Time to ACT

Time to ACT. What does that say to you? Time to do what you need to do? Now’s the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country? You get the idea. It means time to do what needs to be done. Ok, Let’s take it to another dimension. What if it means having “time enough” to get things done. Hm. Peaked your interest? Good. That’s the topic of this blog.

We are busy people. It’s a busy world. How often do you hear people say “if only I had 2 more hours in the day.” Often. Well, that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. That means we have to take control of our own time destinies to keep them in check. There are tons of time management seminars and tools and I’ve probably taken them all. Their purpose is to help you understand what are YOUR time drains.

Types of time drains are interruptions, emergencies, answering email, reading blogs (just had to say that), answering phones, opening paper mail, responding to people coming into your office, searching for information missing from a project, not having a work process in place and working on your calendar. I bet you spend a lot more time on these processes than you imagine. Many many years ago, I was part of a project that was working on winning a Demming Award. A Demming award is for superlative process management. One of the things we had to do was record everything we did, by hour, by day, for two weeks. We did this on a spreadsheet. We were even given watches to keep track of the time. This was an eye-opening exercise. And this was before email, Facebook, Twitter and the internet. It is extraordinary how you can flitter away time on the littlest things.

You should try this exercise as noted above, and then figure out how can you fix some of the issues. What I am going to show you here in this blog is how you can do that with a contact manager. My contact manager of choice is ACT!. Not all of them do what ACT! can do, so if I talk about something here that your contact manager (if you have one) doesn’t do, then consider moving to ACT!.

Ok, here we go. I’m going to list some common time drains and show you how ACT! can help you manage the time drain demons.

Interruptions.
This one is easy. You need to go into your calendar and put in an activity that says “Busy” or “Door closed” or whatever makes sense to you. If you are more productive in the morning, put it in this timeslot then. The idea is your calendar is flagged as not available so you can work on things that need your utmost concentration. We can’t avoid all interruptions, but we can sure try.

Delegation.
Ever get a project that is missing information? You need to send that project detail right back where it came from to get that data. Open a Todo in ACT!, call it “gather missing data”. Put a timeframe for a week or so and set it so it alarms. Send an email to the person who hasn’t sent you the data. Your Todo will pop up reminding you that you are waiting on information. The good news you should have put that project into the “waiting on details” pile and can now go find it. The better news was by setting the alarm, and “delegating” it back to the person who has the details removed from your work pile. In essence, you moved the “work monkey” back to where it belonged. You can also use Activity Series in ACT! to assign steps to someone else, there by delegating to another and off of your desk.

Work processes.
When you work on a process, you typically go through a standard set of steps. Do you call people asking for detail? Do you send emails asking for more information? Do you do the same steps all the time. Then you have an activity series. In ACT!, you can design an Activity series to remind you of events that need to happen at a set period of time. You can even “delegate” them to other people (one of the best ways to get things off your plate.) You can even design more than one type of activity series. These are very powerful.

Keeping on track:
Your calendar is your most valuable tool in keeping on top of your time. If you earmark times for “busy” or “working on mail” or add an entry that says “follow up on pipeline” you have alarms popping up that tell you where you need to be and when or what you have to do. Someone walks in your door – you get tied up talking to them. You forget you have an appointment. An audible alarm from a calendar entry can get your attention and help you shoo that person out the door. Use this tool to your best advantage. Alarms are an excellent way to keep you on track. One of the things you can do in ACT! is set the priority of your calendar items. Use this – and use it wisely. Make critical appointments High priority. If the entry is a low item, make it a low priority and don’t bother with setting an alarm. ALL HIGH PRIORITY ITEMS SHOULD HAVE AN ALARM. Period.

ACT! is more than just a contact manager. It’s a way to keep track of the who, what, when, where and why of things (but that’s another blog.) It can help you keep on top of your day. Time management doesn’t have to be a nightmare. Use tools to help you. After all, it’s all about having “time to act.”

Google and you shall find

A leaky truck tire is the impetus for my post today. Last night, while once again using Google to find an answer, it hit me just how vital Google has become to my every day world. I paraphrased a biblical reference, “seek and ye shall find” for the title of this post because, using Google, it’s becoming quite true. Seek and you will find.

