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Here are some customer comments from our Twitter stream:
"Vertabase is our communication back-bone so no-one has to nag people."
"Vertabase has helped us with a good cultural change -to a more efficient project workflow."
"Years' worth of timesheets just became Business Intelligence when we imported them into Vertabase.
On The Road
Summer has been busy with Vertabase traveling to California, Florida, New Mexico, Arizona, Montreal and Washington D.C.
Upcoming trips include further visits to California, New York and around the State of Michigan.
Let us know if you'd like a visit. We're always happy to see you.
Enter email to subscribe to our Vertabase Timely Tips.
Here are some customer comments from our Twitter stream:
"Vertabase is our communication back-bone so no-one has to nag people."
"Vertabase has helped us with a good cultural change -to a more efficient project workflow."
"Years' worth of timesheets just became Business Intelligence when we imported them into Vertabase.
On The Road
Summer has been busy with Vertabase traveling to California, Florida, New Mexico, Arizona, Montreal and Washington D.C.
Upcoming trips include further visits to California, New York and around the State of Michigan.
Let us know if you'd like a visit. We're always happy to see you.
July 2011
We are so pleased to see the reception the latest version is getting and the kinds of improvements our customers are seeing in the way they do projects.
Here is link to the Release Notes and related information.
Let us know if you'd like to be upgraded or schedule a demo of Vertabase 5.0 to evaluate it.
Contact your Vertabase representative or, you can always let me know directly.
Can Lady Gaga teach us something about project management? How about Google? The articles below use pop-culture and high-tech analogies to discuss project management truths, with a dash of common sense thrown in.
Here's to good projects,
-Mark
That number makes other brands salivate - and jealous.
They want those kind of numbers. They’d be happy with a fraction of those numbers.
Those numbers, though, are in-line with her total reach, her level of exposure and the way people interact with media.
Human Behavior is a Constant
As mentioned in my presentation on social media, people’s behavior seems to be a constant regardless of the technology used. 80% of all a person’s phone calls are to the same people. 80% of all Skype calls are to the same people. The medium changed, the technology changed, but human behavior does not.
Lady Gaga’s numbers are no different. They are generally consistent with the levels of engagement across other media e.g. the percentage of an audience that calls into a talk radio show or writes letters to an editor of a newspaper.
Anecdotally, this number tends to be 1-2% of a total audience. For Lady Gaga, using a total audience of at least 500 million unique members (in mid-2010 total views of her three most viewed videos was over 1 billion), her 10 million plus followers is right in line.
Why This is Good to Know
It paints clear expectations for any social media effort. To get to 10 million followers, an established brand needs to reach 50 to 100 times more people than that.
No doubt, social media makes it easier to reach people and easier for people to engage with your brand. But it is not a panacea for growing your market. That, still requires having something special that people want.
Why Does this Matter for Project Management
1.Technology doesn’t change human behavior. Project management software or other tools facilitate and expand our actions, but they don’t change the fundamentals of how we act.
2. Projects are all about people. It remains critically important to understand people (see Theory of Constraints) to manage and design the right processes for your projects.
There are multiple channels, multiple tools, different ways you can communicate with them: email, phone, text, Twitter, Yammer, Skype, video conference, etc.
But there is only one path.
It connects two people, them and you, together. No matter how many channels or media you use it is always going to be about that one and one. It is always about you and another person.
Don’t forget that there’s a person there. It’s a human relationship.
For example, a marketer could run a time series of when their advertisement showed on TV , then see if it impacted the search volume for terms associated with their product. They could then correlate that against actual sales volume to see how much of the advertising was spent educating people vs driving sales.
It can also be used to create all sorts of nonsense.
For example, I ran a time series of the daily close of the S&P 500 stock index. The most tightly correlated search term was “Microsoft clip art.” Correlation is definitely not causation. I then ran it with a lag, groping for a theory on the relation between putting together PowerPoint presentations and bullish sentiment. Alas, also nonsense (plus the minimum lag is one week, which is too large for daily closes).
To use the tool properly, you need a Theory of Search as it relates to whatever subject matter you’re studying. The theory is what ties together the data.
Knowing that one side of the data set is always going to be search terms, as a general principle you could say that Google Correlate is best used for tracking the spread of ideas among people who use Google.
The data can be powerful or it can be more noise in an otherwise clear analysis. It all depends on the theory, the framework, the context in which the data lives.
Bringing this around to daily work life, we create and receive a lot of information every day about the work we do and project’s in which we’re involved. To be helpful, that information needs to live in a theory, in a framework, about work.
Without a theory, without a framework, all the data generated (in meetings, reports and project management tools) can fast become noise. The good news is that there is a theory of work -it is easily accessible and doesn’t require a Ph.D. to understand.
Project management is a Theory of Work.
Project management is a framework of how people work together on projects and expend resources to achieve a particular goal. It explains what data to monitor and how to use that information to improve processes.
Use project management as a skeleton on which to hang your information and as a guide to determine what information you need. You can accelerate your understanding of how to get things done more efficiently (and maybe even cut out some unnecessary meetings).
Manage Better
"Vertabase 5.0 has great new features. You guys definitely listen to your customers."
