Why you should add “bottle service” to your menu

To:EVERYONE
From: President
Subject: URGENT: read this right now.

If you get an email marked “urgent” from your supervisor, do you immediately comply with the directive?

Some of you will, some of you won’t. If you’re in a workgroup, that’s a problem. If you don’t have uniform response to how you prioritize things, how will your brand provide consistent service? What is an emergency to one person is a “I’ll get to it when I can” to another. That’s one reason hospitals are so stressful for visitors. Try caring for a loved one in a hospital and pressing the call button and waiting – very tough. Your priority is not the priority of some of the nursing or other medical staff. They have to manage multiple priorities and relative importance, not absolute importance.

The reason we often get in trouble is a very normal combination of time management, differing priorities, differing motivations, and differing ambition and/or attitudes. Read the rest of this entry »

IT managers – how much testing is enough?

How much testing do you need to do? The “do you expect me to test every single application?” reply is a natural reaction when someone blames you after you work on their computer. Explaining to them that you can’t test all the permutations in a reasonable amount of time isn’t really what they want or need to hear. You’re not clairvoyant, you don’t know exactly how they are going to use the computer and the software. Most IT folks do one of these four steps: Read the rest of this entry »