My road down the search engine path has been a long one. Doing genealogy research is what first triggered my overwhelming need to travel down the corridors of the web world. I started out with Yahoo as my first search engine tool and it and I spent many many hours going down website ratholes. I remember the first time I delved into some research I was stunned to realize I had spent 5 solid hours reaching deeply into all kinds of links. I was hooked line and sinker. From then on, it was simply a matter of honing in on my searching skills.

As I progressed, I learned about meta crawlers, search engines that used more than one search engine. Soon, my newest best friends were Dogpile and Metacrawler.com. I stayed with them for quite a while until this shiny newcomer called Google came along. It has now become my search engine of choice. I go back to the metacrawlers periodically, but I find them filled with pay for click sessions that I need to wade through to find the real meat.

So, moving on, let me explain about the leaky tire. Once a long time ago, I was driving a car where the back left rear tire came totally off while I was doing around 55 miles an hour. Luck is the only reason my car didn’t flip over. The tire had been improperly mounted after replacing recalled brakes. What this has produced in me is a major case of paranoia when it comes to wheels and tires. OK, you get the picture. Recently, actually for the last several months, one of our Explorer truck tires has had a slow leak. The Sears store could find no holes in the tires they had installed and sent us on our way. That meant Don had to periodically fill it up with air before a long drive or when we were going to put a load on the vehicle. I asked him if there was any way to fix it – it was his comment of “it’s probably a cracked wheel” that sent me into a tizzy. Remember the paranoia statement from before. Alarm, alarm, alarm, claxsons sounding – that was me.

So, I did my normal approach when honey-dos don’t, and said, ok, fine, I’m not driving that vehicle anymore. Period. Then, I decided to go to my computer and do what I find myself doing anytime a business, personal, or house issue comes up – I look for solutions on Google. And I mean I do it all the time. I do at least one Google search a day – always. Even on Sunday.

Here’s where knowing how and what to search for is one of the best tools you can have in your information arsenal. I knew I had a leaky tire. It was a 1995 Explorer. The suspected culprit was a cracked wheel. So, I formulated the following search phrase – “Explorer leaky tire cracked wheel.”

Now, when you do your first search, it’s key to understand you probably won’t find a hit on the first page. If you do, then you’ve entered enough information into your search words to give Google a chance to quickly find what you are looking for. As it turned out, I hit pay dirt with my very first search phrase. It turns out some faulty tire valves were being recalled because an unlucky soul driving an Explorer had died in a crash caused by a overly-low tire. The tire had the faulty valves and a recent court case confirmed this and the valves were recalled. I found the website, saw what I needed to check on the tires, and headed into the garage armed with a flashlight and magnifying glass. Voila, the valves on our tires matched the recalled numbers exactly. Problem found – now it was simply a case of taking them to Sears and saying “see – fix.”

This is just a onetime example of the power of searching on the web. I can’t imagine running my business without this tool. Yes, we’re computer consultants but anyone can exploit this tool. Market research, product comparisons, demographics, business solutions – you name it – the sky is the limit. And now that Google trolls through social networking sites, you can really find some interesting and current information.

As you go down your searching trails, remember you can’t always believe everything you read on the internet. However, what you do find can point you in the right directions when you otherwise were headed nowhere. The secret is typing in as many words as possible to narrow down your hits. Don’t use words like “and”, “or”, etc because Google will just strip them out anyway. If you do need to include these words, enclose them in double quotes – like “Jack and Jill ran up the hill.”

The Google site has all kinds of tutorials on how to use advanced searching techniques. However, I’m typically in a hurry – well, always in a hurry – and I don’t want to bother clicking on the Advanced button. So, I found out there are some cool search operators that can help you zero in on details. You use them directly in the search box. Here’s some of my favorite with examples: note – you need a colon after the operator name. I put the search words in quotes.

- “Pat Egen search engine site:act.com” – this looks for Pat Egen only on the act.com website
- “Excel samples site:.edu” – finds Excel samples only on university domains (usually a wealth of free stuff)
- “related:www.egenconsulting.com” – find similar or related pages to www.egenconsulting.com
- “link:pregen.wordpress.com” – which pages link to a specific site – in this case, my blog
- “Excel tips filetype:pdf” – find only pdf files that have Excel tips

There are some other neat things you can do when searching Google. If you type in a phone number that is not unlisted, you’ll see the phone listings at the top of your search results. A really fun trick is to find out a local time – simply type in “what time is it in Bermuda.” You get back something that looks like this – “5:49pm Tuesday (ADT) – Time in Bermuda.”

