Andrew Filev
, Thursday, September 15, 2011
 Choosing the right move
Here comes another question – how can we better learn from the experience we get? Eric Ries, already mentioned above, uses an efficient way to tackle problems. I am talking about root-cause analysis or “five whys.”
Imagine that the problem you’ve faced has the same structure as a Russian doll. The “root cause” of it is hidden inside, and you have to remove several layers to get to it. Just as you take one doll out of another, you ask a question “Why did this happen?” five times. Each response takes you one layer deeper to the problem cause. The technique is quite easy, but when practiced regularly, it gives you a lot of great insights about what needs adjustment in your company. One of such insights is that there is always a process/human issue behind every technical one.
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Andrew Filev
, Wednesday, September 07, 2011
 Let the feedback direct you
John Wanamaker, considered by some to be the father of modern advertising, once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” By using carefully designed experiments, you can do a better job than Wanamaker. For example, all professional advertisers today know about conversion tracking and A/B testing. These are basic tools of the trade for specialists in marketing or advertising that enable them to evaluate the effect of every small change in banner ads, landing pages and e-mails. But this kind of testing can only answer tactical questions and normally doesn’t affect business strategy. Is it possible to make the whole business structure respond to this type of feedback?
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Andrew Filev
, Thursday, September 01, 2011
 Recently, I read an interesting book by Peter Sims, “Little Bets,” which brings up a really important question: can failure, in fact, take us further than success? The answer is: yes, if we know how to deal with it. While interviewing the executives at Amazon, General Motors and Google, as well as successful musicians, architects and comedians, Sims discovered one thing they had in common. All of them used the same approach of relentlessly “making little bets” to test their new ideas, even if they were not sure about their success. Most of these bets ended up as failures, but five or six out of 100 turned out to be the breakthroughs. According to Sims, in most cases, there’s no mysterious genius behind the great achievement, but perseverance and the willingness to take small risks.
In this series of posts, I’ll analyze how failures nurture success and describe how learning through failures can help you develop your business into a real innovation machine. Through hardship to the stars!
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Andrew Filev
, Monday, January 31, 2011
 My presentation proposal recently was accepted by the Web 2.0 Expo SF committee. I’ll be speaking about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 applications and what product decisions can greatly improve it. The official title for the session is “Be Innovative, Yet Familiar: How to Create a Comfort App People Will Actually Use.”
What we are facing today is that people, who made Facebook and Twitter an integral part of their personal life, are still often reluctant to use Web 2.0 tools at work. My presentation will explain how vendors should approach Web 2.0 solutions, so that business users can quickly adopt them from day one. The point of focus there is recognizing the existing user behaviors and fitting into their current workflows.
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Andrew Filev
, Tuesday, January 25, 2011
 My post about The Secret Ingredients of a Successful Distributed Team turned out to be quite popular, so I decided to follow up on it by sharing a slide deck I recently presented to the Information Management Forum members (IMF). I was invited to speak about virtual teams, as well as how companies can easily overcome challenges connected with their set up. The presentation has 5 practical tips on how to make your virtual project team more efficient. The list is not complete, and there’s always room for more! I hope to extend this list in a future post with your help.
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Andrew Filev
, Monday, November 08, 2010
 Recently, I was interviewed by Gina Abudi, a successful management consultant with over 15 years of professional background in project management, strategic planning and many other areas. You may find a lot of valuable information and helpful tips in Gina’s blog, where she and a number of guest authors share their acquired knowledge with the readers. By the way, Gina also has been one of the contributing authors of “Project Pain Reliever,” the book I’ve mentioned in one of the previous posts.
During the interview, Gina asked me to reflect on the essence of Project Management 2.0 and explain how it fits into the current trends in the project management space.
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Andrew Filev
, Wednesday, September 08, 2010
 In my previous post on critical path, I promised to share some tips and tricks that can help you make your project planning more efficient. So here they are:
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Andrew Filev
, Wednesday, September 01, 2010
 In my previous post about the problem of telling what’s important on a project, I promised to share some thoughts and tips on how standard project management methodologies, particularly the critical path method, can facilitate your planning efficiency when applied to a project creatively. But first of all, it is worth discussing what the critical path method (CPM) is all about.
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Andrew Filev
, Tuesday, August 24, 2010
 You’ve read and heard it so many times: “Efficient project planning is vital for your project’s success.” However, when you’re dealing with a complex project, building an effective project schedule may be really hard, to say the least.
You have to first create a long list of tasks that should be completed to deliver the project, then assign team members to these tasks and also make sure you pay special attention to tasks that are critical for project success. Very often, identifying the tasks that need special attention turns out to be the trickiest part of the planning job. Another big challenge may be to differentiate between the tasks that should be completed first and assignments that can be delayed without delaying the whole project.
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Andrew Filev
, Thursday, July 01, 2010
 A new tool came to our lives and greatly influenced the way we communicate. Twitter turned out to be next big thing of the social media world, and it looks like it’s here to stay. How can we explain Twitter’s immense popularity? Simplicity, convenience, speed? I’d say it’s all three of them that make the tool so sticky. In fact these factors even made many of us seek a similar tool to facilitate our project communications.
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