Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Microfeedback: The Future of Management

A few months ago, I attended an employee engagement workshop. The facilitator suggested that millennials require performance feedback more than once a year. “Maybe once a quarter,” she said.

More like once a day!” I couldn’t resist calling out.

I wasn’t kidding. For the 80 million millennials who now make up a majority of the workforce, no news is bad news. If they don’t hear from their managers frequently, they think they’re doing something wrong and quickly grow disillusioned.

Nevertheless, an open door policy in which employees are invited to stop by a manager’s office for extended feedback sessions multiple times a day simply isn’t practical. So what’s the solution?

The innovative concept of microfeedback originated in the consumer space and consisted of collecting a small amount of information from customers at key moments in their shopping experience. The goal was to gather relevant customer feedback for a more accurate assessment of their satisfaction.

Think about this, though. Why can’t the idea of microfeedback be extended to performance management? We certainly have the technology. Intra-company messaging systems like Yammer, Skype for business, and Slack are growing exponentially and with some groups (like millennials), are even  more popular than email.

Imagine that your direct report gives a status update in the departmental meeting for the first time. You think she did an exceptional job, but instead of noting it in her file to be reviewed in six months (or worse, forgetting about it completely), you send her a “thumbs up” emoticon via Slack. The action takes you less than 30 seconds, and yet your employee has a piece of encouraging feedback that will make her day.

For more where this came from, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

"Let's Grab Coffee and Chat:" The Kiss of Death?

In the Observer, writer Isaac Morehouse made a provocative proposition: the habit of grabbing coffee with colleagues or partners “just to chat” is killing our productivity.

“Let’s grab coffee and chat.”

According to Isaac Morehouse, those five words can be damning. Morehouse’s opinion is that when you become known for doing interesting things, like starting a business or writing intriguing articles, lots of people want to have coffee with you. Most of the time, he says, it’s a bad idea.

Morehouse continues:

“Face to face meetings can be valuable. There’s an energy that you don’t get any other way. But the cost is very high, and it’s rare to gain that energy with a stranger. Unless you know from interactions over email, social media, or phone that you and this person have mutual interests and will both be spurred to beneficial action by a coffee meeting, avoid it.”

“It’s not that coffee isn’t fun. That’s the problem. It is fun. But what’s scarce is conversation that leads directly to productivity. You get a quick high from talking about big ideas with cool people over hot drinks. Hammering out the next steps and taking them is not as much fun.”

“It’s flattering to be asked to coffee by someone who thinks your stuff is great. But it almost always eats away a huge chunk of your time and energy with very little in the way of a tangible outcome. You can feel like you’re doing something because your calendar is booked with coffee and conversation and you don’t have time for stuff. But busyness is not business.”

Oh man, he is so right.

Coffee costs more money than a Starbucks vente

Actually, when new contacts ask me to have coffee – or worse – ask to “pick my brain” (am I the only one who hates that phrase?), I hesitate. I know that these meet-ups are a drain on my productivity. For one thing, they usually take place in downtown Chicago – about a half hour subway ride from where I live and work. So, if you factor in at least an hour for coffee and an hour and half travel time to get to and from the coffee, you’ve probably eaten up half your work day.

And when you work for yourself, the saying “time is money” has a lot of significance.

I also have to admit that 90 percent of the time, grabbing coffee isn’t worth it from a business perspective. This is because generally speaking, people want to get information out of me and take advantage of my knowledge. They aren’t doing it maliciously, they simply haven’t thought about how the meeting can be mutually beneficial.

And therein lies my advice for people who wish to use coffee (and similar types of one-on-ones) as a productivity enhancer rather than a productivity drain.

First and foremost, take Morehouse’s point about action seriously. When you set up coffee with someone, communicate clearly what you intend to talk about, and what actions will take place immediately following the conversation. Brainstorms are fine, but take the next step and use the time with the other person to get your plan of attack off and running. In saving you a second meeting and numerous back-and-forth emails, you will have actually used the coffee date to drive productivity instead of detract from it.

Up in the Cloud: Trends to Watch

By the end of 2015, 82 percent of organizations had adapted a cloud strategy, up from 74 percent in 2014. Cloud computing adoption is expected to hit $250 billion by 2017, but where is this segment of the IT industry going? We compiled a list of five major, influencing trends to keep your eyes on.