I fly a lot and one of my favorite search tricks is typing in the number of a flight – for example DL10. This will show you current tracking details for that flight number. Just enter the right airline code and number. After trolling around for some more ideas for this blog post, I found you can even use search terms like “better than” or “reminds me of” and then add your keywords. This really works. How cool is that. Remember said Explorer referenced earlier in my post here? Since it’s starting to be more problematic that we’d like, and I was showing my hubbie these cool new search terms, he suggested typing in “better than Toyota Tacoma” and lo and behold a “top ten truck” review came up and the Toyota listed number 1. Now that’s nifty.

The moral of this story is to reach for your favorite browser and head to Google.com to search for stuff you need, whether it’s recipes, leaky tire symptoms and simply how to stay sane in an insane world. Really, try that search string.

Ciao for now.

Using pictures to make an impression

An adage from an old Chinese proverb says a picture is worth a 1000 words.   It seems this is especially true with visual people. In my travels around customers, I’m finding that sales and marketing people tend to be visual – not all of them, but a great percentage. The same applies for management. That’s why graphs and charts are so popular.
 
This sunk home to me recently during a training session on ACT 2009. This was one of those sessions where the people in the room were somewhat reluctant about using ACT. Management said they had to use it – but that didn’t mean they were going to like it. One of their comments was “well, management isn’t going to look at this anyway, so why bother.” Here’s when things got interesting.

One of the people in the room had decided they actually did like ACT and found it very helpful in keeping him on track with the 20+ meetings they needed to handle every day. Yes – 20+. Wow, I myself would need something to keep me sane.

Training was going along ok, Some grumbling, some “gee, I won’t have time to do my work because I will be spending all my time doing data entry.” All the general comments of people who haven’t yet seen the value. No problem, we’ll get them there. Then, I got to the part of showing them the Dashboards. The dashboard I started with showed activities and calendar entries and one of the panels was a bar chart. Remember I said one of the people had been using ACT extensively. Well, his “bar” was much larger than everyone elses. By a lot. Now, this group was a very competitive group – typical for marketing and sales departments. When they all saw that their bars were shorter, they weren’t happy. It then became very obvious who was entering data and who wasn’t. At that exact moment, two of the partners walked in the room and saw the dashboard. They said was this always available – even on the web version of ACT. I said indeed it was – they both said, “well, this is what we wanted all along.” They could look at one place and see everything with out needed to go to a bunch of screens. Ok, now that meant management was indeed going to watch what was going on.

You can imagine what transpired after that. Everyone started using ACT – yes, it was in a competitive manner – but ultimately does anyone care why data is entered? No, the issue is get the data there. I chatted with my client a few months later and he said that was the catalyst that got them on their way.

With ACT 10.2, Sage published a really nifty plugin where you could build more customized dashboards. Now, I can build dashboards to show custom fields in the clients database so they can track not only activities and opportunities but things specific to their organization. The client I chatted about earlier in this blog sends me periodic requests for some more involved and exotic dashboards. They have fallen in love with the visual interpretation of data and how quickly they can see where they are with regards to products, states, country penetration, and all kinds of data tracking.

 

I’ve since started building custom dashboards for clients and it is indeed true that a picture is worth a 1000 words. Now, I’d love to take that adage to the next level and guage how much money the pictures are worth as well. More later. Note: cartoon courtesy of wikicommons.

Cool things from last week

It seems that whenever I’m at a Calconnect event, I come back with several cool new things I learned.  Here’s the list from last week’s adventure.

1.  Doodle.com – I already blogged about it, but I liked it enough to show it again.

2. Quickly identify where your IP address physically is located. Pretty cool. http://www.liveipmap.com/

3.  My friend Guy showed me extraordinarily lovely photos created by taking several images – over and under exposed – and then merging them into one image. It’s called HDR – High Dynamic Range and the photos are spectacular.  They almost don’t look real.  Here’s a link to some stunning images.

http://www.online-photoshoptutorials.com/2008/10/17-of-the-most-visually-beautiful-hdr-images.html

Only three things this time – but they were nifty

Do you Doodle?