We are so pleased to see the reception the latest version is getting and the kinds of improvements our customers are seeing in the way they do projects.
Here is link to the Release Notes and related information.
Let us know if you'd like to be upgraded or schedule a demo of Vertabase 5.0 to evaluate it.
Contact your Vertabase representative or, you can always let me know directly.
Can Lady Gaga teach us something about project management? How about Google? The articles below use pop-culture and high-tech analogies to discuss project management truths, with a dash of common sense thrown in.
Here's to good projects,
-Mark
Noteworthy
We are proud to announce that our own Mark Phillips has been chosen as the kick-off speaker for a new session of the successful Shifting Gears program in Michigan. The program is being rolled-out to the entire State of Michigan with support from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.Learning from Lady Gaga and her 10 Million followers
Lady Gaga has over 10 million twitter followers.That number makes other brands salivate - and jealous.
They want those kind of numbers. They’d be happy with a fraction of those numbers.
Those numbers, though, are in-line with her total reach, her level of exposure and the way people interact with media.
Human Behavior is a Constant
As mentioned in my presentation on social media, people’s behavior seems to be a constant regardless of the technology used. 80% of all a person’s phone calls are to the same people. 80% of all Skype calls are to the same people. The medium changed, the technology changed, but human behavior does not.
Lady Gaga’s numbers are no different. They are generally consistent with the levels of engagement across other media e.g. the percentage of an audience that calls into a talk radio show or writes letters to an editor of a newspaper.
Anecdotally, this number tends to be 1-2% of a total audience. For Lady Gaga, using a total audience of at least 500 million unique members (in mid-2010 total views of her three most viewed videos was over 1 billion), her 10 million plus followers is right in line.
Why This is Good to Know
It paints clear expectations for any social media effort. To get to 10 million followers, an established brand needs to reach 50 to 100 times more people than that.
No doubt, social media makes it easier to reach people and easier for people to engage with your brand. But it is not a panacea for growing your market. That, still requires having something special that people want.
Why Does this Matter for Project Management
1.Technology doesn’t change human behavior. Project management software or other tools facilitate and expand our actions, but they don’t change the fundamentals of how we act.
2. Projects are all about people. It remains critically important to understand people (see Theory of Constraints) to manage and design the right processes for your projects.
Forget the Tool - Communication is About Relationships
There is one and only one communication path between you and another person.There are multiple channels, multiple tools, different ways you can communicate with them: email, phone, text, Twitter, Yammer, Skype, video conference, etc.
But there is only one path.
It connects two people, them and you, together. No matter how many channels or media you use it is always going to be about that one and one. It is always about you and another person.
Don’t forget that there’s a person there. It’s a human relationship.
Using Google Correlate to Explain Project Management as a
Theory of Work
Google launched a new tool in labs called Google Correlate. It allows you to track how well a time series of data correlates with specific search terms in Google.For example, a marketer could run a time series of when their advertisement showed on TV , then see if it impacted the search volume for terms associated with their product. They could then correlate that against actual sales volume to see how much of the advertising was spent educating people vs driving sales.
It can also be used to create all sorts of nonsense.
For example, I ran a time series of the daily close of the S&P 500 stock index. The most tightly correlated search term was “Microsoft clip art.” Correlation is definitely not causation. I then ran it with a lag, groping for a theory on the relation between putting together PowerPoint presentations and bullish sentiment. Alas, also nonsense (plus the minimum lag is one week, which is too large for daily closes).
To use the tool properly, you need a Theory of Search as it relates to whatever subject matter you’re studying. The theory is what ties together the data.
Knowing that one side of the data set is always going to be search terms, as a general principle you could say that Google Correlate is best used for tracking the spread of ideas among people who use Google.
The data can be powerful or it can be more noise in an otherwise clear analysis. It all depends on the theory, the framework, the context in which the data lives.
Bringing this around to daily work life, we create and receive a lot of information every day about the work we do and project’s in which we’re involved. To be helpful, that information needs to live in a theory, in a framework, about work.
Without a theory, without a framework, all the data generated (in meetings, reports and project management tools) can fast become noise. The good news is that there is a theory of work -it is easily accessible and doesn’t require a Ph.D. to understand.
Project management is a Theory of Work.
Project management is a framework of how people work together on projects and expend resources to achieve a particular goal. It explains what data to monitor and how to use that information to improve processes.
Use project management as a skeleton on which to hang your information and as a guide to determine what information you need. You can accelerate your understanding of how to get things done more efficiently (and maybe even cut out some unnecessary meetings).
ComputerUser Magazine
"Streamlining Project Management Software"
We believe in delivering powerful project management tools that are easy-to-use and that actually will be used. There are a lot of bells and whistles in the project management toolbox that nobody ever uses and that become a graveyard for good intentions to get better organized. We avoid those distractions and concentrate on the features in our project management solution that can make a real difference in how you do your work.
Webbed Marketing
"Everyone from the CEO to an intern can use Vertabase. Screen layouts are intuitive & easy to follow. They have a visual appeal. Everything is easy to comprehend."
"Everyone from the CEO to an intern can use Vertabase. Screen layouts are intuitive & easy to follow. They have a visual appeal. Everything is easy to comprehend."
