What are the differences between companies that do social media well and companies that don’t? Objectives, engagement and authenticity. Here are 10 steps to making social media an integral part of your business strategy without getting lost in an often misunderstood medium.
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According to the press release, the Microsoft/Yahoo! search deal is expected to take approximately 24 months to implement following regulatory approval. This estimate has some people wondering why it should take so long and others doubting it will happen that quickly.
To get a sense of what’s likely to be happening during those 24 months, note that this is not just one big technology integration project. The deal is comprised of multiple points, each of which will be tackled by different (though probably overlapping) teams as distinct projects within Microsoft or Yahoo.
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Back in my day, the web wasn’t participatory. We would visit a site, read a few articles, maybe even buy a book or a t-shirt even though (*gasp*) we couldn’t try it on first. If something really caught our attention we might bookmark it or email the URL to a friend. We didn’t have any tagging or tweeting or mashing or mobiles. It was a simpler web, and it was very, very boring.
It was also a lot easier to architect.
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I recently managed an e-commerce project and had the good fortune of
working with a talented instructional designer. After witnessing
first-hand the difference that can be made with a structured,
thoughtful approach to software training, I sat down with Dorene
Zjawinski Lofgren, owner of Lofgren Educational Design, to glean some
insights into her methodology.
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The title of “Business Analyst” is one of the fastest growing in the IT industry. In fact, the United States Department of Labor projected a 29-percent increase in computer systems analyst employment by 2016. There are many resources available that explain what a business analyst is, often in terms of comparing the responsibilities of an analyst to those of other team members we’re more familiar with, like project managers, software testers and systems architects. It’s now generally understood, via the IIBA, that a business analyst “works as a liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems.”
Just as important to understand, however, is what a business analyst is NOT. As organizations create positions labeled “business analyst” while struggling to keep costs down, it’s tempting to use the role as a catch-all for tasks that an overextended project team just doesn’t have time for. This may save time and money in the short term, but in the
long term, it will only hurt your projects.
George Bernard Shaw once said, “America and Britain are two countries separated by a common language.” As an American married to a Brit, I can personally attest to the truth of this statement. Minor differences in culture can create a language barrier even when we think we’re using the same language.
While our countries of origin create a bit of a cultural gap, an even bigger one is created by the fact that I am a project manager, and he is a network engineer.
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Now.
I recently overheard this comment regarding a project that was initiated four months ago and has a deadline of July 30. "We're still sort of in the planning stages right now, but once the work begins we'll need to hire a PM to see it through." This was said by a non-technical staff member of a very technical project.
While textbooks may not define it as such, Planning IS work. It is perhaps the most undervalued, critical work of any project, and it is the phase which most urgently needs a qualified Project Manager.
The five phases of a project are Initiation, Planning, Execution, Control, and Closing. Initiation ends with an organizational or departmental decision to begin a project. It is at this point that a qualified PM should be assigned.
If there is no one qualified available and you’ll need to wait for one to be hired, refrain from making any public commitments until they are hired and have had a chance to familiarize themselves with the project.
Have you ever sent a relatively simple request to someone and gotten a delayed response requesting more information? Was the request for more info justified, or did it just frustrate you and cause you to waste more time explaining something that to you is either obvious or irrelevant?
I seem to be getting a rash of responses that say in effect, "Gee I'd love to help, but can you be more specific about what you want? Please tell me the exact time of day you need this done, how much detail you need, and the color of the shoes you were wearing when you first made the request."
Driving to DC this morning I tuned into the Laura Ingram show, who was mid-rant about this NY Times article. She was sure that donors to the Obama campaign were shady characters who were contributing under false names to protect their identities.
As an IT professional, I recognized the names immediately. Anyone who works in software development and testing is well acquainted with Mr. Test Person, Mr. & Mrs. Jgtj Jfggjjfgj, and of course, little Asflkj. We are also quite familiar with the company Fdsa, as well as it’s sister corporation Asdf.
This is not the forum to make judgments or pontifications about either campaign or the legality/ethics of their fund raising practices, but I will say that the Obama campaign’s website developers could brush up on their testing practices.
Let’s say these contributions were innocent test transactions made my testers or developers. Shame on them. There are ways to test software in a production environment that don’t result in garbage data.
Or, maybe these contributions actually were made my people who wanted to conceal their identities. Shame, again, on the software development team for neglecting to include some basic validation. There may not be an easy way to identify false first & last names, but a simple integration with a service like Group1 would eliminate the possibility of getting contributions from fictitious cities like Rewq, ME.
So what have we learned?
Double your efforts for all of the above in cases where minor errors could result in major public scrutiny, like oh, say, running for president.
Most of us know how to behave in someone else's meeting, but what if someone is being disruptive or unproductive in YOUR meeting? Here are some tips on how to gracefully handle some of the worst meeting etiquette offenders.
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