Ok, here’s a first.  Two blogs in the same day.  But I just stumbled on something totally cool and it warrents a second post today.

Have you heard of Doodle.com?  This is a super nifty site where you can schedule an event or send out a poll to large amounts of people, quickly, easily and free.  It’s growing at around 10% per month via word of mouth.  I just used it today to send out a poll asking about whether or not people knew you could schedule meetings and send invites via email – see my prior post.  I used Twitter to send out the poll link and yikes, I got three hits almost instantly.   Nifty indeed.

Here’s the link – http://www.doodle.com.  Give it a try.

If you send it will they come?

I’m sitting here at Calconnect, (http://www.calconnect.org) a meeting comprised of vendors, universities and companies who all share an interest in Calendaring and Scheduling. As I sit here listening to everyone talk about standards and what the customer wants, it occurs to me that there are probably still quite a few people who do not realise what you can do with calendaring products today.

This thought generated today’s blog post. In a few paragraphs I’m going to try to shed some light on the great things you can do with many applications today and the things that are “coming.”

Ok, let’s use the following scenario. You are planning a meeting and you want to invite several people. There will be a conference room involved along with a projector, and oh, the people are all in different cities and possibly even different timezones. This same scenario could be a family reunion at a resort with dinner invites as well. You get the idea.

Next, let’s set the environment of the meeting organizer. In our scenario, the calendar applications are Outlook 2003, Lotus Notes 7.0 and Google Calendar. Double-clicking on a date on the calendar opens a dialog box where you can put in a subject for the meeting,set a location, choose a resource like a conference room or a projector, and select the attendees. When you save the entry, it then sends the meeting as an invitation to anyone who is not on your Exchange server or part of your mail network. Ok, easy.

Here’s where I wonder how many people realize that when you save this meeting, special files are sent to the attendees. These emails have a little attachment called an ICS file. Inside that attachment are all the meeting details – or the calendar smarts. This tells the calendar application of the attendee that this is a meeting invitation and go do something. Typically, when you open it in your email application a special box will pop up asking you to ACCEPT, DECLINE or suggest an alternative time. That’s pretty cool and the good news is in our scenario both Google and Lotus Notes will “behave” appropriately and let you accept the meeting and add it directly to your calendar. Now, that’s cool.

The reason I wonder how many people realize this works this way is because I was sitting next to a guy on a plane a few weeks ago. We were sitting there on the ground waiting to get permission to take off – the classic “tarmac wait and wait” state. The pilot said OK, we’re going to be here a while and the guy next to me figured OK, he would do some work and pulled out his laptop, cell phone and wireless card. Here’s where I was bad and sort of watched over his shoulder. Yes, I know, I was bad.

Here’s what transpired. He got on his cell phone and said “hey, I need to set up a meeting so I’m sending you an email asking for times you are available. Also, I’ll send you an email with the time and date of the other meeting too.” Then, he opened Outlook, sent the email, went to his calendar and manually added the meeting, not putting in the email of the recipient. Hm. His phone rang, and the guy said he got the email and needed to do it on another day. My seatmate then got into Outlook and manually moved the meeting to another date. When he hung up, I bravely said I didn’t mean to be eavedropping but did he realise he could have opened a calendar entry in Outlook, added his friend as an attendee and mailed it – thereby doing two things with one action. His eyebrows went up and he said – “really, cool.” And he proceeded to pick up the phone, call his friend and say “hey, I want to try something out.” He then did what I suggested and lo and behold it worked. Not only did it work, his friend tried suggesting an alternative date, my seatmate received the file and lo and behold it moved on his calendar. You would have thought I had showed the guy the way to the fountain of youth. Something so simple yet to him vital. Why didn’t he know about this – who knows.

That’s when I wondered how many others don’t realize this happens. Maybe it’s because they tried and it didn’t work so why bother? Not sure.