Trend #1: Cloud Automation

Last year, business-level automation of the cloud emerged, being driven by what Joe Kinsella at Cloud Tech called the “complexity gap”, where the complexity of the building and managing of cloud infrastructure is outpacing the ability of management software and services to contain it. “The future of the cloud will not be DevOps engineers writing low-level scripts to automate parts of our infrastructure,” he said. “Instead it will be business-level automation, with enterprises inputting the policies by which they want their business systems managed and smart software executing these policies in support of the business.”

Trend #2: Security

In Solutions Review, Brad Schulteis at Rackspace and Aaron Newman at CloudChekr commented on the significant security challenges facing the cloud in 2016. “We have failed to move beyond antiquated security analysis frameworks, and it’s still far too common to be required to document physical locations, IP addresses, and host names as a part of security assessments and audits,” said Schulteis. “We need to stop collectively treating cloud computing as IT outsourcing or server colocation and fully embrace the dynamic nature of the cloud.”

Newman added that the cloud has introduced the biggest challenge to security in a decade.

“Organizations will continue to need to properly implement network, operating system, and database security, but the cloud has characteristics that make the old methodologies and tools ineffective,” he said. “It’s ephemeral, elastic, and auto-scaling, and this makes everything from intrusion detection to vulnerability management to perimeter assessment very different.”

Trend #3: Innovation

According to Joe McKendrick in his recent article for Forbes, 2016 will be the year we’ll see a solidification of cloud computing’s role as a gateway to new things — and not just as the latest IT strategy. “Thanks to cloud, there will be many things people will be able to do that they simply couldn’t do before. They will be able to experiment, to test, and to pull data and applications from many sources,” he said. “One area where cloud really is laying the groundwork for innovation is in the Internet of Things space. Let’s face it, without cloud, there would be no IoT, just a bunch of Things.”

For more, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Efficiency Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be

The last two decades have been all about ensuring that American workers are as productive and efficient as possible. But the tide is turning. Organizations have started to emphasize cultivating more innovative work product as opposed to churning out higher volumes of it.

Last year, we reported on the worldwide productivity slowdown.  A report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) compared the annual growth rates for labor productivity in 32 countries for two periods, 1995-2004 and 2004-2013. Every country but one (Spain) had slower productivity growth in the second decade than in the first. In particular, the United States’ productivity decreased from 2.2 percent to 1.0 percent.

At the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the news wasn’t much better. Its report too showed that productivity is growing slower today than it has in the past. And productivity is defined in economic terms as efficiency, or delivering work in a time and energy efficient manner.

Definitions are a’ changing

However, in a recent Forbes article, David Sturt and Todd Nordstrom rightfully pointed out that efficiency isn’t the be all end all of business success. “Productivity in today’s business world means something new,” they said. “It’s not focused on just zero-defect proficiency. It’s not focused on just perfectly managed minutes of the day. Productivity in today’s world must focus on adaptation, innovation and forward progress.”

Without this modern definition of productivity and with teams that were efficient according to the traditional definition, Apple would have never created the iPod and auto manufacturers wouldn’t be introducing hybrid or alternative energy cars. “Without the evolution and re-invention that creativity brings, teams and companies stagnate and even die. Just ask the cellular giants who were put out of business because they couldn’t keep up with the rise of the touchscreen smartphone,” said Sturt and Nordstrom.

Indeed, some people are efficient and conscientious to a fault. They are so focused on the bottom line that they forgo brainstorming, ideation, and collaboration – and creativity suffers for it. They do what’s asked on time, but they don’t tinker and look for ways to challenge the status quo because that wouldn’t be efficient.  And they isolate themselves and don’t ask others for ideas because that slows them down.

Efficiency does not equal great work

New research on great work illustrates that efficiency may be in its death throes. The O.C. Tanner Great Work Study looked at over 1.7 million cases of great work worldwide, and found that the skills that deliver such work are actually the opposite of the governing principles of a technically efficient workday.

For example, 88 percent of great work starts with an employee asking an inquisitive question. The types of questions that the efficient worker doesn’t stop to ask, such as “Why don’t we …?” or “Should we try …? or “How can we improve on …?” are often the catalysts for industry-changing ideas.  And 72 percent of great work ideas succeed because the employee speaks to many people about their solution, and incorporates diverse knowledge and viewpoints into the design.

For more, read the rest of the post at QuickBase's Fast Track blog.

Do You Have One of Those Time-Waster Personalities?

When I met Dana Brownlee, the founder of corporate training company Professionalism Matters, we got to talking about time wasting habits. It turns out that certain types of people are actually prone to ineffective time management.

