31 May 2012

Lessons from Terminal 5 project

Attended interesting talk by Dr Tim Brady of the Centre of Innovation Management at the University of Brighton.

Key points about Terminal 5 project:

  • Massive project (biggest in Europe at the time)
  • Set up in multidisciplinary groups to encourage innovation rather than blaming other areas
  • Delivered on time and budget - a major achievement for such a project
  • First week was then a disaster
  • Key lessons: you cannot test for everything so build in some slack (at T5, they were so confident that they started off at almost full capacity.  Some staff and passengers could not find car parks so were late, some staff could not then log on to systems as some test data left in - as little spare capacity, minor problems then caused major problems).
Much more about this project is available here.

Key general points

Project risk can be broken down into 3 main types:

Structural risk:
It's a big project - risk reduced by good planning and control.

Socio-political risk:
It has people involved - stakeholder relationships become very important to manage expectations and keep people working together rather than 'blame shifting'.

Emerging Complexity:
The unknown unknown.  This can be reduced by sharing information eg using web to have single master plan rather than some people working on out of date paper plans.  Need to be aware of this risk and have people looking for problems with capacity (resource and time)  built in to deal with problems.




10 May 2012

Business Process Outsourcing

A short article on Business Process Outsourcing.  I already work with one company where invoices are scanned in one place, the bookkeeping is done somewhere else and the business is run in a third location.  With tools like Evernote and Clearbooks, I think this will become increasingly common as it saves time and money as well as improving record keeping.

How to better manage your 'back office' needs and capitalize on talent:

'via Blog this'

09 May 2012

Facebook to Marketers, It’s Time for a Click to Action | TechCrunch

This article might be a bit 'over the top' for many smaller organisations.  It's good to know what bigger marketing departments are thinking about this channel though.
Facebook to Marketers, It’s Time for a Click to Action | TechCrunch:

'via Blog this'

05 May 2012

03 May 2012

Employment Market Insight

Key skills in demand are Management Accounting, Cost Saving, System Improvement, Communication and a Rounded Commercial Skill Set according to a Webinar by Michael Page Finance and Gaapweb.  It's good to be able to tick off the whole list.