Taking our scenario a bit further, what I want is the ability to check when people’s calendars have open timeslots. This is called searching for Freebusy. The good news is there is work going on now to make this happen. This to me is huge. And taking it a bit further, I work with people in other countries and on different timezones. Calendar applications all seem to operate differently with regards to how they handle timezones. Part of the problem is each app uses a different source for validating timezones. Some of the work going on is to put in place something called a timezone registry where applications can simply “call home”, pull in the current timezone listing, hang up, and everyone is on the same page. Mostly. We’re not there yet, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

So, I’ll continue doing my random surveying of people to see how many realize you can do these kind of things with calendars. It should be interesting.

Staying nimble in a bleak economy

Well, this blog entry is late because I’ve been doing what most people are doing now. Trying to keep my head above water in lean times. That being said, I figured that would be good blog item to talk about what we are trying to do and what we’ve done in the past to stay in business. Which, by the way, is now 11 years and counting.

Our first requirement to become more nimble was after 9/11. Most of our business was focused around Corporate America. Well, they shut their doors on spending and we ended up looking for business elsewhere quickly. I had spent 9 months managing a team rolling out ACT while still employed in Corporate America. I swore I’d never touch it again. Well, one of my favorite expressions is “never say never.” I took a chance, spent quite a bit of money and went and got certified in ACT. Part of the process of becoming certified meant I was put on their partner website. A client called exactly one month after we were put on the list and that turned into a contract that paid for the certification process three times over. Ok. Good idea. Successful conclusion.

In fact, we haven’t looked back since. ACT has become an integral part of our business. So much so that it has caused my other favorite expression (or better said – Alarm) to go off – “never put all your eggs in one basket.”

We do a lot of things besides ACT but since we train, customize, resell, and develop Addons for the product, it has become our cash cow. Now, though, people are watching their dollars. People are spending but much more reluctantly. This has sent me once again into nimble mode to see what we can do to keep the coffers full.

Ok, so here’s what we’re doing. I took a look at which industries were still calling and looking for ACT. I decided those groups would become the focus of a couple of marketing campaigns. I took some time to research what were the buzzwords and issues for those groups and made sure our campaigns addressed those issues.

As for my ACT clients, I figured they too were all in the same boat as we were. They were doing whatever they could to keep money rolling into their businesses. One thing in their favor was they all had ACT. ACT is sitting there with “gold in them thar hills” – meaning data saying who hadn’t been contacted, who wanted certain products, who preferred what, etc. It was time for my clients to drill down into their ACT data and mine the gold. That became the next focus of our group. We started looking for ways to make it easier to see the data.

I attended a session on a cruise that talked about custom reports (www.crystalclearessentials.com). Steve Stroz, a reporting guru, had a great idea about showing people reports and pointing them at the source. He also had done a few dashboards using a custom tool developed by Sage. I had already had Don working on the dashboard DLL and had dashboards of my own. I saw what Steve had done, and created some similar dashboards kicked up a notch based around things my clients wanted, packaged them up into an easy to install package (complete with our logos) and sent out a email blast about them. The email basically showed people how the dashboards looked and how easy it made it to spot problem areas or potential goldmines. I have since fallen in love with the dashboards because it is immediately apparant that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Case in point. I was at a client site doing ACT training. The group in the audience was less than receptive to the idea of needing to input data. They figured management would never look at it, so why bother. Well, then I showed them a dashboard. This particular dashboard showed activities. One person had been doing a super job of keeping their activities in ACT. Their bar line was 4 times larger than everyone else. Did I mention this group was very competitive. That chart was exactly what was needed to motivate that crew. And it made it clear to me that text is fine, but graphs are powerful. Oh, and management liked viewing them as well. Hm, there went that idea that management wouldn’t be looking at the data.

Which leads me to the next thing we’ve been doing to keep money flowing into the business. Again, I started looking at what people can do to get a better idea of what is going on with their business. Most everyone has Excel in house. Not everyone, though, is well versed in Pivot Tables and charts. I had two customers call for Excel training and that is what we focused on. One of my recent posts talked about showing Pivot tables to a client and it made their trip to our office worth the price of admission. And they were there for ACT training. However, it was the Pivot tables that made their day. Well, ok, Mr. Customer, you want to focus on Excel Pivot tables – we can do that.

