Monthly Archive for January, 2005

See What I Mean

Published on January 30, 2005 in Business and Process. 1 Comment

In my continuous search for how people use mind mapping, there’s an interesting discourse about it at How to Save the World.

There’s something about a quickly-produced yet elegant, legible, organized and flexible ‘picture’ of your thoughts that just seems to evoke more, faster, from both sides of the brain. In a business and social culture that is increasingly oral, and aspires to become more collaborative, the current explosion in use of mind mapping is likely to continue, and the ability to use these tools will probably become a skill you can add to your resume.

The author, Dave Pollard, mentions three mind mapping tools, one of which is my favorite, MindManager. But he also mentions FreeMind, which has an excellent selling point of being free!

Review Your Vendors

Published on January 23, 2005 in Process. 0 Comments

Most managers give their staff a year-end or year-start review, which hopefully you’ve completed by now. You review past performance and discuss upcoming performance requirements and projects. But what about your vendors and subcontractors? Are they delivering the value and reliability you expect? Are you happy with them? Do you rank them? Do you discuss upcoming projects, material requirements, manpower requirements?

You should! It’s a buyers market. Vendors need to do more for their clients, and clients need to demand more.

INsourcing, ONshoring and Home-shoring

Published on January 18, 2005 in Business and Process. 0 Comments

Outsourcing and offshoring have been the big headline-grabbing business processes for the last several years, coming to a head during the last presidential campaign. The mainstream press ignores the foreign jobs coming onshore and common outsourced jobs that are being insourced to our working citizens. Insourcing has been growing more quickly than outsourcing, but it’s still below the political radar.

And if you’re tired of talking to heavily-accented helpdesk personnel on the phone, you may be surprised to have a down-home country boy answering your next call. Why home-shoring may be the next big thing talks about companies using home-based personnel for call-center work. Other industries may soon find these workers and score some good PR along the way.

While there are some 4 million people working in call centers in the U.S., there are also about 100,000 home-based phone representatives on U.S. soil, according to IDC. And the stigma against offshore outsourcing, as it relates to fewer jobs for Americans, is making home-shoring, or home-sourcing, an increasingly attractive option.

U.S. workers may cost more on an hourly basis, but are often productive enough to more than overcome that price disadvantage, especially for the most complex and lucrative services. But remember, the problems with insourcing are the same for outsourcing: poor planning, lack of project management skills, lack of control and poor requirements definitions are the main problems with any projects and processes that fail.

Cost That Meeting

Published on January 5, 2005 in Process. 0 Comments

The New Year always brings a slew of meetings — strategy meetings, budget meetings, working meetings, lunch meetings and the I-don’t-know-why meetings. If you’re addicted to meetings hopefully one of your New Year’s resolutions is to stop your addiction. While some face-to-face meetings can’t and shouldn’t be canceled, one of the easiest ways I have found to reduce the number and length of meetings is to cost them. Once you see how much money is wasted during an ineffective meeting, you’ll first be reluctant to ramble on for two or four hours at a time, but you’ll also be more selective in scheduling a meeting!

Before you schedule another meeting, ask yourself a few questions:

  • Has a goal been set for the meeting?
  • Do you have an agenda?
  • Who will be attending?
  • Can I cover this in an e-mail or memo>

It’s essential that you prepare and distribute an agenda before any meeting, so participants have time to prepare. If you can’t come up with an agenda, do not schedule a meeting.

If you do come up with an agenda, stick to it! Don’t let your meeting wander off-track because if you do, you end up accomplishing nothing. The majority of meetings today simply exchange facts or information about a specific topic. Consider using e-mail to update or share information with the individuals who would have attended the meeting. They will all thank you and you’ll save some money.