Being the productivity nut that I am, I naturally probed a bit deeper on this one and asked Brownlee to describe her four personality types, and how to stop struggling if you have one of them.

The Fire Extinguisher

This person has no real plan for their career or even the day ahead. All she can do is focus on the latest fire or the most recent request in front of them, with no organized system to manage all of her tasks. Brownlee says this time bomb approach explodes when something really important falls through the cracks.

The Checklist Checker

This personality is more focused on checking off items on his “to do list” than the real accomplishment of important items. Focusing too much on small tasks rather than the critical (and yes, daunting) ones is a dangerous approach because it gives the false illusion of achievement.

The Manic Multi-Tasker

This personality is convinced that one has to do 2-3 things at a time to be efficient. This person often can’t distinguish what can be multitasked versus what can’t. This can set her up for negative consequences (e.g. quality lapses, errors) that result from lack of attention and concentration.

For more where this came from, check out the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

IT Amps Up to Meet Business Priorities

One of the most intriguing sections of Deloitte’s new Tech Trends 2016: Innovating in the Digital Era report discussed the right speed for IT. Moving beyond the current, hyped-up two speed approach, the report highlighted speed-related considerations CIOs must take into account: business process-related, architectural, and organizational.

The tension between the need for stability and agility has resulted in the widely recommended two-speed (or bimodal) methodology for IT. “On one side are the predictability and controls necessary to manage risk while delivering large-scale enterprise IT with reliability, scalability, security, etc.,” said the report. “On the other is the push to drive discovery and experimentation around new features, tools, and technologies.”

However, according to Deloitte, in proposing the bimodal theory we may have oversimplified the conflict between these extreme sides. At the same time, we’ve offered little guidance on managing the unavoidable gap between the two priorities.

Many organizations are coming to terms with the idea that different types of business requirements require different speeds and IT must support a continuum. The Deloitte report offered these considerations for CIOs to keep in mind when forming expectations around speed.

Business Process Considerations

Finance management: Budgeting, prioritization, allocations, and accounting treatments all need more flexibility than annual appropriations, rigid planning cycles, and depreciation schedules do. Failure to address the differences in time-consuming finance management processes as part of an overall right-speeding initiative is a missed opportunity.

Procurement and sourcing: Similarly, multi-month RFP processes, drawn-out vendor assessments, and sourcing strategies focused on cost takeout are sometimes appropriate. But they also are not the only game in town. Codify paths to adopt open-source solutions such as platforms, libraries, and code-bases that could jumpstart efforts.

Vendor and contract management: Revisit nondisclosures, intellectual property protection clauses, and traditional segmentation of provider tiers. Consider creating new categories of engagement that can be deployed against efforts beyond simple fixed-scope and traditional service-level agreements. Encourage value-based arrangements where vendors are compensated based on outcomes.

Solution shaping: Beyond determining the recommended end-to-end architecture, ascertain the appropriate speed for a given project or product. Offer the team guardrails as they combine governance, controls, delivery model, enabling processes, and stage gates to balance business impact, technical vision, and risk.

Stakeholder communications and expectation management: Don’t hold back for a large periodic release. Instead, increase the number of releases or user previews to demonstrate progress. Gamify testing and reward members of the user community for providing feedback. Even if these releases are not destined to be put into production immediately, providing users and stakeholders with evidence of tangible progress can make the process seem quicker.

DevOps: Try to determine the granularity of control points, formality of reviews, and the appropriate level of automation that will be needed for the effort. Right-speed IT efforts often coincide with investments in autonomic platforms that can help move more of IT’s underlying workload to labor-free, seamless tasks (or at least introduce automation to eliminate waste in the end-to-end lifecycle).

For more insights from the Deloitte report, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Project Managers Waste Money - and Lots of It!

The Project Management Institute’s 2016 study shows that organizations around the world waste an average of $122 million for every $1 billion spent on projects as a result of poor project management practices.

Poor project management practices are costing us big time, says the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) 2016 Pulse of the Profession®: The High Cost of Low Performance study. Wasting $122 million for every $1 billion spent represents an increase of 12 percent over last year.

The 2016 study features feedback and insights from 2,428 project management practitioners, 192 senior executives and 282 Project Management Office (PMO) directors from a range of industries including government, financial services, information technology, telecom, energy, manufacturing, healthcare and construction. It also includes insights from eight corporate leaders and 10 PMO directors and directors of project management. The global totals in the report represent feedback from North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region.