That’s where being nimble comes into play. When the economy changes or events arise that drive business away from your door, you need to be nimble enough to change directions or tactics. You need to be aware of what is going on with your customers so you can point them towards things that will help not only them but you as well. It’s not quite the same as “you want me to jump how high.” It’s more of a “well, it was purple last week, it’s green this week.” I guess it’s like being a chameleon. You have to be able to change your colors when necessary. The trick is knowing which color and how fast.

We’re still working on our own color changes. When the phone is not ringing as much, we are using the time to work on the new processes, ideas or campaigns. Use the time to put in place new tools or products to sell. Yes, it’s scary when there is less money coming in but you have to do it. Every time I freak out about the number of calls that day I go back and look at what I was able to accomplish because, indeed, the phones weren’t ringing as bad. Hm. Ok. And we are now starting to see the results. The phones are starting to ring again – in answer to those emails I sent out. Yep, I struck a nerve. People are looking for ways to mine their data. Cool. Guess I better get back to doing just that. Being nimble and working on a new idea.

See ya….

I needed a day like today….

Once in a while, a day comes along where you realize “this is why I do this.”

We are ACT consultants. That is a good thing and somedays a bad thing. ACT is sooo much better now with version 11. However, there have been days where it wasn’t so.

I had two people from a new client in my offices today doing an “Advanced/Power User” ACT 2009 Class. The class was customized for their requirements.

Or at least that is what was scheduled. What happened, as usual for me, is it turned into a “here’s how you can use ACT” to satisfy your requirements and let’s plan what you need to be doing. In other words, it turned into more of a consulting gig than a training gig. That’s what happens a lot. I get started, they jump off their seats, and we’re off to the races.

I had gotten an email from the client with their “vision.” I always ask for these when I do customized training so that I am totally prepared for what they are looking for. They came in expecting an ACT class – well, it turns out they weren’t sure what they were expecting.

This was an interesting client. They drove 5 hours to Chattanooga to meet yesterday with another client of mine. That client is an LTL trucking company meaning they sell “lanes” – Atlanta to New York for example. My client sells trucks. My client is their customer. the new client knew my client was a big ACT user – 65 users in fact, so they met with them to see how they use ACT.

At their recommendation, they then met with me for training. Today they showed up for the training and met with me to see how they could get to where they wanted to be with regards to selling better and using ACT.

That’s where the fun began. Do you know/remember how gratifying it is to show somebody something and they almost jump off their chairs. It was that kind of day. We have all dealt with the “holy s…., ACT is broke” days. So, I really needed a “wow, you mean ACT can do that….” day. When they saw what we could do with Dashboards, I thought they would explode. Those of you not taking Dashboards and making them shine are missing the boat.

When I showed them Pivot tables from the Opportunties to Excel extract, I thought the Sales Manager would faint dead away. He looked at me and said “What are Pivot Tables.” We spent the next hour showing him what he could with some data he had on his laptop. He said “Pat, I have spent 100’s, and I am not kidding, 100’s of hours putting together Excel spreadsheets for reports from our mainframe data and in one hour you just showed me the answer.” He was literally “overwhelmed.” Speechless – almost.

He was one of those guys you try to keep on a path – who will take you on a circle instead. He saw what he could do and was already at the pass waiting on us to catch up. How refreshing is that.

I can’t express enough words to say how much I needed a day like today. There is so much power in ACT. When you get someone in the room (ok, really now, I’m getting goosebumps) who sees what can happen and how it can revolutionize their business ( a business that is 45 years old) it, again, justifies why we do what we do. And again, it justifies to me why I love working with smaller organizations. They just appreciate you so much more.

So, for those of you out there looking for more revenue or more business, take a look at what you know. If you know ACT – you know sales guys. You know how to make it “attractive” to those sales guys. And, you have Excel in your back pocket. Excel is such a powerful tool that simply showing Pivot tables to a client can be business “altering.” And it makes you a vital piece of their business future.

This was the first time they had met me. They drove 5 hours to get here. They said, about two hours into the session, it was worth the trip. They also said “we will want you to come to our offices in 6 months.”

By the end of the day and after the Pivot “epiphany”, it was “can you be at our offices within the next three weeks.”

