Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Why Spreadsheets Are Yesterday's News

On a recent Gartner webinar, research analyst Teresa Jones explained how the PPM solution market now offers dozens of effective tools to replace the ubiquitous spreadsheet.

In 1979, spreadsheets changed the world. VisiCalc (for “visible calculator”) was the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for the Apple II. According to Wikipedia, it’s often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool. VisiCalc sold over 700,000 copies in six years, and as many as 1 million copies over its history.

Over three decades later, the spreadsheet remains prevalent as a valued tool in the project manager’s toolbox even though its widespread use leads to as many problems as it solves. Due to duplicated information, arguments about whose data is most accurate and the challenges of distributed teams, fit-for-purpose tools are growing in appeal.

Jones offered guidance on some of the options available to project managers, and started with a bit of education on the PPM market itself.

Welcome to the PPM Age

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is the centralized management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices (PMOs) to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics.

Within this discipline, however, you need to know exactly what you’re working on in order to identify the right tool. For example, Jones defined a “project” as a temporary endeavor designed to achieve a particular business outcome, a “portfolio” as a group of projects that are related in some way, and a “program” as a group of projects within a portfolio (CRM, etc.).

Selecting the Right PPM Solution

Before undertaking the selection process, it’s key to understand that PPM tools aren’t perfect. Jones cites several challenges, including that some tools can’t report the most useful information, and others are too complex or not complex enough. Some have inefficient cost models, while others have poor usability.

Given that there is no Holy Grail that will be all things to all organizations, PPM software selection begins with gaining a comprehensive understanding of your company’s requirements. Who in your organization will use the tool, and what do they need the tool to do? Jones said that PPM solutions provide a combination of actual work activities and reporting, but features differ.

A program manager, for instance, may need a tool with more strategic analysis capabilities, while a project manager will likely need a central dashboard. Usually, as the level of manager interaction with a tool goes up, the number of employees accessing the tool goes down.

For guiding questions on how to select the right post-spreadsheet tool, visit the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

5 Essentials for the “Office” of the Future

Yesterday I traveled to the Gil Hatch Center for Customer Innovation in Rochester, NY to talk with my partner Xerox and visiting press and analysts about the future of work and office technology. Given that the office isn’t a necessary a physical location anymore, both software and hardware must be configured to be used effectively and efficiently by a growing virtual, mobile and contract workforce. Whether you are an enterprise or an SMB, here are the must-haves for your technology.

IoT and mobile operations

Technology must be accessible anytime, anywhere, by both full-time and contract workers. Mobile phones must be able to seamlessly communicate with other devices via the Internet of Things as well as any onsite infrastructures and systems, and users want to automate complex processes with a single touch or action. And, all of this must be done with minimal intervention from IT as these professionals can only assist so many people at once.

Remote collaboration

In 2016, flexwork is king, meaning that the days of the majority of your employees working together in the same location are likely numbered. But technology must facilitate virtual work in which it’s just as easy and productive to engage with your colleague in Japan as it is with the one in the cubicle next door. Technology must be agile, with the ability to support new collaboration apps being developed on the consumer side or via in-house citizen development.

Secure workflow to and from the cloud

When it comes to intellectual property residing in the cloud, security remains the biggest concern. Organizations want their data stored in a central location and accessible by everyone who needs it, but documents must be managed in a way that is controllable and protects them from internal and external threats and breeches.

Customized to the individual

Employees have variable needs and every individual has his or her own way of doing things, so mandating a certain process for using technology is a surefire way to hinder adoption. Tomorrow’s office systems must be personalized so that whether you prefer to print via mobile or manual methods or scan via email or QR codes, you’re covered.

Despite the obviously increasing sophistication of office technology demands, according to IDC, 40 percent of smartphone users and 35 percent of tablet users don’t even know how to print from their device. So, as an example of new office technologies that address these demands while also simplifying solutions for the individual, Xerox has just released the 14 Xerox ConnectKey enabled i-Series multi-function printers (MFPs). In order to accommodate a diverse mobile workforce, the MFPs are designed with an intuitive user display with ready-to-use MFP applications right on the interface.

In particular, the Mobile Link app lets users create one-touch, automated workflows on their mobile devices to remotely control a Xerox MFP and transmit documents to fax, email and cloud-hosted services like Box, Dropbox and Google Drive. And, perhaps most importantly, the new MFPs have secure print and scan encryption so companies can ensure that documents remain confidential.

What new technologies are helping you be more productive at work?

