software development projects .
My post on how previous experience with lean manufacturing might overcome some of the barriers in language and acceptance of non-intuitive concepts related to agile also comes to mind.
Here’s Margaret’s language issue followed by my response. Sensei at ActiveEngine! I expect you to get involved with this:
Margaret: I’m going to think more about how language remains a …read more