Flipboard: Innovative but I want it for work
I am not much of a social media user/consumer. I don't have a facebook page (never say never) and though I am an avid consumer and tweeter, I haven't been on Twitter all that long either. So an application that takes all of your social media feeds and consolidates them into one interface, using a pretty intuitive and well known metaphor would not be something that would typically grab my attention. But that's exactly what has happened. Not because of what it does today, but what I hope it will do in the future.
The interweb is all a twitter (pun intended) with the new iPad application called Flipboard, .
http://www.flipboard.com/, which was announced today. So I had to go look for myself to see what all the hubbub was about. I actually don't own an iPad (or any apple products) so I can only go off of the various demos that I've seen. I like this product. I think it is VERY innovative and has alot of potential, but not for the things that it does now. Let me explain.
If you own an iPad and use Facebook and Twitter and I'm assuming other social media feeds coming soon probably, then I think you would want to get this free application. It takes all of that content; the photos, the wall postings, links etc and presents them in a magazine UI metaphor, without you having to do any programming or layout work. Pretty cool. But if you are not a social media heavy user and/or don't own an iPad (aka me) then you won't be so excited about it or at least you would think. But here's the catch for me... I want a Flipboard for all of my work content. I want to aggregate my email, my sharepoint stuff, my docs, my excel spreadsheets, my project schedules, tasks and issues/risks -- all of it -- into Flipboard type content I can consume as I go about my day at work. Why limit your product to only the consumption of social media content?
For example, I'm a realtor. I need to look at emails coming in, setup appointments with potential buyers (and sellers), file escrow paperwork, check the status of a loan from the bank for a client, check new listings on the MLS... why couldn't I put all of that into a Flipboard type magazine for me to consume? For other realitors at my company to consume?
Or I could be an executive at an organizaion, let's say that makes widgets. I need to (again) check emails coming in, look at my calendar for meetings, etc., I need to check the quarterly departmental budgets an expenses, review a press release, look at a balanced scorecard dashboard of other metrics for my department or organization, check stock on inventory, approve some purchase orders, meet with the board of directors taking notes the whole way.... it could go on and on. Wouldn't it be cool that instead of having to open up all of these applications to do the tasks that I'm describing that instead I had a Flipboard for my company that contained all of the information "feeds" that I would use based on my position and what I've "subscribed" to from my IT department?
The Flipboard company bills itself as a social magazine, but I hope it won't stop there. I hope that it will open up its interface so that the types of content that I've just describe... work stuff... can be added, that company-centric Flipboards can be created for the information feeds that we deal with at work.
Labels: Flipboard, iPad, productivity, social media, technology
Tying Your Project Metrics to your Strategic Business Drivers, part 1
[Project Management] [Business Strategy]
Strategy and Execution. Pick up any business magazine or book and that's about all you'll be reading about it seems. Company XYZ is a top performer because they not only come up with great ideas (innovation / strategy), but then they can make it happen (execution). I recently read two books about Strategy and Execution, "Clever" by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones and "Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles between Vision and Reality" by Scott Belsky. Even the cover story of my July-August 2010 Havard Business Review is about Strategy and Execution, "The Effective Organization: Turn Great Strategy into Great Results".
Project Managers are all about execution, but how do our projects align with our company or organization's business strategy? Do we even know? Or care? We should. Sure, we spend time planning, defining scope and requirements, then putting together a team, but the majority of our time we spend actual doing things, aka executing. Plan the work. Work the plan. Do the projects that we spend time executing align with our core business strategies? If not, we shouldn't be doing them.
And not only should the projects that we are managing be aligned with our organization's strategic objectives, but so should the measurements that we track and use to manage them. I'm often asked by PM's or during the course of implementing an EPM (Enterprise Project Management) system what metrics should they be using. Most talk about Earned Value, Burn rate, Budget vs Actual and the like. And while these are all good and provide valuable information about how a project is peforming, I typically ask a question instead of giving a specific answer, at least right away.
What are your organization's core strategic drivers or objectives?
This is usually met with silence. Let's take Earned Value. Earned Value is a set of measurements that combine scope, schedule and cost into a set of integrated and hopefully objective metrics. Originated during the 1960s by the United States DOD to manage and provide insight into government projects, it has gained in popularity in the commercial space in recent years. I like it because of its high accuracy in predicting how a project is going to run (for cost and schedule) within the first 20% of work on the project. But it is a reactive, corrective action metric and it only covers part of what you should be managing as a project manager.
