Let's face it - stuff breaks. Entropy and Murphy's Law apply to the virtual world just as they do to the physical world. It doesn't matter if there is an elegant piece of code wrapped up with clear naming conventions, adhering to standards and optimized for performance running on a shiny server hosted to the world, eventually it is going to fail due to a variety of factors including add-ons, installs, part failure, outages and upgrades to products, operating systems, browsers and equipment for all hardware and IP assets. It's part of life for software and IT professionals.

Consultants, especially Environmental Planners, have to balance many factors and entities to accomplish their work. They must commit to their clients to provide solutions to water resource planning, redevelopment and capitol improvement projects while considering the site specific setting's physical, chemical and biological factors and scientific, technical and engineering factors when taking on a project.

Marketing and Media Consultants encounter the same problems time and time again - communicating messaging, branding, strategic segmentation, competitive analysis and effective calls to action into a comprehensive value proposition for advertising or showcasing that is clearly understood both internally and externally for clients.

Universally across every healthcare network - administrators, physicians, hospitals, healthcare providers in clinics, and homecare agencies and post care facilities poor communication and planning are occurring in clinical and business operations leading to projects that are overdue and over budget.

"A good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." - George S. Patton

Patton is trying to say that there is a point of diminishing returns on any large effort where the benefit of completing all pieces is more costly and time consuming than getting something done now.

It's a question we hear all the time. By far, the greatest drain on project timelines involves ramp-up, interpretation, assumptions, corrections, and resetting the goals as the time for full execution dwindles. People engaging other people via some third party medium like software is the real challenge.

What if the vague planning process was pinpointed with precise checklists that were broken down to team members so everyone has clear expectations and only posts information in relevant areas?

To learn more about the book go to 42 Rules for Successful Collaboration

TECHNOLOGY
Using Collaboration Technology to Improve Communication

Too often project management and collaboration companies will focus on the amount of time it takes to assign, respond, accept or decline and complete a task within a project with email responses. When you breakdown the total amount of time spent in meetings, planning, questions, roadblocks, bottlenecks, scope creep and assumptions, managers will find that the productivity gains can be realized in the communication or human interaction rather than a overly complicated, feature-rich, software application.

As millions of people compose a new email each day, they pause briefly at the subject line to try to summarize the content for retrieval later or worse yet, they leave it blank. As the back and forth reply threads continue, the subject rarely matches the ending content or conclusions that are reached causing further confusion later. PlanDone keeps the comments neatly tabbed under the original task subject page so that any relevant discussion can be referred to later without a search for the subject of the original email thought.

You have seen these people are all around us (and may be one yourself) - they are not present in the physical world, but rather are doing that cell phone pacing, teetering march while looking down with a pivot/spin move on the corner or worse yet, cutting us off in traffic while connected somewhere else. You can look straight into their eyes, and they will not see you. Some expect some sort of nodding praise that their multi-tasking is a sign of productivity. Next time, ask them what they are working on simultaneously right now.