Many companies, my employer included, uses spreadsheets on a more or less consistent basis in order to track such things as vacation planning and KPI reporting. For me, as an employee, keeping track of these spreadsheets can, from time to time, be a bit annoying. Much to my surprise, at some point in the past few years, Microsoft added a pin item feature to MS Office.
Leave a CommentThoughts on many things Posts
I’ve been using Adobe Premiere pro for a while now, but am finding that I can’t really defend the cost of Adobe Creative Cloud. While having multicamera support has been very nice, the product quite simply is cost prohibitive for me, especially as it really only offers a single feature I need; the ability to sync clips based on their audio. For my needs, iMovie will suffice.
Leave a CommentAs you may or may not know, I graduated from the Open University with a B.Sc. last year, and attended a frankly pretty amazing graduation ceremony in March. In a conversation just after that, someone asked me “So, who is the typical OU student?” When I simply answered “Yes”, they were a bit confused, and asked me to expand on that.
Leave a CommentLast week, I defined the three KPIs I believe are what you need to understand how well your support department is operating. Defining them, however, is just part of the job; if you don’t understand what they are telling you, you might as well not bother measuring at all. Let’s look at each in turn:
Leave a CommentMetrics – often referred to as “Key Performance Indicators” or simply “KPIs” – are a necessity, regardless of your field. If nothing else, it’s nigh impossible to say anything meaningful about performance without them, and improving the performance is turned from something quite achievable. to a Sisyphean task.
Leave a CommentI hold that any successful business venture must operate on three levels; the operational, the tactical, and the strategic. These dimensions must also be kept in mind when making plans. There is nothing revolutionary in the underlying ideas, but I think it is worthwhile to define the terms, to bring about a (more or less) unified understanding of them.
Leave a CommentI have previously written about my frustration with always requiring experience when hiring. Now, I’m not saying that requiring experience doesn’t have its place – it certainly does. What I am saying is that listing it as a requirement should be justified by the needs for what the successful candidate will be expected to deliver, and that employers need to think long and hard about what they must have from their new employee, and what they can take the time to teach.
Leave a CommentIn the past year or so, I have been using Twitter a fair amount, and I have found that, despite all of the systemic issues of bullying and harassment, there are also plenty of communities from which to learn, exchange ideas, and commiserate. From time to time, I need to find a specific tweet, and have taken to using a few searches, filters, and operators to find what I need:
Leave a CommentSince it’s been a few years since I wrote about my podcasting diet, and since easter is coming up at the end of the week, I thought I’d take a new look at what podcasts I subscribe to. I still use Downcast for podcasts; it’s been working well for me, and I see no need to replace it with something else. The podcasts I listen to has changed a fair bit over the years; some have been removed, and others have been added. Here’s the list as it currently stands:
1 CommentWhen you work product support on a specific product, you need to have a solid grasp of how to set up the product, as well as the best practices for making things work as you want and expect. This was certainly the case for me when I worked for FotoWare. One of these best practices was not to use the Domain Users group to set permissions.
Leave a CommentI am a big believer in the principle of putting information out there, for the world to see. This blog is part of pursuing the goal of achieving just that. It made sense to me, then, to ensure that the data from my weather station would be made available to as many people as possible.
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