How such a simple little thing as an export to Excel can totally change the entire session around. Yes, ACT is cool and they are going to do this. But the Excel reporting on their AS400 data – now that’s so much farther down the path than they were thinking that they were out of their seats and almost out of their skins.

Like I said – I sooooo needed a day like today. It was reaffirming – it made me realize I have value to add – always knew that but sometimes when you are trying to fix what’s broke in ACT, you question yourself. Wow, such a good day.

So, here’s hoping you all get one of these days soon. It makes it all worth it…

Black holes and Boomerangs

Today I’m writing a blog entry that’s a departure from topics I normally write about.  A while ago I wrote an article for a newsletter and I called it “Black holes and Boomerangs.”  The article was about managing projects.

All of us at some point have either managed people or projects or have been the recipients of project assignments. And, we’ve all witnessed projects that fail or are delayed for a variety of reasons.  What I’m going to talk about today are two types that can really be time drains or hurt a company.

Let me first explain what I mean by the title.  We’ll start with Boomerangs.  These are the projects that start out fine.  For example, you give someone a project, you give them what you feel is enough information to manage the project, and two weeks later, the project ends up back on your desk, unfinished.  Reasons for this are often “I couldn’t figure out what you wanted” or “I couldn’t make this work” or “I can’t do this project.”   Two weeks have passed and you are no further along and you end up having to do the work or spend time figuring out what you need to do in order for the other person to handle the project.  I’ll talk more about this a bit later.

On to Black holes.  These are my least favorite of the two – if favorite is a proper word for this.  Black hole projects are just what they sound like.  These are projects or tasks that go out into a blackhole and are never heard from again.  Ever.  They are not completed.  You hear no status reports.  Nothing.  Nada.  Typically, a weekly status report or a staff meeting can handle this but in a busy office, there may not be time for those.  So, these projects fall off the radar scope until you get irate phone calls from clients.  Sigh.

So, how do you handle these black holes and boomerangs.  Carefully.  In some cases, depending on the person, I’ve discovered there is no solution. Well, there is one – you don’t assign projects to those people.  But, to me, that’s giving in.  My mission is to get the work done.  And, I want that person to succeed as well.  If that happens, it’s a win for everyone, and it’s especially gratifying to me to see this happen.

Here’s some tips I’ve uncovered over the course of trying to solve these project pitfalls.

Does the person who has been given the task have all the details they need.  Do they have the authority to do what they need to do without coming back to you to ask questions. In particular, if something else comes up, can that person judge which project to work on first.  Balancing workloads can be easy for some, but not for others.  Some people simply cannot multi-task.  When they discover they are behind one solution is to return the project saying they can’t work on it. If you know you have someone who falls into this category, then the right thing to do is only assign projects to them when you know they can devote time to the project.  This may be tough in a small office, but it beats having the project languish and then reappear in two weeks no further along then when you started.  This same person can often be guilty of the blackhole syndrome.  It’s easier to just let it sit on the pile then say something.  Hopefully, nobody will notice it’s not done and it will go away all by itself.

Another reason tasks go astray is because of not setting expectations.  Does everyone understand the project and is everyone aware of the deadline?  Did you actually say “this needs to be done by this date?”  Projects with no deadline or priority end up being just that – low priority.  If they have no deadline, it means “oh, I can work on this later” and no priority means “oh, this is not that important and I can wait a bit.”  However, if a project is assigned, there has to be some kind of deadline or it didn’t need to be done at all.  The message here is don’t assume anything.  Make sure everyone involved is aware of the due dates and assign some level of priority to the project so you can then do load balancing of the work.  I have a saying here – if it makes us money it comes first.  That’s an over-generalization but it’s a start.  We all get sucked into time draining wormholes like email, newsgroups, research, internet sites, and the list goes on.  Now add Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin to the equation and you can see where it gets tough to balance your workschedule.

If you don’t have time for staff meetings, then put a reminder in your tickler file, calendar application or CRM system like ACT to ask about a project task.   If you have a deadline set for 2 weeks, then have the reminder show up two or three days before the deadline.  Send a quick email or IM and ask “how’s it going.”  The trick here is to do what makes sense for you.  If you are always in email, send yourself and the project owner an email asking for an update.  Warning – this may become another black hole but at least you’re keeping on top of things.  If you prefer instant messaging, send an IM.  Do whatever you need to so that something pops up in your face saying “check on me.”

