Many people act as if they believe there is a problem, the rest of us should simply believe them. I had a colleague who said, “A problem on your part does not make an emergency on mine.” It stuck with me because I tend to want to solve problems for people. I’d help with the…
Your workplace design goals should not be about “flexibility” or “collaboration” or “productivity”, it should be focused on supporting the many needs of the business #WorkplaceWednesday
I expect there are going to be a few people that disagree with this title. Flexibility and collaboration and productivity have been buzzwords for corporate real estate designs for a decade now. They’ve become so ingrained in our thinking that we forget that these are means to an end, not the end itself. A workplace…
If you think in silos, you will get half-assed solutions
Silos are what happens when people think about their piece of the world in isolation. When real estate groups build a workplace based on what will look good in an industry magazine, they are operating in a silo because they aren’t taking into account the needs of the business. When IT releases a new version…
Downtime should be a feature of the process, not a bug
Downtime is a word that many people associate with unproductivity. If you are not actively working on something for the company, you are stealing money from the company. This is the premise behind the “lost productivity” articles that land every March discussing people who watch the tournament during the workday. This is the same premise…
There is no workplace design or philosophy that will work perfectly without aligning with your corporate culture
Everyone has an opinion on the flexible workplace trend taking place these days. Go look and you’ll be inundated fairly quickly. Most of the articles are negative from people who are personally impacted but have no experience in corporate real estate or business productivity generally. Hot-desking, flex working, hoteling, agile, desk booking, coworking are all…
…and then one day you discover the best use of your time is no longer writing scripts to analyze data.
This brief story starts on an optimistic Saturday. Computer in front of me, I sit down to begin improving a particular analysis that leverages a large amount of data. The original script was one that I had written 7 months before. It simply needed to be given a bit more detail and depth. How hard…
Having comfort with financial analysis is a CRE must-have skillset
I find it interesting how finance is thought of by many people in the world of business. I encounter many people that look at numbers with horror. Ask them to identify costs and benefits and they freeze up. In my experience there are four big groups of financial stereotypes in the business world: Ask the…
3 most common causes of CRE technology failures
If you are reading this, it’s probably because you are deep into our little CRE world, trying to better understand CRE technology generally, or you have gotten very, very lost on the internet. Welcome, no matter who you are. One thing we all have in common, no matter how you got here, is that we…
Do you know the difference between Platforms, Products, and Projects?
Delivery starts with understanding the level you are working at. You cannot deliver a product without having a series of projects. You cannot treat a platform like a product or a project like a platform. They are different things that act in different ways. If this seems intuitive, you’re either confused about it or one…
Stop using fuzzy language in all of your many communications
Fuzzy language is easy to fall back on. Efficient optimization of language is a strategic goal for all organizations /s. Let’s try again… Fuzzy language is easy to fall back on. When you have a short amount of time to write something, the easiest words to use are the ones that have fuzzy meaning. Optimize…