by Staff Writer It’s long been the stuff of science fiction, but increasingly, the practical side of artificial intelligence (AI) is very real. On the consumer side, personal assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana help automate the simplest of tasks. Meanwhile, AI adoption is also accelerating within your workspace.
According to a recent Spiceworks survey of more than 500 IT professionals, nearly a quarter of large companies have already implemented digital assistants and another 40% expect to follow suit by 2019. For small and medium businesses, that number is closer to 25%. It’s virtually indisputable that AI (in the form of natural-language processing, machine learning, and deep learning) has tremendous potential to reduce costs and increase productivity for the enterprise. But its true impact comes to life when combined with human ingenuity. by Diana Ramos Whether you're renovating or adding to an existing location, or constructing an entirely new one, properly planning for a construction project is a tremendous undertaking. Even the most experienced program managers struggle with setting proper expectations for construction projects given the unforeseen hiccups that can occur.
There’s no way to be 100 percent prepared for the realities of a construction project. Contractors may encounter changes in site conditions and need to adjust plans, or there might be sudden shortages in important building materials. But that shouldn’t stop owners from making their plan as watertight as possible, and using a reliable software platform, such as Smartsheet, to help them execute. Ensure you and your contractors are hitting your targeted budget by dividing the process into these four key phases. by Staff Writer Have you done anything different this past week? Something you’ve never done before? It might be something as simple as talking to a coworker you haven’t met before, or trying a new way to complete a task. Or maybe something bigger, like taking a training course on a topic you’ve been wanting to learn more about, or signing up to speak at a conference. If the answer is no, you might be stuck in your comfort zone. Staying within your comfort zone also means you aren’t learning new skills, which can lead to career stagnation.
by Stephen Danos The benefits of building and maintaining a culture of quality can be measured in dollars. According to a 2014 study, companies that emphasize quality, and ultimately make fewer mistakes, can save an estimated $67 million per every 5,000 employees.
At a time when customers increasingly use social media and online reviews to make informed purchasing decisions, the pressure is increasing for businesses to continually raise the quality of their offerings. This emphasis on quality — combined with pressures to respond to changing demands at speed — can lead to more mistakes for companies that lack a clearly defined doctrine of quality. So, how do effective leaders build and sustain a culture of quality — without sacrificing speed? Here are some ways business leaders can get started. by Stephen Danos Many powerful business leaders no longer leave their work at the office. Instead, they’ve intentionally embraced work-life integration over work-life balance, and expect their employees to follow suit.
Work-life integration is a more harmonious approach, entwining career and personal activities so that professionals can make decisions wherever they are in order to execute on business objectives. Basically, if you are productive, excited, and joyous at work, the thought is you will bring that home with you, and vice versa. For those who embrace work-life integration, here are some tips and tools that free you up to move faster on higher impact work throughout your day. by Stephen Danos Fast, informed decisions are the backbone of successful companies. The ideal speed of decision making is analogous to an 800-meter run, the controlled sprint where participants need to establish their position and pace once the starter pistol fires. Elite runners train rigorously to shave milliseconds off their time.
by Stephen Danos In order to gain a competitive advantage in today’s business world, companies need to make speed a habit and accelerate workflows, all while avoiding the Red Queen Effect: working faster and harder to stay in the same place.
As pressure to innovate grows, companies need to continuously improve on their products and processes, taking in to account internal observations and customer feedback. This means being proactive and, like experienced chess players, thinking several steps ahead to compete without sacrificing quality. The combination of a clear foundational vision, organizational alignment, and emphasis on speed allows business leaders to build successful, cross-functional teams. Once these are firmly in place, businesses can run faster and smarter. by Stephen Danos When leaders move with speed, whether in decision-making or in running efficient meetings, the benefits can spread throughout an entire organization.
Studies show that leaders ranked in the top 10 percent based on their leadership speed see positive results in the attitudes of their direct reports — 63 percent of whom say they would do everything possible to make their company successful. That’s according to the book Speed: How Leaders Accelerate Successful Execution, in which the authors propose that there is no statistical downside to speed, as long as leaders take the time to periodically pause and reassess whether their efforts are aligned to their organization's overall strategy. Business leaders who avoid these five common pitfalls can motivate their teams to execute more quickly — and at a higher level. by Stephen Branstetter I covet more time: more time for important work, more time with my spouse and kids, more time with friends, more time to work out and get healthy.
I used to hate creating weekly status reports. While important, they felt like a waste of time. Often, my status reports were simply a manual process of collecting data that already exists elsewhere mixed with tracking down people for further clarification. So I started playing around with ways to simplify the process and save time using Smartsheet. Automated actions are simple solutions that save me and my team time, reduce the number of status meetings, create more consistency in the frequency of our reports, and improve data quality. And these benefits free us up to focus on more rewarding projects and less on manual, repetitive tasks. by Stephen Danos How often do you make bad decisions? According to a McKinsey & Company survey, 72 percent of senior-level leaders believe that bad decisions are “about as frequent as good ones” — par for the course across their organization. As a company grows, apparently so does the potential cost of poor decision making. At the enterprise level, these undesired outcomes tend to stem from problems caused by increased organizational complexity, murky accountability, and an overabundance of data that cause decision makers to suffer from analysis paralysis.
Getting on the path to better decision making starts with recognizing and addressing these challenges — often with the help of the right enterprise-grade work-execution tool. |