Take the following list of Project Management Knowledge areas as outlined in PMI's PMBOK (Project Management Book of Knowledge):
- Project Management Integration
- Project Scope Management
- Project Time Management
- Project Cost Management
- Project Quality Management
- Project HR Management
- Project Communication Management
- Project Risk Management
- Project Procurement Management
Only the three areas that are highlighted in bold are covered by Earned Value. What about the rest of the areas? Couldn't quality of the deliverables of your project effect its completion or the stakeholders satisfaction? Having to go back and rework parts that were delivered certainly could effect your project's timeline in a negative way. What about not having enough or the right team members to do the work on your project? Do they have the tools or training they need to do tasks they've been assigned? Or not getting timely delivery of materials to create those parts, could that negatively impact your project? What values in Earned Value do you use to measure these areas? The short answer is there aren't any.
Tracking costs and delivering on schedule might be part of your organization's strategic objectives, typically under Customer Satisfaction or decreasing cost to market, but they are only part of the picture. And if they aren't part of your organizations core strategic objectives, why are you putting so much emphasis on them by tracking them? I know, I know. It's almost considered heresy to suggest not tracking costs and schedule for projects, especially in today's economic climate, but I'm a "why" kind of gal.
I like Earned Value. I really do. In fact, I use it for almost every project that I manage. In my next post, I'll be talking about what you should and could be measuring in addition with Earned Value to get a better picture of how your project is executing.
Hint: It involves a little thing called the Balanced Scorecard.
Labels: Balanced Scorecard, Business Intelligence, Business Strategy, Earned Value, Project Management
Now why doesn't she write?!?
If you have seen Dances with Wolves you know this quote from the guy who used to play Eldin on Murphy Brown. (And if you are asking who's Eldin and What is Murphy Brown, you might not get most of the references that I'll make in this blog.)
But seriously it's been a while since I've felt the need to write down things here. So why now? Well, I recently (several months ago) and reluctantly created a twitter account. My tech friends and collegues were all tweeting and facebooking. I had looked at facebook and didnt want to be there (never say never tho). I just didn't see the point in what all the buzz was about this twitter thing. At gatherings and parties, I'm not a small talk kind of gal, so the idea that I was suppose to share all the little minutia of my life in 140 character bites over the air waves and that people would actually cae just didn't seem like something that would interest me. But I signed up and did some tweeting. My general axiom for my tweets is that rather than 'share' what I'm having for lunch or what outfit I'd picked out for the day, that instead I'd tweet anything that I would normally yell at the TV. It made me feel better and didn't scare the cats. As much anyway.
It wasn't really until I found a third party UI (User Interface for those non-geeks) program for the twitter service called Tweetdeck, that I really got into the groove. The program allows you to take the stream of consciousness feeds from the people that you follow on twitter and group them into, well, groups. I have a TechGeek group, a Non-Tech Group, a Writers/Publishers group, a TV/Fandom group... well, you get the idea. Hey, I have eclectic, um, I mean diverse interests. And I can group those in TweetDeck. More importantly, now I have context to those tweets. I confess, I am hooked.
My original axiom about yelling at the TV tweets still stands, most evident when I watch the Sunday morning 'news' programs, but I've really gotten into this whole RT -- that's Retweeting to those uninitiated. I feel like I'm interacting and passing on information now. I'm being productive. No really!
So what does all this have to do with the re-opening of my blog? Well, sometimes there are conversations going on in twitter that I just have more to say than I can do in 140 characters. These could be about technology, either new trends, product releases or maybe even training content. These could be about writing, the epub trends (I'm a big eReader fan and consumer) or just publishing discussions in general. So... the blog. Previously I thought that blogs had to be focused on one type of subject. ie: personal, techy, writing, etc. Twitter actually taught me that blogs, etc don't have to be single threaded.
What you will see here will be, for lack of a better categorization, me. All of my interests, all of my political views (fair warning here) and all of my quirks and warts. Yes, there will be techy stuff. There will be political stuff. There will be movie, books and TV stuff. Pretty much the kinds of stuff you see from me in Twitter, just longer.
It will be a confluence of things, which I hope will be more interesting.
Thanks for reading and let the journey begin (again).
Merry-Go-Round Economy
When I first moved to Southern California and experienced for the first time the difference in the cost of living here compared to, oh say, the REST of the country, I was a non-believer. People were just over-exaggerating, right? Just being whinners, right?
A friend tried to explain it to me in such a way, using small words, childhood metaphors and imagery, so that I would feel better about it all. After she was finished, I seriously doubted her sanity. That is until I had lived here six months and then I realized I was the one who was insane. Now nearly four years later, it makes perfect sense to me in that drinking the cool aid kind of way and I am in awe of her ability to put into perspective such a complex environment as easily and as clearly as she had. She took a deep, cleansing breath, scooched to the edge of her chair, closer towards me and began softly.
Living in California is like riding a merry-go-round. When you are standing on the ground, trying to gauge the best time to jump on and it is spinning around and around and around, it looks like it is going too fast to ever be able to make the leap. The rails and people on it are a blur, speeding by at high velocities as they are. You stand there, watching it whirl by, screwing up your courage, flexing your legs over and over in preparation for that one, hopefully well-timed jump.
