Wal-Mart.
Whether you love them or hate them, there’s no denying their scale. The company is just huge. When they make a small change, it can have large-scale implications.
When Wal-Mart Changes A Light Bulb
Hal Macomber has a post up that cites an upcoming Fast Company article that covers Wal-Mart’s anticipated change to using coiled fluorescent bulbs instead of standard incandescent bulbs.
Its estimated that if Wal-Mart can successfully do so, that would be the equivalent of pulling 1.3 million cars off the road in terms of reducing carbon emissions.
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You can tell a lot about the target market for a project management software based on what they call planning.
a) If the tool doesn’t having planning, it’s a tool for helping keep things in order.
The target is probably smaller organizations, teams or individuals who may or may not interact with other people as part of the project. The main goal of this type of project management software is to help individuals be more organized or to give some structure to the way people interact.
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Project planning is often taken for granted by people in charge of projects (in an everyday, business sense) -or by their bosses. They overlook the need develop a deliberate and disciplined approach to spelling out tasks, personnel and resources on a project by project basis.
This may come from a mix-up in the way people talk about planning and project plans.
There are two different ways of looking at project plans and the act of planning.
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Search engines may be stifling the success of software companies. How? By assuming all searchers are the same.
In general, a software company writes for a target audience, its intended customer base. That audience may or may not be people who spend a lot of time on the internet or in the blogosphere. (For brevity, let’s call those who do spend a lot of time on the internet and blogosphere netizens.)
However, it seems that search engine rankings are determined, in large part, by the amount of presence a specific url has on the general internet and blogosphere. The more a particular software is talked about by netizens, on net-based outlets like blogs, websites and forums, the higher the likely ranking of that particular software on a search engine.
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There are two ways to manage a project: with brute force and with finesse.
Brute force managers are like rock climbers who uses their arms to pull themselves up a wall. It can get you there if you have the strength, but it sure is tiring and ugly.
Project managers who use finesse are like climbers who realize that their can legs do most of the vertical lifting. They just need to use their head to find the right placement. Climbing with their legs (which are stronger than arms), using their hands mostly for balance, they can climb a lot higher, for a lot longer and its much prettier to see.
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Behind the buzzwords of Web 2.0 and web-based software, there is a specific approach to ease-of-use and friendliness. Its reflected in the way the software is designed and, in the best cases, in the company’s attitude towards users. This approach makes a compelling business case for web-based software.
These should resonate loudly with buyers of project management software. In this space, buyers face a crowded market. And a lot of people have been burned or turned-off by other types of project management software in the past.
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I have the pleasure of speaking to hundreds of people looking for project management software every month, and what I find amazing is the great difference in the way they are all working from one another. When I started speaking to people about their project management needs, I believed for the most part that everyone would basically be working in a very similar fashion. After all, we all put on our shoes basically the same way, brush our teeth, and walk upright as we move from place to place. But the more I spoke with potential customers, the more they kept asking me about very specific software functionalities. The first part of the question does your software do x and then y and then z, is followed by surprise when I answer that no, no one else has ever asked about that feature before. “Really?!” Is a classic response and they pause in disbelief.
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Note: This is not a political entry, despite the subject of the article referenced below.
Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal makes an interesting comparison between the general blogosphere and public demonstrations in the 1960’s. He likens similar-minded, link-sharing, bloggers, in his phrase, blogospheric daisy chain’s, to events or happenings in the 1960’s. They are part protest, part public display and as he says “part rock concert, part street theater, the rush of being part of a morally unblemished belief system.”
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BusinessWeek Online has an interesting article about failure. It cites a couple of high profile successes (like Bill Gates and Abraham Lincoln) that had failed businesses early in their careers. It then goes on to talk about making business failures more productive through analysis and review.
The same holds true in projects. A huge number of projects “fail” in that they don’t meet original expectations, timelines or budgets. Sometimes they even fail by not producing the expected deliverable. Good project management can help minimize these kind of failures. But even the best team or is not going to bat 1000.
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Scott Berkun has an interesting survey on his blog. He is researching innovation for a new book. I found his survery thought provoking . Hope he doesn’t mind me springboarding off it (for those interested in the original, check it out here.
To me, innovation is about solving a problem when existing solutions don’t cut it anymore. Underpinning this definition is a belief that there are very few “new” problems (if any), just obsolete solutions. Technical accomplishments and new research are like getting pieces of a puzzle to fit together how we want them to. We didn’t build the puzzle (nobody asked us how the laws of nature should work) but are trying to get new shapes or designs from it.
What drives innovation? Or, in other words, why wouldn’t an existing solution cut it anymore? I think dissatisfaction is at the core of innovation. Somebody or a group of people, isn’t happy with the ways things work. So they try to figure out another way to make things work. The exact way they solve the problem itself isn’t necessarily the innovation. The solution could be made up of existing methods, processes or technologies. But the innovation is in the application of those methods, the fact that it solves a problem and takes away the dissatisfaction.