Sustaining Enthusiasm for a Long-Term Project

In 2001, a team led by NASA principal investigator Alan Stern crafted the proposal for the New Horizons mission. Five years later in 2006, NASA launched an unmanned probe, a spacecraft weighing over 1,000 pounds, on the first-ever route to Pluto.

Less than a year later, the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to the status of “dwarf planet,” but that didn’t mean anything as far as the epic New Horizons mission was concerned.

Fast Company recently shared an article detailing the muscle behind New Horizon’s formidable planning process, which spanned 14 years (9 if you start counting at launch) and more than 3 billion miles. The team relied on strong leadership, rigorous risk assessment, and of course, endless patience.

A huge part of the mission’s success was the team’s Longevity document, a list of requirements for ensuring the probe’s successful 2015 encounter with Pluto. The document detailed the uses of the probe’s spare parts and listed every New Horizons team member so they could be reached if their expertise was needed.

The team also compiled a spreadsheet of contingencies for when things didn’t proceed as planned, listing 249 items that might go wrong with either the spacecraft or ground-based operations. This document turned out to be critical when ground control temporarily lost communications with the probe earlier this summer.

Although the Fast Company piece didn’t directly address it, Stern and Chris Hersman, the lead engineer on the New Horizons project, had another intimidating task. How could they bolster their team’s excitement about a project where no immediate payoff was an understatement? Not everyone on the original team stayed on board through the 14 years between proposal and today, but many did. Here’s four ways Stern and Hersman kept them interested.

Communicate the Big Picture

According to Hersman, New Horizons is now flying through Pluto’s shadow, taking measurements from its atmosphere and probing to learn about the temperature, pressure, and composition of its surface. After hearing NASA publicly claim that the probe’s job is crucial to expanding humanity’s scant understanding of the outer reaches of the solar system, the New Horizons team was invigorated by the opportunity to participate in the making of history.

Play the Politics

Stern and Hersman likely reminded their people that the National Academy of Sciences ranked New Horizons as the space agency’s top priority during an every-10-years survey of its projects. The importance of the project and expectations were continually reinforced from above, making it easier for team members to keep their attention on the end game and the upward career mobility that would result from a successful mission.

For the rest, visit Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Are You Ready for Life in the Swarm?

Mid-century work teams will be temporary in addition to virtual. The growth of contract work and the specialization of organizations will spell the end for stable groups that work together a long time. Teamwork will still be valued and rewarded, but the teams themselves will form and disband with lightning speed. Industry analyst firm Gartner calls this phenomenon swarming.

Pros and Cons of Life in the Swarm

A swarm is a group that comes together for a short-term project and quickly disbands when the project has been completed. It’s characterized by a flurry of collective activity from everyone available and able to pitch in. Employees in a swarm will barely know each other, so in order to gain influence with colleagues and partners, professionals will have to leverage larger networks rather than smaller ones.

In the near future, reporting relationships will get confusing since work will cross department and company lines and people will have an ever-changing array of formal and informal managers. Employees will have to be more spontaneous, proactively creating new designs and models to deal with the issues at hand.

Working on a new team every month (or week) is likely to be challenging and exciting, and you won’t ever be bored. But because your path is your own and everyone you work with is going in a slightly different direction, you are likely to struggle finding suitable long-term mentors and solidifying work relationships. Networking will be more complex as you attempt to manage an army of weaker ties, calling on people you may have interacted with only once or twice about a project or opportunity.

You won’t always understand the culture or perspective your new colleagues are coming from. Unfortunately, considering the speed and intensity of swarms, you usually won’t have time for icebreakers. You’ll simply have to accelerate your efforts to get to know swarm-mates, and accept that a common work goal may be all that binds you at times.

For more on life in the swarm, check out Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Are You Hurting Your Productivity By Being Conscientious?

When I take work personality tests, I’m off the charts on conscientiousness. Conscientious people tend to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement. We display planned rather than spontaneous behavior and are generally organized and dependable.

This all sounds great, of course. But conscientiousness and productivity are not the same, and I’ve found that some conscientious habits can interfere with productivity. I share them with you here so you can be on the lookout.

Choosing assignments based on your strengths

Business guru Marcus Buckingham says to play to your strengths, and he’s not completely wrong. People who focus on tasks they’re good at will be more productive, usually. The trouble is, when you are naturally talented in an area, you may become complacent and believe there’s nothing more to learn or insights to derive. This can lead to sloppiness and overconfidence in your work, at which point productivity goes downhill.

