DaChispa

Churches should be free.

TriciaF — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:33:49 +0000

I was really shocked today to find that it costs £15 to visit Westminster Abbey. Outrageous. There isn’t really anything else to say.

Old tricks, new dogs?

TriciaF — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:39:59 +0000

How to give time back to your team

The above post talks about a great idea to make better use of expertise of all kinds by outsourcing tasks such as designing and creating presentations and other administration functions.

I seem to remember something similar from working at Texaco when we had administrative support centres that started out doing typing and administration tasks across teams and then took over publishing and presentation responsibilities. This was over 15 years ago so not a new idea, but one which could be creatively adapted to the current ‘do more with less’ mantra that the recession has produced.

Take your rubbish home

TriciaF — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:30:52 +0000

This sort of thing really bugs me – people throwing their rubbish into the lake which is a local beauty spot. How difficult is it to take a can home? What bugs me more though, is that I actually like the photo.

Change, memories and family holidays

TriciaF — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:24:36 +0000

I’ve been going to the same place on a family holiday for over 30 years – and for a long time, you knew exactly what to expect. Now it seems that every year something changes. Despite, or maybe because of this, I have fond memories from 20 years ago which have gone down in family mythology – but no similarly epic stories from the past few years. Do our memories get less vivid as we get older, or do we just do less interesting things? Having said that, I realised that I do have more recent holiday stories – but they largely revolve around emergency hospital visits. Memories – but maybe not ones I want to keep.

My memories are mostly of people, but there are some places that don’t change. Our ‘back beach’ and the great sunsets are among these – this picture captures the memory from this year, but it it timeless.

Don’t just ask the expert…listen to them

TriciaF — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 10:53:36 +0000

I had a problem accessing my wireless connection recently so rang my service provider for help. I had a very clear idea of what I thought it wasn’t so kept ignoring the suggestion of the technical guy on the end of the line by telling him ‘no it can’t be that because it hasn’t changed’. Eventually, with gentle persistence, he got me to do what he asked and, lo and behold, the problem was resolved. This was clearly a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing and is a microcosm of another issue that I see all the time in business. We bring in an expert to help solve a problem or deliver a solution and then only implement it if it fits our pre-defined concept of what we are expecting. Maybe if we didn’t frame the problem in the form of the answer we think we want and really listened to what they were saying, we might get better results.

I have learnt a valuable lesson – listen to the experts. They usually have more experience than you and can actually be right!

A novel team building approach

TriciaF — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:24:08 +0000

I went to an event recently to promote ‘The Rock Dynamic’ http://www.rockdynamic.com/ who offer an intriguing approach to team building. They ask the team to create a rock group – complete with publicist and technical support as well as the performers. No musical ability is required and everyone starts on a level playing field. The outcome seems to be that people not only re-discover how their team works, but also surface individual strengths that more formal team building exercises don’t.

After all, everyone at some stage, dreams of being a rock star.

Trip down memory lane

TriciaF — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:31:19 +0000

It is astonishing the amount of technical change I have seen in my working life. I vividly remember the first time I was introduced to email. Suddenly I could get messages to someone immediately and scheduling meetings was easy. Human behaviour was still much the same challenge though – to ensure that I could schedule meetings using the ‘new’ technology, I had to take some draconian measures to ensure that everyone’s diary was up to date. This largely involved booking important meetings based on what people’s diaries said. If they were incorrect, they had to cancel the un recorded meetings – people soon got the message.

However, the more times change, the more they stay the same. Administrators still manage their boss’s in tray – electronically now – and I still see the same sort of problems, for example:

- chasing down the corridors has been replaced by the blackberry call
- piles of paper waiting to be filed has been replaced by Word documents hidden away on C: drives or personal storage devices and not in electronic repositories
- the paperless office is still a ways off – people still like to print papers to read and annotate – although environmental changes of attitude are having an effect

However, technology is at the forefront of automating for bad human habits – electronic filing is increasingly becoming seamless and the introduction of better e-readers might spell the end of the reign of paper. Time will tell. I recall that I had a great deal of difficulty introducing the first PC network into one company – few outside of the IT department could see the benefit. It seems crazy now, but who is to say what current pre-conception will be seen as short sighted in a few years time.

Twitter Tools – why was I shocked?

TriciaF — Mon, 31 May 2010 16:03:52 +0000

Inspired following my last post, I did a quick search for Twitter tools to see what was available out there. I don’t know why I was suprised that there are so many, it is a pervasive tool. Anyway, here are a few links that I found that list some examples:

-Twitter toolbox on mashable.com

-A SAP blog – but these Powerpoint Twitter tools can be used without SAP

-This twittip site might be a bit technical, but worth a look

I think this is only the tip of the iceberg….

Don’t jump if you click through…

TriciaF — Sat, 29 May 2010 15:21:26 +0000

I experienced a good example of how someone gets more traffic to their website recently – this post actually demonstrates Lee Gilbert’s success in promoting it as I am writing it as a direct result of the ‘freebies’ that he offered in return for registering and filling out a survey. I registered because I was interested in what his report ‘The Secrets of Using Social Networking to Promote You and Your Business’ might have to say. It was useful – I summarise the Twitter tools he talks about below (click to enlarge).

I guess the point is not that I got a lot of new information about social networking (although I did get some), but he actually demonstrated what he was talking about by getting me to his site and then to talk about it to others because it was useful. Find out more – don’t jump if you have your speakers on, his video starts almost as soon as you hit the site.

A real knowledge map

TriciaF — Sun, 23 May 2010 19:14:06 +0000

I went into an estate agent yesterday and was hit between the eyes by the simplest example of knowledge at the point of need I have ever seen. There, on the wall, at least 2 metres high and wide, was a local map of the area – almost done as a piece of art. How incredibly useful is that? Not just so that you know where you are going, but to give a client a quick overview of the area in which a property is located. Brilliantly simple.