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4 steps to make your business intelligence teams more relevant

Andrew Wells and Kathy Chiang Business Management, Services & Risk Management

The world of analytics is changing. Self-service analytical tools like Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are enabling business users to perform reporting and analytics on their own with little to no support from the IT organization. This trend has evolved due to several factors. Organizations are flooded with data and IT organizations are not able to keep up; easier to use business intelligence tools make it more efficient for business users to directly create their reports rather than go through IT for a project; and IT organizations’ analytical projects can take several months when a business needs this information in weeks.

Take the lead to sidestep herd mentality

Bob Kowalski Business Management, Services & Risk Management

When Merriam-Webster added 300 words to its Scrabble dictionary recently, the company that made its name in language played directly to the fans of the popular board game. A couple of the additions also pointed out a trend of follow-the-leader. Among the new words usable in the game were "sheeple" and "hivemind." Outside of Scrabble, though, those words can lead to a herd mentality among both leaders and teams. You might have experienced those terms in the workplace, if not verbally then visually.

Facility managers struggle to see ROI of building management technology

Scott E. Rupp Facilities & Grounds

More than 100 energy and facilities executives were interviewed recently to gauge how their firms are using technology and the challenges they face in realizing value. The research showed some in-depth insights from multiple industry sectors, but the responses came primarily from large enterprises with more than $500 million in annual revenue. The focus was on the direction of their facilities management strategies, what technologies they are deploying to optimize energy and facilities processes, and the top barriers to realizing expected value from these deployments.

Drive this way: Ride-hailing increases traffic fatalities, working paper…

Seth Sandronsky Transportation Technology & Automotive

A new working paper from academics at Rice University and the University of Chicago finds that ride-hailing services correlate to a rise in traffic fatalities among passengers and pedestrians. "The increase in accidents appears to persist (and even increase) over time," write Livia Hanyi Yi and Yael V. Hochberg of Rice University and John M. Barrios at the University of Chicago in "The Cost of Convenience: Ridesharing and Traffic Fatalities."

Stop email from secretly undermining your success

Catherine Iste Business Management, Services & Risk Management

How awesome is email? With it, we can work remotely, delegate, share files, manage teams, stay productive while traveling and more. Yet as useful as it is, managing email can also waste time, challenge communication and foster bad habits. Here are a few simple ways to ensure email does not secretly undermine you or your team’s success. For example, with email, we can respond to anyone, anytime and anywhere; presumably, this makes us more efficient.

Use this checklist before posting holiday ads on social media

Emma Fitzpatrick Marketing

By now, you've likely finished your holiday ads for social media — or perhaps you're putting the final touch on them. Either way, before you mark them done, do a quick check to make sure you’re reaching the right people. If you’re like most businesses, the bulk of your holiday advertising budget is allocated to social media. It’s no small chunk of change either. Marketers are planning to spend 25 percent of their entire annual ad budget to target shoppers just during the Thanksgiving weekend, according to 2018 Nanigans data.

Negotiating commercial leases: Focus on important issues

Dale Willerton and Jeff Grandfield Retail

For many commercial tenants, negotiating a good lease or lease renewal against an experienced agent or landlord can be a challenge. While an entrepreneur focuses on marketing and managing, savvy real estate agents and brokers are specialized salespeople. Their job is to sell tenants on leasing their location at the highest possible rental rate. Whether you are leasing a new location for the first time or negotiating a lease renewal for your business, here are two money-saving tips.

Applying an agile tool to make your proposal processes better

Maryann Lesnick Business Management, Services & Risk Management

We talk about it in our proposals. We know it works. Agile practitioners take it seriously and are diligent about its use. What is it? It’s the idea of using lessons learned from each proposal effort to improve our approach the next time. In the Agile Scrum world, they call it a retrospective. APMP best practices suggest that conducting a lessons-learned review on each major bid opportunity is a critical best practice. Lessons learned should be well-documented and stored for others to access and reference on future opportunities.

3 essential steps to avoiding leadership burnout

Catherine Iste Business Management, Services & Risk Management

Burnout does not always look like a heart attack, high blood pressure or weight gain. It is not only increased stress, loss of sleep or a caffeine requirement. While these physical symptoms may be the easiest to recognize, many of us have figured out ways to incorporate exercise and healthier habits into our routines thereby reducing the physical issues most commonly associated with burnout. In such cases, burnout may show up as a strained relationship, reduced free time or downtime, or daydreams of an off-the-grid escape vacation. The key is to understand what burnout looks like for us.

4 questions to strengthen team relationships

Deborah Ike Business Management, Services & Risk Management

What have you asked your team lately? As project managers, we have to ask about the progress and status of various tasks. However, we can also use questions to develop our team and our relationships with team members. For example, your project team is used to you asking them to finish a task or give you a status update. However, what if you turned things around for a moment and asked how you can help them? The key to this question is to listen carefully and work to fulfill their request if possible.

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