Project Management Tools from MindTools As you move ahead in your career, you are likely to face more complex and difficult challenges. Some of these will involve the coordination of many different people, the completion of many tasks in a precise sequence, and the expenditure of a great deal of time and money. Whether you succeed or fail with these projects depends on how good you are at project management. This section of Mind Tools teaches more than 50 individual project management skills . The Browse by Category box below will help you target specific project management skills areas, while you can look through the full list of tools to find interesting topics. Free Tools Mind Tools Club Project Management Framework Scheduling Scope Management Building Support for Your Projects The RACI Matrix Structuring Accountabilities for Maximum Efficiency and Results Communication Change Management Project Improvement and Review Join the Mind Tools Club Where to go from here: Next article
Why aren’t more business leaders online? Problem-Solving Skills From MindTools Find the fundamental cause, and you're half way there. © iStockphoto The 25+ tools in this section help you solve complicated business problems. By using these techniques, you can start to deal with problems that might otherwise seem huge, overwhelming, or excessively complex. Start by taking our How Good Are Your Problem-Solving Skills? Then browse the list of tools below: the techniques that you'll find will help you in many different situations. Enjoy using these tools! General Problem-Solving Tools Problem-Solving Approaches Finding the Cause of a Problem CATWOE Developing a Robust Problem Definition 5 Whys Quickly Getting to the Root of a Problem Improving Business Processes Flow Charts Understanding and Communicating How a Process Works Diagram-Based Tools Join the Mind Tools Club ... and get 65 in-depth Bite-Sized Training™ sessions as well as more than 900 articles like the one you've just read. Develop the skills you need with training, help and ideas from the Mind Tools Club.
Tetradian Books » Blog Archive » Power and Response-ability Published: July 2008 Suggested price: £25.00 Preview: see: Buy print edition from: Buy e-book edition from IT Governance “Many of the common concepts of power in business are so close to perfectly wrong that it’s amazing any work happens at all…” The physics definition of power is ‘the ability to do work’; most social definitions are closer to the ability to avoid it. This enlightening and enlivening book explains the interplay of power, property and responsibility in the business context – how it works, why it doesn’t, and what to do about it. how to identify power in the workplace – both functional and dysfunctionalhow to enhance responsibility and ‘response-ability’ at workhow to resolve differences of scale, from ‘I’ to ‘We’ to ‘Us’ to ‘Them’how to avoid ‘power-traps’ that could put the enterprise at riskhow to design systems that improve purpose-fulfilment, relationship-management and knowledge-technology in the enterprise
How Good Are Your Project Management Skills? - Project Management Tools from MindTools Project managers need a broad range of skills. © iStockphoto/ez_thug Whether or not you hold the official title of project manager, chances are you'll be called upon to lead some sort of project at some time. From initiating a procedural change in your department to opening a branch office in a different city, projects come in all shapes and sizes. As the complexity of your projects increases, the number of details you have to monitor also increases. However, the fundamentals of managing a project from start to finish are usually very similar. This short quiz helps you determine how well you perform in the eight key areas that are important to a successful project. How Good Are Your Project Management Skills? Instructions For each statement, click the button in the column that best describes you. Your last quiz results are shown. You last completed this quiz on , at . Questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 still need to be answered! (Questions 6, 11)
Which Best Practice Is Ruining Your Business? - Freek Vermeulen by Freek Vermeulen | 11:00 AM December 3, 2012 For many decades, newspapers were big; printed on the so-called broadsheet format. However, it was not cheaper to print on such large sheets of paper — that was not the reason for their exorbitant size — in fact, it was more expensive, in comparison to the so-called tabloid size. So why did newspaper companies insist on printing the news on such impractical, large sheets of paper? Why not print it on smaller paper? When finally, in 2004, the United Kingdom’s Independent switched to the denounced tabloid size, it saw its circulation surge. When I looked into where the practice had come from — to print newspapers on impractically large sheets of paper — it appeared its roots lay in England. Everybody does it Most companies follow “best practices.” One reason why a practice’s inefficiency may be difficult to spot is because when it came into existence, it was beneficial — like broadsheet newspapers once made sense. The short-term trap