Of the geographic regions covered in the report, the Middle East reported the lowest average monetary waste on spending projects: $99 million per $1 billion spent. Brazil reported the highest average waste on project spending: $202 million for every $1 billion spent. North America came in under the global average, wasting on average $119 million for every $1 billion spent.

Of the industries included in the study, government agencies had the lowest average monetary waste on spending projects: $108 per $1 billion spent (does this surprise anyone else as much as it surprises me?). Financial services reported the highest average waste on project spending: $149 million per $1 billion spent.

PMI speculates that the following factors are influential in the amount of project management waste a company might incur.

• Value: Just over half of organizations fully understand the value of project management, a number that has remained the same over the past five years.
• PMO: The percentage of organizations with a PMO has also remained the same for five consecutive years, with nearly seven in ten having a PMO. Furthermore, the types of PMOs in organizations have remained unchanged since PMI began tracking them six years ago; two-thirds of organizations report having a department-specific, regional, or divisional PMO(s), and nearly half of organizations report having an EPMO.
• Practices: Nearly six out of ten organizations use standardized project management practices throughout most or all of the enterprise. But only one in four uses standardized project management practices organization-wide, a decline of three percentage points from one year ago.
• Training and Development: The percentage of organizations providing project management training on tools, competency development, and a defined career path remains unchanged since 2012. Just under half of organizations report having a formal knowledge transfer process — a decline of five percent since last year. This leads to stressed outand ineffective PMs.
• Executive Sponsors: The average percentage of an organization’s projects with active sponsors declined compared to last year: only 59 percent of projects on average have actively engaged executive sponsors.
• Strategy Alignment: Less than half of organizations report high alignment of projects to organizational strategy, a number that has been fairly constant for the past three years. And, organizations report that, compared to last year, fewer of their projects are strategic initiatives (an average of 48 percent of projects, down from 54 percent in 2015).
• Maturity: The percentage of organizations with high project management maturity has not changed for the past six years. Program and portfolio management are equally established in organizations, with only one in six reporting the high maturity of each.
• Benefits Realization: The percentage of organizations reporting high benefits realization maturity is at 17 percent, static for the past three years. And, the percentage of organizations reporting low maturity in benefits realization is trending upward—nearly four in ten now report low maturity.

For more, read the rest of the post at the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Top Business Process Pitfalls to Avoid

Business process improvement requires good business process visibility, or the ability to accurately and completely view the processes, transactions and other activities operating within an enterprise.

In particular, it ensures that the business has a complete and accurate picture of IT operations, and vice versa. Organizations can also quickly identify process problems and get processes that don’t map to overall business objectives back on track – increasing value and efficiency.

But business process visibility is not just a nice-to-have, it’s essential in order to improve business processes and overall operational efficiency. Here are eight unfortunate things that happen when visibility isn’t up to par.

Silos and Manual Solutions

When information isn’t stored and shared in a central location, each team must develop its own process and solution. Obviously, these are inconsistent and unreliable, and “reinventing the wheel” always takes longer that sticking with a single plan that everyone knows works. Also, while project managers may share schedules with sponsors and other leaders at the start of a project, executives may lose the trail if documents are updated but not shared in real time, or worse, via emails and spreadsheets.

Insufficient Resources

When leaders can’t see individual tasks and team capacity, they are likely to assume that their people can do more with less and may go overboard with project planning and assignment. Project managers may be aware that team members are overloaded, but without process visibility, they lack the means to prove it to executives. And with no reprieve in sight, top talent is likely to seek other opportunities.

Incomplete Communication

Email is the biggest culprit here. This resource is frequently used to communicate about projects, but what happens when a new team member joins and doesn’t have access to the project’s documented history, and what happens if a team member forgets to cc another on an important piece of communication? And what about the common scenario of the executive who feels kept in the dark because he or she isn’t receiving regular updates? Then, you have team members wasting time frantically searching their inboxes.

Lower Quality Outputs

Fragmented processes lead to poor project quality because it’s easy for details to be missed during handoffs and things to slip through the cracks. A small problem may easily become a larger one. The result? Anything from a cost overrun to a defective product.

Inaccurate Reporting

Even when businesses have the right business intelligence information available to them, it may be inaccessible or erroneously reported due to lack of process visibility. Leaders who don’t have the most relevant insights at their fingertips are less likely to make smart choices.

For more pitfalls, head over to QuickBase's Fast Track blog.