Then you do. You make the jump. As you land on the platform, the pull of the opposing forces between the ground you just left and the centrifugal force on the platform play at the contents of your stomach. Your inner ear signals that you are not in Kansas anymore. Literally. You are only queasy for the slightest moment, your footing unsure, and then you get your balance. The urge to puke subsides. You adjust to the speed in which you are spinning. You get used to it.
That is what moving to Southern California and living here is like.
Everything is more expensive, including food which I’ve never understood since, with our weather, we should grow a lot of it here. Not just a little more expensive, but much more expensive. After four years of living on the merry-go-round, you’d think that I would be used to it all. However, the queasiness has not subsided. If anything, it is worse, especially recently. After 40+ years of being alive, after thirty of those years living in apartment after apartment, after years of traveling and moving and traveling and jumping from job to job, most recently thanks to the recession and savage cuts of tech jobs, we started looking for a piece of property to call our own. Some people buy a little convertible sports car, preferable red, for their mid-life crisis. Me, I want to buy a house.
I’ve always lived on the wild side.
As a household, we make pretty good money with a good credit rating. Still with interest rates at the lowest in history, we can not afford to purchase any kind of decent property in our county. Thank you, Merry-Go-Round Economy. I’m not talking about pie in the sky, loaded to the hilt homes. I’m talking about basic, bare bones two bedrooms, hopefully three, two bath condos. Yes, condos.
Case in point… our current residence. It’s a VERY nice place, even for an apartment, with lots of “luxury” items such as white ceramic tile countertops, crown moldings, high ceilings, a fireplace (that doesn’t produce heat – another subject altogether) a club house with pool, workout room, lush landscaping, etc. Never mind that we never go to the pool. Never mind that we never use the clubhouse with its 20 seat “theater” where you can watch movies on an indecently big TV. Never mind that no matter how much we say that tomorrow will be the day that we will get back into exercising, we don’t really use the workout room. It is close to the coast, but not so close that it would be considered “on” the coast. We do have the cooler temps of the coast. But it is STILL an apartment.
Several months ago we received word that the whole complex was going condo. We have seen a rash of apartment complexes, not as nice as ours, with far more apartment-esque features, going condo. It seems that that is the *thing* to do now adays. With the real estate market estimated at a 120% growth rate over the last five years, who can blame the rush to cash in.
We welcomed the prospect of the complex going condo. It would be a good way to get our foot in the door of home ownership especially given that ten percent of our rent over the last three years could be used as a down payment. Or so we thought. We were told the asking price of our 1151 square foot, two bedroom, two bath, tandem garage unit in July. The letter that brought this happy news should have included a small vial of smelling salts. The price was a mere $508,000, a bargain I am told for this area and for this property.
I want some of what they are smoking. It might quell the queasiness, the urge to puke that I experienced. I never was good on merry-go-rounds, even as a kid. I get motion sickness sitting in the back of a van.
We are currently packing. While we’ve seen the market slow down a bit in the last couple of months, we expect it to continue, even slightly, in anticipation of the predicted bubble burst to happen. I don’t think it will be in the scale of the tech bubble, but I’d rather be on this side of the adjustment as the other. We have decided to stay on the rental merry-go-round for a few more months and move to a unit at a different complex short term. Then, hopefully during a slow down in the circular motion, we will make the leap and buy sometime next year.http://www.torreyvillas.com/floorplan_proc.asp?model=Napoli
To blog or not to blog, that was the question.
Well, I've gone and done it now. Until now, I have resisted this decade's "in" thing... to create a blog and share my most insipid, trivial mind dump of the goings on in my life. I mean, I haven't had a Dear Diary since I was 7 years old and I kept the pink little book under my pillow locked against my brother's prying eyes. If I'm writing in a blog, I should be spending that time actually writing writing, right? I had a journal while I was traveling and that just got to be old. What would be the point at this stage in my life? Well, I haven't been writing writing lately, (though I'm secretly hoping that this kick starts that). Stir into that pot all the idiotic occurrences that have been happening in the world today, especially my own country, state and city and what is passing for the News these days on TV and in some print publications.I have to say that for most of my life I was blissfully unaware of what was going on around me in society. I didn't watch the news (except CNN's Headline News) or read the paper, listen to NPR, or anything else that could inform me as to current affairs. I never voted, didn't know who my congressman / woman was or even how many Supreme Court Justices there were. I can't say that's true anymore. I've been infected with information feeds, with caring what's going on, how those we've put in charge are taking care of things, and how people are being treated. The downside of that is that I just can't believe what I hear is going on or what is being covered.So, trading on the nickname some friends gave me, I thought I would start a blog to "dagger" some of those topics that I think are really dumb and hope others think they are dumb too, should be brought to light more or just to get the pieces out of my brain so that the space can be used for more important information :-). Thanks for coming along on the journey with me.
