Wow – so it’s March already!! Time flies when you’re having fun eh?
So it’s time for our monthly round-up of our top 5 favorites (i.e fun and interesting business related stuff) we came across during February.
So fire up that coffee machine, take a seat and let’s see what we found.
1. I was discussing a colleagues workload with him the other day and he bemoaned his 60+ hours a week he was doing and how much of a slave to his inbox he’d become. So to try and tame the beast he’d started to review his work routine and that started by reducing his inbox time by automatically deleting any cc mails that landed in his inbox.
Ahhhh email you gotta love it….I’m old enough to remember it taking our office by storm and we were at first wowed by it – these days there are so many articles on how to manage it better (or ditch it for good). The early part of the year is as good enough time as any to consider how we use the machine and I was interested to read about how Gmail are offering new functionality to manage it more effectively.
Take a look here for some great insight into how you can make your email more effective (even if you don’t use Gmail you can use some of the tips.
While this is all great stuff I’d recommend us all to take some time out to see how we use this tool (not as a big 3000 message to do list. but when it’s properly tamed and targeted, really – you’d be surprised how email can be super effective when it’s rescued and targeted properly?
2. There’s a great read over at the Triaster blog which emphasizes the importance of having a process library within a business. Whilst I’m amazed at the volume of businesses I work with who have invested substantially in process re-engineering and development I’m always dismayed by how many simply don’t follow what’s been created – it’s like they know what’s important, spend time creating it – but then throw it out the window by failing to to deploy it (or often follow it) effectively. Triaster’s blog piece goes into the benefits of a process library, it’s users and how it can be an effective tool for your company – go check it out!
3. Having worked in engineering for most of my career I loved reading the piece at The verge showing how holograms can take over the workplace – the opening paragraphs showing how such systems can offer virtual process instructions on an assembly line. What’s interesting about the article is the detail it goes into about some of Microsoft’s design choices and how these have enabled it to focus it on the business not consumer user, and when I talk about business I don’t mean office based.
I love reading design work and this is a really fascinating piece.
4. Using Spotify and Netflix to help model your supply chains? Yep you read that right – there’s an excellent article at Forbes that covers how many businesses that have failed to meet their sustainability targets and are now turning towards solutions like here to help provide clarity of an world of thoroughly confusing supply chains and help organizations deliver their sustainability targets. Creating a crowdsourced solution targeted at collaboration. “The Netflix and Spotify models were the key – cut through the confusing complexity and bring solutions out into the open.” Great to see how “app based thinking” can be applied to help solve complex business problems.
5 – We had a busy February – we published a number of articles covering SWOT analysis a definition with examples, How to do stakeholder analysis with example templates and our companion piece that goes into the Common problems with stakeholder analysis.
See you next time!