The image is bad - it's a graph, not a grid, unless you can somehow make a negative investment. Anyway, the model distinguishes "between basic and differentiating features.. improving certain aspects only serves to maintain basic expectations, whereas improving other aspects can delight customers with less effort"Basic features sho…

Zenkit... online project management... a spreadbase... an underlying database and ... a variety of views, including Kanban, table, wiki, mindmap, and hierarchy... easy-to-use and intuitive tool, and makes collaborating on activities like project management, CRM, and other business operations simple and straightforward...I found some of Zenkit baff…

a unique productivity philosophy called deep work. He carefully blocked out his day, and created space for long, uninterrupted hours to write ... tactics like travelling on foot to give himself more time in isolation and actively sought out isolated spaces to work... his latest book, Digital Minimalism... there's an implicit reward for the sha…

when it comes to teams, many hands do not make light work... four to six members is the team best size for most tasks, that no work team should have more than 10 members, and that performance problems and interpersonal friction increase “exponentially as team size increases.”... if you are on a big team that keeps screwing up... try some subtract…

One of the most important things when working together is to be clear on who is helping who with what and why... I’m trying to make working together effortless by showing how easy it is to map what’s actually going on when people collaborate. You can normally draw it out on a page. It normally doesn’t take longer than an hour or two.... I call the…

... they have recently embarked on a journey to become “Agile.”... neither explicit support nor discouragement from senior executives... they are failing for the same list of reasons as every other team I have met with in the last 5 years. Here are those reasons:... 1. There is no clear vision for the product....The “idea” has been handed down …

they had on-site Project Managers (PMs) and looked like a professional, full-service firm, but they outsourced the actual dev work to $5/hour shops and freelancers.... so-called “expert” firms and consultants only pretend to have in-house dev teams...Smart, experienced software engineers are keen problem solvers. They’re incredibly valuable... A …

This article focuses on the project management and bot building, more than on the coding and framework implementation.... The main feature, the core of your bot, can be one to three different intents... “A bot that does everything will be good at nothing.”

some clients make it very, very difficult to work on their ideas... unknowingly sabotage their own projects.

One of the primary reasons to get teams together has to do with the hardwiring of the human brain... Building trust is a multisensory experience... Only when people are physically present together can they use all of their senses to establish that needed trust. Without a bond, conflict or disengagement can more easily arise and is more difficult t…

the most-coveted project planning tools include file sharing, time tracking, email integration and Gantt charts... using social media facilitates “small talk ... help build rapport and create a more nurturing, supportive, collaborative and trusting environment... dedicated Yammer newsfeeds in SharePoint, for example, can be useful for communicatin…

Work management... the current state-of-the-practice in task management. Task management tools formerly were limited to a list of tasks... Nowadays, the most competitive tools incorporate social communications, like chat, @mentions, and messaging: these I consider work management tools, like Asana, Trello, and many others. I recently published a G…

How can project management help news outlets improve their workflow and manage their time and resources better?... the role of a product manager or developer will sometimes overlap with that of a project manager, Katharine Bailey, the outlet's head of news products, told Journalism.co.uk in a recent podcast.

developers should not only be included in design and usability work from the beginning, they should also meet the people who eventually use their product... Developers need to be more vocal about the need to be included at these early stages... Excluding the developer from the design process will do nothing but prevent the project from living up t…

So I’ve been building a little calculator that is a bit more user friendly than my Google spreadsheet. - Calculating the production of high-quality content - GatherContent: A blog about content strategy and development

"Slack is just another stream ... of continuous information that you have to follow. I remembered I found it distractive and stressful because it was so easy to miss out on stuff.... This is what drives Slacks’ success. Because if you don’t follow Slack all the time you do not and cannot take part in the conversation with your team members anym…

"If you’re embracing online collaboration as a necessary evil — the only way to work with an increasingly dispersed team of global or remote workers, for example — then you’re doing it wrong. Online collaboration is not a second-best substitute for face-to-face work: It’s a complement with its own perks and benefits." - Collaborating Online Is So…

"Much of what social collaboration tools are designed to support is shallow work, and the stuff of managerial oversight... deep productivity comes from supporting deep work - cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results, and that push our abilities to continually improve - trying to support…

A lot of good practical advice here, although focused on teams distributed across the planet, not just Europe. The last recommendation is worth remembering: "Last, but not least... meet as a whole team. Do social things together, give people a chance to get to know one another. Once you connected a real human with the flat, blurry face on the scr…

Some useful ideas for what we call the 'Project Briefing' stage, which may be the first part, or indeed the entirety, of a project's Inception phase: "... we often discussed visual or technical issues without a clear understanding of the business goals... we immediately jumped to design suggestions that were based on personal opinion, assumption …

"In a previous post, I outlined the benefits of Five Whys... Today, I want to talk about the mechanics of Five Whys in greater detail." - Lessons Learned: How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis

"I have come to believe that this technique should be used for all kinds of defects ... we use the defect as an opportunity to find out what's wrong with our process, and make a small adjustment. By continuously adjusting, we eventually build up a robust series of defenses that prevent problems from happening.... breaking down the "time/quality/c…

"The Five Whys technique was developed and fine-tuned within the Toyota Motor Corporation as a critical component of its problem-solving training... "by repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear." ... dig into each problem that arose until they found the root cause. "Observe the production floor w…

"Making sure everyone know's what's going on isn't just courteous—it's essential to a smoothly functioning business." To be frank this is really Project Management 101, but it's worth repeating as the number of EU comms projects managed without any of these tools never ceases to amaze. - 7 Ways To Finally Get Your Team On The Same Page | Fast Co…

A fun interactive setting out the 'ideal team & process' required for building interactives. Rarely seen in real life, sadly. - One Approach Leading Interactive Expeditions: Eric Cade Schoenborn | Creative Director | Knight Foundation

"... is to foster alignment and enthusiasm toward the right goal. I’m thinking of official leaders (and myself) when writing the above, but there are official and unofficial leaders in every organization. " Very short post, very worth reading. Sometimes the simplest insights are the most powerful. - The Job of Leadership — Inside Medium — Medium

Lessmeeting looks like a cool tool. Even if you don't try it: "Below is our best practices guide to writing meeting agendas, capturing meeting minutes and following up on action items:"

"We couldn't understand why people without technical knowledge had to tell programmers "what" to do and, furthermore, they had to supervise "how" programmers did it." At last. Someone said it. And also quite a bit more about the timesucks that are meetings, email and commuting. These guys avoid all of them, work 4 days/week and are growing …

"I think companies such as Asana (which I love) will be the future of business consultancy. They will substitute the big consultancies leveraging big data, just like Coursera will displace traditional course providers by leveraging information on how people use training and using this information to design more effective training. Business consult…

"Smartsheet, a project and work management platform based on the spreadsheet user experience, announced integrations with Dropbox, and Zapier today. Dropbox is the well-known file sync-and-platofmr, used by millions. Zapier is an integration clearing house that allows users to connect participating applications in dozens of inventive ways. Smartsh…