Following directions

Conscientious people are terrific rule followers. In the workplace, it’s essential that you understand how to submit to sensible authority. The key, though, is the word “sensible.” Conscientious people will often blindly follow their boss’ will whether or not it’s the right path. If you know more about an issue than your manager, you owe it to your team and your productivity to diplomatically address how that issue can best be handled.

Doing online research

I tell myself that spending hours perusing Google Scholar and Wikipedia is a legitimate use of my time when I’m entering uncharted, work-related territory. But is it really? Not always, because in addition to being conscientious, I’m also curious. This means that I might start out looking up recruitment segmentation and, through a chain of spontaneous clicks, find my way to an article on the scientific explanation for ghost sightings. If you’re not careful, online research can turn into the mother of all time sucks.

Going into the office when you don’t have to

Conscientious employees wear their office face time like a badge of honor. However, going in just for the sake of going in is often not as productive as taking time at home where you are free of a commute, distractions, and chatty colleagues. There are some companies – and some managers – who really do equate face time with results. But these are becoming less common, and if you aren’t under the influence of one, consider what spending 50 hours a week trapped in your cubicle actually buys you.

Check out the rest of the article at Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Do You Encourage Citizen Development?

Many leaders today are missing an opportunity. Their teams spend all day catering to business needs when in fact the business managers can and should be empowered to solve problems themselves.

There is an old saying that goes: “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” IT leaders who facilitate low code rapid application development knowledge in employees outside IT greatly improve IT’s efficiency and productivity. Unfortunately, they don’t do it nearly enough and spend a great deal of their time rushing around putting out fires with the few resources they have leaving little time for more strategic initiatives.

According to Gartner’s IT Glossary, a citizen developer is a user who creates new business applications using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT.

Citizen development is possible because end users now have the ability to build a variety of enterprise applications through model-driven platforms and cloud computing services. As long as users understand the principles behind application design and development, they do not have to learn the programming languages that were necessary in the past.

Here are five reasons IT leaders may want to re-consider sanctioning and even encouraging citizen development.

IT Demands Have Gotten Out of Hand

Most enterprise IT departments do not have enough resources to handle every request that comes in and must therefore prioritize by value to the overall business. This means that often, individual groups like accounting and marketing will have important requests put on the back burner while a short-staffed and overwhelmed IT group struggles to keep up. In fact, though, IT might not even be essential in developing solutions for these requests and is simply acting as a bottleneck.

IT Might Not “Get It” Anyway

Even if IT was to take on the request, who’s to say that the IT professional who accepts the project fully understands the requirements necessary to develop the most appropriate technology solution? A citizen developer who has deep subject matter expertise could use a low code platform for rapid application development to more quickly arrive at a solution that meets the department’s needs.

For more where this came from, check out Intuit's Fast Track blog.

The Next Generation of Employee Monitoring

Last summer, I wrote about a Rackspace/University of London study that assessed productivity levels in 120 employees outfitted with wearable monitoring technology. The participants were equipped with one of the three devices – the GENEActiv high-velocity accelerometer wristband, which measures movement and activity; the NeuroSky Mindwave portable biosensor EEG, which monitors brain activity; and the LUMOback posture and activity coach, which issues a pulse to remind its wearer to sit up straight. Participant productivity jumped 8.5 percent and job satisfaction climbed 3.5 percent as a result of the monitoring.

Employee monitoring is increasing in popularity, and the reason goes beyond productivity gains and wider availability of Internet of things-related technology. Compliance with regulations such as the Affordable Care Act now involves understanding exactly how many hours full-time and part-time employees are working so that organizations can accurately classify them and determine benefit eligibility.

In a recent article in Harper’s Magazine, Esther Kaplan investigated the $30 billion telematics industry. Telematics is essentially hardware and software that facilitates real-time employee monitoring. Shipping conglomerate UPS, for example, uses handheld delivery information acquisition devices (DIADs) to track delivery times, speed, stop times, and seat-belt use.

When a UPS driver pulls into a delivery location, scans a package, and has the customer sign for it, the DIAD records the time, location and wait and sends the data to the driver’s supervisor. Although this DIAD system was introduced to UPS employees as a safety measure, the devices have saved the company millions in productivity and efficiency gains.

For the rest of this post, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

Celebrating 50 Years of Project Management

Last year in the International Journal of Project Management, Julien Pollack and Daniel Adler reported on 50 years of PM research trends to distill where the industry has come from, and where it’s going. Their report acknowledges passing fads as well as those that have withstood the test of time.