For Greater Productivity, Try 52/17

Over five years ago, I wrote one of my first posts for the Fast Track blog. The article was about how I was able to hold down four paid jobs in addition to raising a toddler. Fast forward to today, when I am working on at least a dozen paid jobs and am responsible for an additional child. I’m still using the same system, and it’s still working.

One of the things I mentioned in the article is how I leave two hours per day for last minute tasks, essentially only scheduling enough productive work for six hours. During the remaining time, I manage administrative tasks, networking calls and gatherings, media interviews, research, and yes – downtime.

Introducing 52/17

Julia Gifford is a self-proclaimed Canadian born tech-enthusiast who currently works for the Draugiem Group. Gifford published an article on TheMuse.com detailing her company’s research study on employee work flow. Using time-tracking and productivity app DeskTime, Draugiem looked at the habits of the most productive employees and pinpointed the work style leading to an incredible ability to get things done.

What’s the strategy? It turns out I wasn’t so far off in my approach to six hours of productive work and two hours of non-productive work or breaks. Draugiem found that the most productive 10 percent of DeskTime users work for 52 minutes without stopping, break for 17 minutes, and then get back to the task at hand. They repeat this technique every hour.

If this sounds familiar, you might have heard of a similar approach called the Pomodoro Method. Cited by Gifford, the Pomodoro Technique is a time management method that uses a timer to break down work into intervals of focus and rest. These intervals are called “pomodoros” (or “tomatoes” in Italian), after those tomato-shaped kitchen timers.

Pomodoros are separated by short breaks for distractions, daydreaming, snacking, etc. It works by choosing a task to work on exclusively for 25 minutes, setting a timer, working on the task until the timer rings, and then taking a five minute break. After going through this cycle four times, you take a longer (about 15 minutes) break.

The Magic of the Creative Sprint

Why do methods like 52/17 and Pomodoro work so well? How can people who don’t even work a full day accomplish so much more than those who clock way more hours? Gifford wrote that the reason the top 10 percent of productive employees are able to get the most done during a comparatively short period of time is that every interval of working time is treated as a sprint. During the 52 minutes, they work with intense purpose, and then during the 17 minutes, they remove themselves completely from the task so that they can be fully focused and ready for the next sprint.

Human beings, apparently, are actually built to sprint. The body is not meant to sit for eight hours straight, so breaks on-the-hourimprove both productivity and health. The brain doesn’t love focusing for long periods either, and according to Gifford, concentration is like a muscle that needs to rest. Even if you’re a conscientious employee and love your work, doing it for hours on end will inevitably result in boredom and flagging attention. Psychologically and physically, being overworked is worse than being underworked.

For the rest of the piece, check out QuickBase's Fast Track blog.

Is Deep Learning the Future of AI?

Artificial intelligence has been in the news a lot lately, specifically related to machines’ ability to deep learn, or more closely mimic the actions of a human brain. In the near future, will a computer’s algorithms be able to do the project manager’s job as well as you can?

It started in 2011. Stanford professor Andrew Ng holed up at the Google X Lab at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters and initiated a project dubbed “Google Brain.”

Google Brain encompassed a connected network of 16,000 computers programmed to mimic aspects of human brain activity by looking for recurring patterns on the Internet. In a period of three days, the Brain had successfully trained itself to recognize a cat based on 10 million digital images taken from YouTube videos.

Google Brain was an example of an artificial neural network, designed after the densely interconnected neurons of the human brain. Possessing about a million simulated neurons and a billion simulated connections, Google Brain was ten times larger than any deep neural network before it, and in the last few years, Ng has made networks that are ten times larger than the original Brain.

The Google Brain and its subsequent neural networks represent what many consider to be the new frontier of artificial intelligence – deep learning. Deep learning trains computers to recognize patterns in data and then classify and categorize them as a human brain could do instantaneously. At present, deep learning in the form of image and speech recognition is used in applications such as Facebook’s tagging feature and the iPhone’s Siri. AI experts are already working on computational linguistics applications that will allow machines to easily decipher the variety of human languages – both spoken and written.

Machines may elbow their way in…

The maturation of deep learning along with machines’ ability to perform more complex algorithms will be a powerful combination. Within the next five years, we could see computers undertaking the following project management functions:

• Defining the scope of a project
• Aligning with other business areas
• Analyzing risks
• Developing project schedules, timelines, and budgets
• Assigning tasks to the appropriate resources
• Implementing software and other technical components
• Documenting project progress
• Assessing project outcomes

For more about AI and deep learning, review the rest of the post at QuickBase's Fast Track blog.