On of my favorite blogs, Fashion Incubator, has an interesting post about "best practices" (she calls it "standard work") applied to manufacturing in the clothing and fashion industries.
All in Management Tools
In looking at Google Analytics data I have seen that about half of all visitors came to my web site All Kind Food via the main page (which I call “Recent Postings”) and half come directly to other pages. One question that arises is, what do people do before and after they go to a specific page on my web site?
In looking over the recent usage data for this site I decided again to look at individual page counts. Google Analytics offers several, including “visits,” “page views,” average time spent on each page, percent of times visitors exited the site from this page (as opposed to going somewhere else in the site), and something called “$ Index” which refers to the accomplishment of a specific type of transaction.
What Kind of a Project Manager is King Kong?
I’ve seen the new King Kong movie twice so far and I intend to see it again. I love movies, I love writing about movies, and on occasion, I even enjoy reading about movies. King Kong, in my opinion, is just about as good and as visceral a cinematic experience as one can hope for. It presses all the right buttons, it’s exciting, funny, scary, and touching, sometimes all at the same time. But that’s not why I’m writing this.
Jeremiah Owyang and I recently co-authored a “white paper” titled “Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New ‘Web 2.0’ Tools.” For joint authoring we used the “Writeboard” web based collaborative authoring system. This article describes our experience.
A couple of weeks ago I signed up for the free Google Analytics service. This free Google service tracks web site usage including frequency, type, and source of visits, as well as behavior of visitors after they come to a site’s initial web page. I figured that, if Google was going to be knowing everything about my site in order to help it calculate advertising rates, I should at least take advantage of the data.
For a given technology-based application, system, or service, it's critical for a company to define who owns and is responsible for developing, managing, and running it. Failure to do so can result in "orphan" applications and systems that sit uncomfortably between business and IT, all the while consuming resources (storage space, updates, maintenance, communication costs, infrastructure costs, governance costs, etc.). Even blogs and podcasts can turn into "orphan applications" if we're not careful.
This paper discusses key issues that management should consider when redesigning an automated voice response system that supports customer service.
I’ve used Salesmetric (www.salesmetric.com), a hosted, web based sales lead tracking system, for a couple of years. (The provider calls it a “sales force automation” tool.) In this report I describe my experiences using it and some of the things that I have learned.
Overall I’m very pleased with the system. I have learned a lot about this type of tool and what that might say about using other hosted, web based tools with groups of users spread around the country.
I’m also aware that there seems to be a growing number of software tools designed to support improved project management, to help with everything from developing an initial project justification to creating a software “dashboard” for reporting “key performance indicators” for measuring progress against business goals.
I’ve also come across a couple of instances recently where companies seem to have purchased such management tools BEFORE they have thought through all the business process changes that implementation of such tools can create.