Management Software Redefined – ManagePro

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What is management software and why should you even care?  The term sounds
kind of boring doesn’t it?  Google has a definition for it.  You may have a different
definition, or not even use the phrase at all.  But… what if there was a benefit for
you to redefine the concept as embodied in the software ManagePro.
Keep reading, I’ll try to make it brief and interesting.

First a quick snapshot of how Google looks at it.  Basically Google reflects it’s
definition of management software by what it prioritizes in organic listings.
And I think they have it all wrong.  Google’s definition by listings identifies
management software as a financial package with a  mini-ERP program.
This orientation focuses on management software as  tracking anything
financially based.  Very basically it is going to cover the  life cycle of creating,
selling, and receiving compensation for products and/or services.

Wikipedia doesn’t even have a category for management software, it directs you
right to project management software.  You’re in luck if you’re a project manager,
a performance manager or a task manager.  However if you’re just in management,
you have the same tools as your admin.

Management Software Redefined

How did we get to this point?  Imagine, you’re a manager, an executive… and
there doesn’t seem to be any widely known tools for what you do.

Do you find it strange that we don’t have a technology for the challenges presented
if you’re in the role of management?  Or is it that we feel that learning to use
anything more than our memory, verbal and writing skills is too much effort?

Here’s a thought.

What if most of what you and I do 90% of every day is managing something
that doesn’t have a direct price tag attached to it?  What if Google misses the
point.  What if the things you spend the most time on are things like that next
meeting,  the next email, the phone call, the opportunity embedded in the
customer comment, etc.  None of it has a direct price link or a financial price tag,
and yet that’s what we spend 90% of our time managing.

Don’t you think there should be management software that addresses what we
spend 90% o of our time managing?  Actually ManagePro does, but I’m trying to
make a point.

If you think about it, yes you need some type of “management software” to
track all those financial related materials and transactions.  But what about the
other 90% of what you do?

You see I think most of what we do at work in the 21^st century is all about
managing activities… and mostly we manage activities through people.
So we spend  a lot of time talking, writing, following-up, checking in, checking
back.  We spend our time managing activies from their inception as ideas, through
planning, coordiating and following-up.  And the majority of time we’re interacting
with and making that all happen through people, through others.

We certainly manage activities in support of getting to a financial based product
or transaction, but for the most part we managing people and activities, not the
products themselves.

I think management software needs to get redefined.

Management software needs to get redefined as centrally helping people in
management manage all the activities they oversee and the people who get them
done. Any other definition misses the mark. On the other hand, maybe you’ve
got a better term to describe this, than management software.  Whatever you
call it, and whether or not most managers admit or deny it, we can all manage
and lead more effectively with redefined management software tools.

Bottom Line:

90% of the time, people in management manage activities and the people who
get them done, not a product that has a price tag on it.  Yet, other than ManagePro,
I’ve never found a management software that actually tackles the things I have
to tackle in a given day whether I’m managing goals, projects, priorities, business
constraints or that daily calendar… all within a day.  Perhaps most people in
management don’t realize how expensive it is to work by voice, email, short
term memory and your scratch pad.

 

Thursday, May 5th, 2011
Posted in Management Software | 10 Comments »

Manager Software in your Brain and on the Screen

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Manager software, whether it’s connected by neurons in your brain, or electrons
and code on your screen, seems like it should do several things really well.
It should have:

- An easy to master juggling manual, along with
- A top, that no matter how fast it spins always stays upright,
- Loaded dice so that no matter how they land, # 1 always comes to the top, and
- A cloud catcher that sucks up murky diffuse globs of information, only loosely
connected at times, and condenses it into a stairway to heaven.

You have something like that don’t you? No?

I could say good manager software should boost or resource your thinking process.
It should allow you to organize, plan and follow-up on projects and supporting tasks,
goals and the people who make it happen.  But if I write it that way, it sounds kind of
flat, like marketing 101, doesn’t it?

I’m sitting here looking at the typical kinds of information that comes across my desk.
Information that someone who is a manager has to deal with daily, and I think how
much it represents such a crazy, more stressful than it needs to be, challenge.