Buys Eloqua Redwood Shores, Calif. – December 20, 2012 Oracle today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Eloqua, Inc. (NASDAQ: ELOQ), a leading provider of cloud-based marketing automation and revenue performance management software for $23.50 per share or approximately $871 million, net of Eloqua’s cash. The combination of Oracle and Eloqua is expected to create a comprehensive Customer Experience Cloud offering to help companies transform the way they market, sell, support and serve their customers. The Board of Directors of Eloqua has unanimously approved the transaction. “Modern marketing practices are driving revenue growth and is a critical area of investment for companies today,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development. “Exceptional customer experience starts with knowing your customer’s preferences and delivering a highly personalized buying experience,” said Joe Payne, Chairman and CEO, Eloqua. About Oracle Trademarks Contact Info
Here is how cloud computing, big data, and some innovation can reinvent healthcare I’m often taking aback by the lack of automation and underutilization of information assets in the world of healthcare. Over the years, so much effort went into dealing with compliance and privacy issues that the core thrust of why the healthcare systems exist seems to be lost in the mix.| No matter if you were for or against the new healthcare regulatory changes, the end result is that more people will be tossed into a system that is already at capacity. The fact of the matter is that most healthcare providers are under-funded, which leads to being under-automated and under-innovative. The statistics back up my statements. The solution to this problem of too much to do and not enough resources to do it, is one of leveraging the right new technologies, some careful planning, and moving from a reactive to proactive state in the world of healthcare IT. Manage patient data holistically, and in new, innovative ways. This concept is nothing new. Again, this is an old vision.
The future of LinkedIn and the economic graph Digital Activist Aaron Swartz Dead At 26 Digital activist and early employee at Reddit, Aaron Swartz, committed suicide in New York on January 11. He was 26. Swartz was a fiery proponent of Internet freedom and the founder of DemandProgress.org. Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing wrote a beautiful eulogy to the young man who, at the age of 14, surprised his computing peers by organizing the RSS 1.0 working group. I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. Schwartz was in the news in 2011 for taking 4 million documents from JSTOR, an online aggregator of scientific journals. It is always tragic when one of our own dies and it is made even more tragic when they choose suicide rather than help. But rather than dwell on what went wrong, it is right to celebrate this young man’s accomplishments and mourn his passing.
Managers are for Efficiency, Leaders are for Innovation Time was, back when the railroads were built, that the military was basically the only management structure that was large, distributed and relatively effective. So the railroads and other rapidly expanding businesses adopted the military’s top down, command and control management philosophies. This was actually a driver for industrial growth, since many corporations were forming and needed a structure to allow them to grow, to expand and to control operations. Fast forward to today, and the top down, command and control organization is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The Cross Roads Our businesses are at a cross-roads, in terms of existing structures and purpose, and future demands. Leaders, managers and visions, oh my! Back in the day when command and control was the accepted and the practical alternative, executives created strategies but didn’t bother to share them with their employees. But today, things should be different. The new paradigm Wait!
A Shape-Shifting Smartphone Touch Screen Tactus Technology, a startup in Fremont, California, is prototyping touch-screen hardware with buttons that emerge when you need the feel of a physical keyboard and disappear when you don’t. The approach, in which a fluid-filled plastic panel and cylindrical fluid reservoir replace the usual top layer of glass, is among a crop of emerging technologies aimed at adding tactile feedback to make screens feel like old-fashioned keyboards. Touch screens are ubiquitous: in 2012, 1.2 billion were made for smartphones and 130 million for tablets, and they’re showing up in everything from game consoles to car navigation interfaces. Tactus isn’t the only company recognizing a need for screens to offer tactile or so-called haptic feedback. Tactus’s approach, however, is the only one that allows users to orient their finger on the screen before actually depressing the key, or to rest their fingers on buttons without triggering them.