Good article about why people work round company enforced IT rules with good suggestions.

HP Blogs - Cloud and Shadow-IT: It is forbidden to forbid - The HP Blog Hub

Useful update on Eurozone problem

Bank ‘throws kitchen sink’ at credit problem - Telegraph

New web bite suffix implications

The article below talks about why applications for .com and .org replacements have been lower than expected and discusses how the changes will affect us all.
Tech - Companies

Electronic board reports

This article from a bank directors' briefing looks at electronic board meetings from a big company perspective, with lessons applicable to smaller businesses.

Key points:

• Looks at providing board reports on a web site rather that in a printed or emailed report
• Improved security is seen as advantage
• Allows sharing of parts of report 'as ready' rather than 'after last submission arrives'
• Directors are expected to read in full, before the meeting
• Cost for specialised board portal is about US$22,000 a year but I suspect for many smaller organisations pdf files on Yammer could make a workable alternative for free, by creating a group with access restricted to just the Board.

Cash and trade cycles

I'm a strong believer in trade cycles - what goes down must come up.  This article in Financial Management draws attention to the fact that increasing numbers of companies are sitting on piles of cash (well liquid assets on the overnight market anyway) and as soon as they have the confidence to spend it, the economy will be in for a steep take-off.

The big question is: when will that be?  The answer, especially with changes to the fundamentals like Euro problems, is not clear.  Economics works better with hindsight.

Are you an accountant or a problem-solver?

A good article that does more than discuss the stereotypes of the 'accountant' label.  Interesting about 'management boards' and the move away from desks to virtual workplaces.

Are you an accountant or a problem-solver?:

'via Blog this'

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.