When was the last time you played hooky?
Once, on one of those spectacular fall days where Mother Nature offers up the perfect combination of sunshine, warmth, humidity and an abundance of color, my wife and I did just that: we played hooky. We decided on a road trip and headed away from the hustle and bustle of the big city to explore rural America – no constraints and just the following rules: “No phones & let’s enjoy”.
Tweet
I was out for another bike ride this past weekend and I noticed once again how differently the drivers in Virginia and New York behave. In Virginia, drivers seem to stay in the far right of their lane, hugging the white line. In New York, the opposite is true: drivers seem to prefer the center yellow line and leave as much space as possible on the right.
If projects, especially large-scale projects, are your business, you know that there is a certain amount of risk involved in getting to the finish line. So many things can go wrong! The wrong specs or plans can be inadvertently approved; the budget can be revised by a person without authorization; an outdated version of a file can be followed; work can be done without the proper permits; communication can break down among team members; cost increases can sneak up; certain people can be left out of hearing new, critical information; due dates might pass without notice; and unavoidable delays might cause changes that wreak havoc unless they are monitored and compensated for correctly.
It seems that with every new TV commercial, automobile technology makes another huge leap. Everything from automatic parallel parking, radar-assisted cruise control, back-cameras with audio warning, blind spot detection, and foot-activated rear door openers are now available.
So many people assume that critical project data is accessible and safe because different people on the team claim that “they have it covered” or “I know where it is.” However, in many cases, the data is not really centralized.
Documents are scattered in different people’s personal folders, their desktop or somewhere in their email Inbox, or they consist of just a plain piece of paper. All of this means that the data is really sitting on multiple information islands. Scattered information happens when people do not work in a centralized program that manages all of the data for them. What if someone leaves for the day or forever? How do others find all the information they need? Usually with a frantic search punctuated by cries of “where is it??”
Tweet
