Get Customizable Web-Based Software and Get Productive: a 7 Tip Series

April 15, 2009 at 3:20 pm · Filed under Distributed Work, QuickBase, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0

We (Intuit QuickBase) recently wrote up some thoughts, compiled into a white paper, on seven ways you can improve team productivity with customizable web-based software. The first of those tips is shared below.

For the rest of them – about two a week - please visit the QuickBase blog and click on the industry trends category. Or, if you’d like to get all the tips now, click here to request a copy of the white paper – “7 Ways to Optimize Project Team Productivity: Using Customizable Web-based Software to Your Business Advantage.”

Tip #1 - Stop the “spreadsheet shuffle” and start working better – together

There’s an old saying: “When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” For many companies, the spreadsheet is the hammer they apply to any project. And just as a hammer is a poor way to measure dimensions or cut wood, the spreadsheet – though familiar – introduces more project management problems than it solves when you’re working with a team.

When you and your colleagues do the “spreadsheet shuffle,” your team choreography descends into chaos. Without a centralized location for all your project information – a place where individuals can update their pieces of information in real-time- you don’t have one version of the truth. Instead you’ve got spreadsheets and emails travelling around and potentially people working off of inconsistent/old information.

Spreadsheets hurt productivity in several ways. You waste time reconciling multiple document versions. There is a lack of adequate tracking and audit tools which make it nearly impossible to find errors. And, spreadsheet applications haven’t been designed to encourage and facilitate communication: they have no features for tracking progress, prompting activity or alerting team members to deadlines.

Emailing spreadsheets is a project work-around, not an effective means for managing work. The best alternative is an online project management application that centralizes project information, provides all team members with secure access to the information they need—whenever and wherever they need it—streamlines data gathering, tracking and communication, and makes it easy to stay on the same page and easy to monitor progress.

We recently asked a few QuickBase customers how they put a stop to the shuffle - check out their comments here.

One example: “We used to send these big spreadsheets as email attachments to the whole department on a reoccurring basis. Besides clogging up everyone’s inbox, we usually ended up referring to different versions once in a while, adding to the confusion. Another reason that pushed us into a better solution was that IT decided to strip our macro-based Excel files from the emails, sending us scrambling to find a solution around that new ‘policy’.”

Pretty neat, we think, right?

QuickBase

What Happens When Two Bloggers Actually Meet Face to Face?

April 6, 2009 at 5:52 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Communities, Distributed Work, Management, Work Design, social networks

The answer:  good things.

I’m just back from a conference in Vancouver, BC, where Jon Husband just happens to live. I was smart/lucky enough to have announced publicly that Charlie Grantham and I would be in Vancouver for a few days, and Jon was gracious enough to get in touch and suggest we meet (since we never had).

The three of us ended up having breakfast together last Friday, and then Jon was the perfect host, offering us a ride out the airport for our trips home.

Of course, Jon being the champion of Vancouver that he is, the ride took a little extra time (which we had plenty of) as he gave us a mini-tour of the downtown and surrounding area.

I had been in Vancouver before, but not for over 20 years, so it was an eye-opening tour. I’ve always had good feelings about the city (stemming from a wonderful summer in the mid-80’s characterized by many late evening dinners down near the harbor).

But even more important than enjoying Vancouver was enjoying getting to know Jon. We (including Charlie) discovered way more in common than any three older gray-haired guys who had never met before have any right to expect. As Jon described on his own blog last week (”Back to the Future . . .  of Work“), we share many intellectual curiosities and probably even more views and values about organization, work, people, and even politics.

So here’s to the value of face to face meetings. In spite of our mutual fascination with what Jon calls “wirearchy,” we also agree wholeheartedly in getting together physically to share a real space, not just a virtual one.

Of course, that f2f meeting never would have taken place without the AppGap blog and our e-newsletter (where I’d announced the Vancouver trip in the first place), so I guess we owe some thanks to Hylton Joliffe and the folks at Intuit too for originally making Jon and me aware of each other.

But the nice part of now having “pressed the flesh” is that I’ll have a whole lot more context from now on as I read Jon’s blog comments. And I suspect we’ll see each other again in the not-too-distant future.

Thanks, Jon, for your hospitality and for your always-stimulating questions about the future of work and of management.

Yet Another Glimpse At the Future of Work

March 31, 2009 at 11:52 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Talent Management, Web 2.0

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About a month ago the summary of McKinsey’s research on the use of the Web and social computing tools in the knowledge-based workplace made the rounds of the blogosphere and the Web.  It brought to mind an article from the January 2006 survey “Knowledge and the Company” in The Economist titled “The New Organisation” to which I have pointed several times over the past two years.

Why did that particular article come to mind ?  In the context of McKinsey’s research summary, for two reasons.

The first because the article started out with several paragraphs that took us back to the 50’s and William H. Whyte’s famous “The Organization Man“, noting that basically organizational structures and basic management techniques haven’t changed much since then, whilst juxtaposing that with the increasingly obvious facts that with the Web, web services and tools and mobile devices many (if not most) knowledge workers are continuously connected and ever-more densely interlinked … today we euphemistically call it ‘networked’.

The second because towards the end of the article The New Organisation McKinsey and Mercer (two high-end blue-ribbon management consulting firms) were cited as demonstrating rapidly growing interest in, and awareness of, the emerging new landscape for networked knowledge work.

In my previous posts pointing to the Economist article I have somewhat sarcastically noted that these firms knew a good market space to grow into when they smelled it (sarcastically because I have been aware of and following practitioners who have been talking and writing about this for almost ten years now) … the granddaddy of them all Stafford Beer, and people like Bill Ives, Euan Semple, David Weinberger, JP Rangaswami, John Hagel, John Seeley Brown, Jay Cross, Harold Jarche, Stan Davis, Verna Allee, Chris Meyer, Jim Ware, Arie de Geus, Tom Stewart, Hubert St. Onge, Tom Davenport, Jim McGee, Dion Hinchcliffe, Gary Hamel, Larry Prusak, Dave Snowden, Andrew McAfee, Don Tapscott, Niall Cook, Lee Bryant, Matthew Hodgson, Patti Anklam, Jenny Ambrozek, Anne Marie McEwan, Ross Dawson, Cindy Gordon, Marc Prensky, Karen Stephenson, Valdis Krebs, Michel Bauwens, Nancy White, Dan Rasmus, Robert Johansen, Michael Schrage, Tom Malone, Jessica Lipnack, Luis Suarez, and on and on and on.  If I know you and I’ve left you out, please forgive me; there’s so many it will get boring if I keep thinking of and listing them (it probably already has).  Shameful egotistical plug …  I count myself as one of them, albeit probably on the farm team.

So … given the arrival and settling into place of what’s called Web 2.0, I think that the McKinsey summary mirrors what many leading thinkers have been saying for some time about the impact of the interactive participative Web on the workplace.  It’s useful, as it offers a fairly concise overview of the core issues associated with the shifts in leadership, management and basic organizational effectiveness management; and because it’s McKinsey, it provides an imprimatur of legitimacy to the ongoing discussion of and refinement of strategic and practical implementation issues related to this massive era-defining shift in the way work is perceived, designed and carried out.

To be fair, people at McKinsey have also been paying attention to knowledge work for quite a while now.  Anyone remember the name Brooks Manville - closely associated with McKinsey’s knowledge management practice back in the day ?

To help us all understand even more clearly, here’s a video clip explaining McKinsey’s Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.

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