Most of us don’t have the tools to readily absorb information and convert it into
an action plan that you can easily follow and track. Yet that’s the essense of
managing.  Take a look at the screen shot below.  It’s a web analyst’s report,
citing improvements we need to make to our site.  It’s a good example of what I
want to point out.

Scan it for a couple of seconds, then let me ask you a couple of questions, because
this is a very common format for information the manager software in our brain
has to deal with.

1. First of all you couldn’t really scan it effectively could you?  Your brain was
probably wondering what to focus on to  get it all in a couple of seconds.  Our
brains scream for some way to see it all in a sequence, a picture that makes sense.
Note that information as structured in the office products we all use – defies that process.

2. Did you notice how many sub projects and tasks were embedded in even the
first simple paragraph?  How many did you count?  How many did you remember?
If you were getting this report what would you have done with it… because reading
it doesn’t really make any of it move forward?

3. Let me list the tasks and emerging questions that pop up in the first paragraph.

1. All the blogs need to be assessed for what keywords are most appropriate to
their content, but then this is supposed to match up to their content category.
My brain starts immediately asking,
Q1.  So is the content category supposed to be one of the keywords in the blogs?
Q2.  What if the blog content is not a tight fit for the content category, then what?
Q3.  Then my brain is wondering “What’s the definition of similar keywords in
comparing one site to another.  Does that mean similar in my book, Google’s book,…
Q4.  I’m not supposed to mirror the referenced site, so… what does that mean
exactly I’m supposed to do. . .?  But hey, one site is a blog and the other
site is company site, with products and services, I wouldn’t know how to make
them mirrors of each other anyway, so what does it mean in this sequence?

Hey, are you still engaged? Starting to disengage yet? It’s hard to scan and make s
ense of all of this, isn’t it? And we haven’t even got out of the first paragraph yet.
While you’re reading it and somewhere, if your brain is engaged, there’s all these
questions coming up, and then we haven’t even switched to what you’re going to d
o about it, how you’re going to sequence it, what you’re going to do about this
before lunch today… you get the point, right?

Email and word documents quickly get too long, and with all the characters, your
brain doesn’t know what’s critical and what’s stuffing, so there’s all this extra
attention required.  Meanwhile word processing, as a way to relay information,
totally falls down when it comes to formulating a plan.

Why? Because you can’t connect next steps and actions easily enough.  Pretty
soon you’re on the next page and you’re trying to remember what was on the last.
There’s no visual map or diagram to tie it together; tie it into an actionable sequence.
See even this blog is too long.  You’re probably wondering, “Now what was the point?”

You then add phone calls, people walking into your office, dozens if not hundreds
of emails each day and it all starts to accumulate into this building muddle of
information which I find to be very challenging for us all to manage given the
software most of us have in our brain, not to mention our PC.

My point is that our brain manager software looks for connections and tie-ins
pretty quick.  If there’s a lot of information to absorb, unless we’re motivated
by needing to recite for a test or a task, we start disengaging actively, and move
into a monitoring phase, which results in weak action plans, lots of processing
and not much activity.  Or maybe it just results in one more information packed
email or IM or something to keep the dialogue moving, but sadly not moving that
much closer to an endpoint.

So this is one of the reasons I gravitated to ManagePro when I first found it 15 or
more years ago, and why I keep working on it.  I want it to both match up to my
brain’s needs and next challenge, e.g. support my brain manager software, and
support me actively in the external managing activities of planning, documenting
and achieving great results.

Most people I see are using tools that don’t do a great job of supporting their
internal manager software or external activities, but sure add to the information
and correspondence overload well.

Bottom Line:
There’s manager software in our brain that tries to make sense of it all, prioritize
and act on what’s next.  That’s the essence of managing.  Using standard manager
software tools, we don’t feed our brain information in a format that makes it
easy to work with. On top of that, most of us have management tools that only
add to the information clutter, not focus it into a plan and deliverables.  That’s
one of the best things ManagePro provides for me, because ultimately  no matter
how much information you need to get your arms around, you need to do
something, be able to track and follow-up, and gauge your process multiple times
a day– without it costing you and arm and a leg.  Let’s make managing easier and
use better management tools.  But maybe the first step is realizing that the
information age hasn’t caught up with what our brain needs yet.

 

Monday, May 2nd, 2011
Posted in Management Software | 7 Comments »