My Son, My Appraising Manager and Project Management

I am very fond of my son. Who is not :-) Well,  being too fond of them may lead you to irritate them too. When my wife and I sit together for a chat along with my son (just 3 years now), I observed one interesting thing.  He always goes and sits next to my wife more than me. I am not jealous btw, honest. He comes to me but moves away faster than probably he wants to. This made me think. I later realized that I was probably irritating him by cuddling him and not letting him set the agenda :-) Later I stopped doing that and did not even look at what he was doing.  Hey, now I found that he increased the average time spent "near" me.

Now 7 to 9 year back I had a comment from my first appraising manager. I asked what is your feedback about my performance and his reply was, I do not have much feedback, you are doing just fine. I do not want to give feedback and disturb your rhythm. Well I am happy for that.

Got the relationship with Project Management ? If a team is doing well, do not change the working equations. Its very hard to get a set of people to work together on the long run. If the team is doing well, and there are big plans for the long term, then do not tinker with the team. Just let the Project Manager function with independence.

updates for business critical functions vs twitter updates

I have observed many times people are able to make twitter updates with amazing regularity. Stress here is on "regularity" not quantity. But I have seen others who always have an excuse of not having "time" to keep the CRM updated.

Or to put it in another way, it has been hard to make the team do a "business critical" function like keeping the "sales CRM updated" when compared with a "socializing" function like writing personal comments on twitter !

What makes this possible ? I am sure employees mean well. So ...

Well twitter has twitterfox that makes tweeting a breeze. I guess the main reason for this lack of enthusiasm among employees to update a "business critical" function is lack of usable interfaces or in other words the drudgery of existing mechanisms.

So reduce this drudgery and make them more productive by giving them cool widgets and interfaces to your million dollar CRM investments.