Bottom line – there will always be reasons projects and tasks don’t get completed.  Do what you can to provide as much detail as possible to ensure you get the results you want.  And make sure you ask – don’t get caught up in day to day minutia.  Take the time to followup so things don’t go bump in the night or get so far gone as to be unrecoverable.

Facebook – the next frontier

My last several blog entries have been talking about Twitter and social networking.  During  my journey of discovery, it quickly became apparent I also needed to look at Facebook.

I had a Facebook page that I had started months ago but never did anything with.  Having not spent much time logged in I had no idea what the Facebook environment entailed and what it had to offer.

To learn more about what was going on I decided to update my Facebook page and start poking around.  Well, if I thought Twitter was amazing, Facebook blew it away.  In fact, it’s much more viral.

Within a day, I was getting emails from friends asking me to connect with them on Facebook.  I get emails from LinkedIn connections, but not nearly so fast.  This was literally within hours. 

Not only friends contacted me, but family members I hadn’t heard from in decades.  There was a tragic death in my family and my niece was trying to reach  me.  She found me on Facebook and sent me an email.  I had lost touch with her and didn’t know her married name so it was impossible for me to find her.  Instead, she found me.  The circumstances were a sad one, but the results were phenomenal.

That was just the beginning.  I started to explore the applications, some of which are just downright annoying.  Some, however, are fun and make it interesting to use Facebook.

My network started to broaden based on who my friends were linked to.  It’s not quite the same as Twitter where people you don’t know start following you because you posted a very public comment and they thought it was interesting.  On Facebook, you get connected to people similar to Linkedin.  These are connections you know and trust.  Next, I learned that people update their status on Facebook which posts on their “wall.”  You can see what people have said, and they, in turn, can see what has been written on your wall.  People can comment on your status or on any links, pages, or groups you have set up.  It’s a wonderful way to market a business, or champion a cause.  The next thing I did was connect Twitter to Facebook.  By that I mean I enabled the Twitter connection on Facebook so my Twitter comments updated my “status” on Facebook. 

This weekend, though, I found out the real power of Facebook.  I was working on an issue with an Act conversion.  I was lamenting about the complexity of moving attachments during my conversion.  Three of the people connected to me on Facebook saw my status update and commented with suggestions on what I could use to handle my situation.  That was a surprise and extremely helpful.  And unexpected.

Later in the evening, someone else commented on something posted by another of our “friends in common” and I liked what I read and commented as well.  The topic was cooking and a nice long dialog started.  I thought this would be good as a group and setup one and invited the people in the discussion to the group.   Several others noticed the group and joined as well.  Within minutes.  That’s what I meant by viral – it spreads like a virus.  But a good virus.

As I watched the events occur during the evening, it hit me that this was way beyond emailing and instant messaging.   If I wasn’t on Facebook, and wanted other people to know what was happening, I would have had to send out a broadcast email  or instant message to everyone.  Point of fact, I wasn’t really asking for help – I was commenting on something that was happening during my day.  The help came free of charge – without me asking.  Whoa Nelly, that’s amazing.   I didn’t have to send it an all points bulletin to everyone.  

Well, actually, by posting my status, I did send it out.  But in a different way.  I ”posted it” to my Wall.  Anyone logged onto Facebook who was connected to me saw my status updates.  The notification section told them I had posted an update.   It’s like Twitter, but different.  It’s Twitter on steroids.

So, where does this take me in my journey of discovery.  Well, a lot further down the trail.  I realize you need both.  Twitter is the short, quick updates of 140 characters that you can manage updates from a phone.  Facebook is a page of your life.  Your Twitter updates are there to update your status and spread the word, if that’s what you are trying to accomplish.  Facebook then takes it to the next level allowing you add groups and specifically target projects, business applications and personal interests, like cooking.

It’s not a case of which one you use.  You use them both.  It’s how you use them to the best advantage that is the question. My next step is to figure this out along with how LinkedIn fits into the puzzle.

Oh, and warning, don’t get sucked into the games that Facebook has.  I was sent an Easter Egg and several hours later I am still here gathering away.  Help me – I’ve fallen and I can’t get up……

Ciao for now.