When Pollack and Adler set out to examine the evolution of project management, they knew that a standard literature review wouldn’t do. They wanted to check out everything, so they sourced 94,472 unique records of PM research (published between 1962 and 2012) from the Scopus and ISI Web of Science databases.

The keywords and abstracts that authors used to describe their work were analyzed in terms of word frequency, rate of change and the co-occurrence of keywords and abstract terms. Comparisons were made between the frequencies of key terms and rapid changes in the ways that terms were used in the literature to identify emergent trends.

Long-Term, Overall Transformation from Siloed to Holistic

First and foremost, the research indicated a change in emphasis in project management research from a technical engineering orientation to one which encompasses a broader organizational perspective.

Also, recent bursts of keywords related to environmental issues, strategic planning, project managers, knowledge management, business and innovation suggest a movement from technical and industry-specific issues to an emphasis on the interpersonal aspects of project management and the role of the field in the broader organizational context.

Education and Financial Investment Dominate the Early 00s

Use of keywords related to education enjoyed a period of popularity from 1999 to 2005. This may be attributed to the growth of project management professional associations, the increasing significance of certifications as a route to employment, and the widespread increase in university education focused on developing the capabilities of project managers. Also in the first few years of this century, keywords related to cost, contracts and investment were popular from 2001 to 2006.

Interestingly, keywords related to cost and contract management were more strongly associated with the construction industry than the IT industry, while issues associated with education were more strongly associated with IT than construction.

For more where this came from, check out the full post at the Intuit Fast Track blog.

Is Open Allocation in Your Future?

Github.

Gore & Associates.

Treehouse.

Valve.

What do these companies have in common? Well, besides the fact that they are forward-thinking, pioneering firms, they all practice a leadership style called open allocation. In open allocation, employees select how to spend their time and the projects on which they’ll work. There is no such thing as hierarchy. In an open allocation culture, employees are accountable to the business and to their peers. As long as they can show that they’re contributing value, they can switch assignments whenever they want – there are no managers or rules about headcount to hold them back.

Self-Directed, Self-Managed

In an open allocation scenario, teams essentially manage themselves and are only temporary. The concept reminds me of Gartner’s swarming idea, in which a project group forms based on expertise and interest and then disbands when its goal is accomplished. Rather than an executive calling for a new team, the informal leader is the employee who came up with the idea for the project – tenure or “rank” aside. A new strategic initiative will only get off the ground if the “leader” can convince others to invest their time, talent, and resources.

No Blame, More Gain

The benefits of open allocation are many. Decisions are smarter and better informed because the people making them are closer to the work, and employees can provide input free of strict, inflexible communication channels. Team members are automatically more motivated because they wouldn’t have chosen to work on a project if they didn’t believe in it and weren’t excited about it upfront. And if they are unhappy, they have to recognize that it’s because of their own choices rather than a managerial mandate. Instead of leaving the company, they just move on to another project.

For the rest of the post, head over to SilkRoad's blog.

Jumpstart Your Productivity with This 4 Letter Word

Fellow Fast Track writer Alison Green tipped me off to a great new study on productivity, and it reminded me of a British sci-fi movie I just watched called Frequencies. In it, human beings interact with the world and with each other based on their individual (unseen) biochemical vibrations (or frequencies). One of the characters was able to change his frequency by saying certain words, citing a brain/body connection kindled by speech.

Why You Should Get it Done

As part of her weekly roundup, Alison briefly mentioned the work of neuroperformance expert Leslie Sherlin. In a recent article by Lisa Evans on Fast Company’s website, Co.Exist, Sherlin claimed that saying the word done can help you get more accomplished on your to-do list. “Telling ourselves that we’re done creates not only an emotional reaction but a physiological response as well,” said the co-founder of the brain-training company SenseLabs.

“When we’re concentrated on a task, the brain’s electrical activity is heightened. But the moment we say we’re done with something, the electrical activity in our brain shifts from being activated and engaged into a more relaxed state. That relaxed state looks very similar to mediators or individuals who practice mindfulness techniques.”

Deep in the brain, a neurochemical shift occurs as the feel-good chemical serotonin is released. The satisfaction that follows allows you to confidently move on to the next endeavor, and the effect is self-reinforcing. The more often you complete a task, the more confidence you build and the more challenges you are able to take on.

For the rest of the post, check out Intuit's Fast Track blog.