Daily Archive: June 8, 2006

Are teams always the answer?

We can sometimes get carried away by the idea that the solution to all of our problems is team work, we draw ever more people onto our conference calls, send our emails to bigger circulation lists and try an enlist a diverse group of people on every project to increase...

Project management is all about the people

I love the reforming project management blog,  it has some great insights.  As an architect/solution manager who has dabbled with project and programme management for 15 years I have found that all too often project managers get tricked into managing the project and not managing the people.  A great example...

Knowledge work is difficult to turn into a process

In my previous post I described the difficulty of modelling most knowledge work as a process, and that makes it difficult to create IT tools to support it, to measure it, improve it and ultimately automate it.  Rod Boothby follows a similar train of thought in his post Forget Robots...

How do people really spend their day?

In a study by the Information Worker Productivity Council in 2004 they found that the average knowledge worker: Spent 3 hours and 14 minutes a day using technologies to process work-related information—just over 40% of an 8-hour work day, the details follow, they: Devoted 1.58  hours/day to e-mail (49% of the...

How much un-tapped productivity savings is there in business today?

A study was conducted in a software engineering company, which was already above the norm in terms of efficiency.  The Trial consisted of 7 teams who were co-located compared with the rest (more) who used audio, video and application sharing.  The co-located teams averaged double the output and reduced time...

The business case for improving productivity

I am a big believer in the improvement for businesses that can be achieved by improving productivity.  I still see this as a largely untapped area of savings. what! you are probably saying at this point is Steve talking about, every last bit of productivity improvement has been driven out of processes...

Collaboration Is a Key Driver of Business Performance!

I will be interested to see the full research report, but it’s no surprise to me that Frost & Sullivan found this when they surveyed 946 information technology and line-of-business decision-makers.  My personal feeling is that there is a huge difference in the effectiveness of individuals that can be attributed...