Inspiration

Gartner Symposium 2010

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ October 26, 2010 ⋅ 3 comments

Last week, I was able to attend this annual Gartner event – something akin to SAPPHIRE, the SAP uber-users group meeting, without the vendor specific rah-rah. An interesting event – 7400 attendees, over four days. A typical conference – multiple sessions along major tracks, and I bounced between sessions dealing with these issues: Master Data [...]

A Little Too Literal (or, How to Teach Innovation)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ August 9, 2010 ⋅ One comment

Spoiler alert: It can’t be taught … One of the questions I get – and I’m getting this a lot lately – is how to get people to think more analytically, less literally. We need folks to stop focusing on the mechanical task of manipulating reports with Excel just to compute some answers. How about [...]

Defining Business Benefits: Hard and Soft

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 6, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

All projects should have a clear objective, a practical plan, and an understanding of the costs and benefits to get the thing done. Easy to say, but a lot of project teams struggle to crisply and clearly define specific business benefits. One way to move the process forward would be to have a clear understanding [...]

Calculating the Business Benefit of Effective Training Material (4 of 4)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 20, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

In previous notes, I’ve written about the importance of training and, by extension, effective training material. It’s a common requirement in many organizations … … well, actually more of a “nice to have”, am I right? Truly effective training material is difficult to create (at least, to create material that does the job), and difficult [...]

The Sandpit

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 7, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

(via GNC, thanks for this one!) A bit of artistic inspiration; a visually stunning film, combining time-lapse and tilt-shift photography. For the intellectually and technically curious – more information here. For the artist and the observationally curious – tai chi under the freeway? Nice.

A “New” Critical Requirement for Business Projects (Part 1 of 4)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ May 20, 2010 ⋅ 4 comments

As we continue the deep dive into questions like “how do I get information required to run my business?”, we inevitably get to training – more specifically, training on … … the business / functional domain, and [your company's] self-image and self-awareness in that domain (who we are, and how we talk) … process & [...]

A Hierarchy of Information Requirements

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ May 9, 2010 ⋅ One comment

It’s a common problem statement – ‘I don’t have enough information to (run my business unit, manage this process, identify opportunities, etc.)’. The solution designer, when faced with a question like this, starts with a little detective work; the problem is too broadly stated.

eMail is Dead, Long Live Social Networking: Don’t Get Left Behind

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ April 27, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

via Fred Wilson – a stunning slide from Morgan Stanley’s recent Internet Trends report: The primary topic of the report is the growth and future prospects of the mobile internet – reason enough read through all 87 slides. However, I am slightly amazed by the fact that eMail runs second to the relatively new phenomenon [...]

Business Proposals and The Lesson of Jabberwocky

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 28, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

When someone asks my opinion on their writing, I’ll get fairly detailed; I’ve noted in the past that there is a lot of power and influence in the written word, and it’s fairly important to get it done well, or your project proposals just never seem to get off the ground. This particular proposal suffered from [...]

Quantifying Business Benefit of Collaboration Tools (or, What Is This Meeting Costing Me?)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 24, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

This post started off as an excuse to experiment with Google Docs, and this really neat feature I discovered – embedding a spreadsheet in a web page as a sharing method. However, it struck me as a potential way to cost justify the time, effort, and expense of implementing collaboration systems with the Most Cynical [...]

Categories