The one phrase that stuck our for me was ‘.. so that …’.

It is a truly magic phrase which should be compulsory at strategy reviews.  It helps you to focus on the activities that will help you achieve your goals.

An example.  Suppose our charity provides help and support for sufferers of Fred’s Disease. (This is an entirely fictitious ailment).  We also support research into the causes of Fred’s Disease.  What is our ultimate goal? Surely it’s the eradication of Fred’s disease.  This may not be possible in the short term, or even the long term, but it has to be the ultimate aim of the organisation.

Within that aim are our goals which could include offering help and support to sufferers.  What sorts of things can we do to achieve this goal?

We could prepare information packs for GPs.  Why? So that they will be better informed, so that they can diagnose it earlier so that patients can get care earlier so that they will live longer and more comfortable lives. And that supports our aim to offer help and support.

We could set up a research fund to provide funding for medical research, so that progress can be made to understand Fred’s Disease so that we might develop preventative measures so that fewer people develop the disease so that it is ultimately eradicated.

It’s so straightforward.  Two little words that are so powerful.  In these interesting times we can’t afford to do anything that doesn’t support our ultimate goals, so I encourage you to use so that when you think about what you’re doing.

I sit in a darkened room writing this blog so that I might help charities to make more effective use of their resources so that they can devote more of their resources to their aims and objectives so that they can do a better job.  That’s good enough for me.

I’m getting up now so that I can get a cup of tea so that I will feel refreshed and invigorated so that I can do some more work so that …. I think I’m overdoing it.  Help!

In these interesting times* charities need to think really hard about what’s important to them.  When times are good we all do things that are fun or interesting in addition to the things we need to do.  But when times are difficult we need to look really hard at everything we do and decide if it’s an activity we really must not give up, or whether it’s a nice to have.  It’s not always an easy decision, but getting it right could mean the difference between the charity surviving or going under.

How are the finances of your organisation?  Can you easily tell which of your services and/or projects are contributing to your core activities?  Can you tell which of them need propping up with your unrestricted funds?  This is the sort of information you must have in order to make an informed decision about which services you can afford to keep and which you have to cut in order to survive.

None of these decisions are easy. For example, which of the following is more important to you?

• A job finding service that helps around 30 people per year find proper jobs
• A telephone helpline that helps around 200 people per year

At first glance it’s the helpline – more people involved.  But could those people find the information in another way or from another agency?  What about the job seekers?  Is there any other way for them to find jobs?  Are there any spin-offs from the job finding service?  Is the cost of the helpline crippling the organisation and preventing it from doing all sorts of other things?  Is there a way to provide the helpline in some other way? Does the job service contribute anything to the core activities of the organisation?

And so on…

With the new year it’s really useful to take some time out and have a really hard and cold look at what you do and the way you do it.  I’ve found it works best when staff and trustees are all involved.  It’s hard work, but worth it.  I have two of these days coming up, and I’m looking forward to them, because, no matter how hard they are, they tend to leave everyone with a clearer sense of what’s important and what’s worth fighting for.  They’re strangely inspirational.

*from the ancient Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times”

This year I not only get a little chocolate first thing in the morning, but also a “joke”.  Note the inverted commas.

Today’s offering.

What do you get if you cross a shark and a penguin?

And the answer is … frost-bite

Tee hee!

Some projects are big and complicated and need detailed plans to make sure they work.

Then there are some smaller projects which don’t need the big tools, and to use those big tools would be serious overkill.

For those projects a simpler tool is required and today I uploaded a video to outline a method you might like to try for a simpler project. It’s called (inspiringly!) the Simple Planning Tool.

You can catch the video here and download the tool itself from here. I recommend you download and print off the example before you watch the video.

I hope it’s useful to you. Any comments are welcome

PS – to South Eastern Trains and First Capital Connect – it’s just as well you’re not running a brewery.

There comes a time in any presentation when you want the audience to stop looking at the screen and look at something else.  That screen is hypnotic and no matter how exciting the other thing is, their eyes will be drawn towards your slide.  It’s as if there’s an eerie power keeping them focussed on the screen.

You need to turn off the projector for a couple of minutes.  But that’s not really on, as it’s bad for the projector and you never know if it will all go horribly wrong when it restarts.  You could just block the light from the lens for a while.

If the projector is at desk height, you could lean a pad of paper against the lens.  It works but it’s clumsy.  And if the projector is mounted to the ceiling, then you might have to resort to climbing on the table and gaffer taping your pad to the lens.  No, probably not.

Fortunately, there is a much easier way.  Provided you’re in slide show mode, you can type “B” on your computer keyboard and the screen will turn black.  No image – nothing to look at except you.  Sorted.

Press “B” again, and the slide reappears.

If you prefer the screen to go white, then just use “W” instead of “B”.

Easy. Impressive.  No climbing, no gaffer tape.

One of the downsides to this is that there’s … lots of stuff going on.  And you need to keep on top of it all.  Can I strongly suggest keeping a logbook?  A hardback book with numbered pages is the best, as it’s very hard to lose a vital page if it’s bound in such a book.  And write in ink because pencil can fade and be rubbed out.  You might need these notes later…

Why lumber yourself with something else to carry around and keep up to date?  Because you can’t remember everything and it’s sometimes really useful to be able to recall a telephone conversation that happened 4 months ago.

Also keeping notes can help with subtle problems.  Let me explain with an analogy.

My friend Sid had some niggly little health issues; a runny nose, a minor headache that just wouldn’t go away, a sore foot and a few other bits and bobs.  In themselves none of these symptoms were terribly serious, or even serious at all; hardly worth wasting a doctor’s time.  But put together, his GP came to the conclusion that Sid was suffering from “galloping wormy head-rot” or some equally strange and dreadful disease.  Since he caught it early, he was able to fix it easily and painlessly.  Had he waited much longer, he would have needed an arm transplant, or six months of some ghastly treatment. *

That’s a deliberately silly example, but projects can have the same sorts of things going on.  Silly little issues can crop up, none of which are very important in themselves.  But put them together and …

If you keep a logbook and make a note of things going on in your project, you may very well see a number of silly little issues that together have the potential to scupper your project.  And even if you don’t, it’s good to have one place where you note telephone conversations, discussions about changes, etc etc.

So you have a choice.  Carry a relatively light notebook around, and use it, or just wait until the disaster happens.  A long time ago I opted for the book.  And it’s been worth it.

*NB galloping wormy headrot is not a real disease.  I don’t have a friend called Sid.  I made it all up.

I find it staggering to think that if I used a certain word beginning with ‘N’ I would be hit with the full force of anti-racist law (and rightly so) but it’s still apparently ok to call someone a retard. It’s just not!

It’s time the R word went the same way as the N word, and is treated with the same level of severity.

“Oh, but it’s only a word – don’t make such a big deal of it”

Nuts!

It may be just a word, but it stands for so much.  It stands for an attitude that places people with a learning disability as second class citizens, and encourages discrimination against them.  It stands for freedom to bully and taunt.

Let’s make a stand and make the R word unacceptable.  Once that’s happened the next step is to take bullying and mindless discrimination off the streets too.

I urge you with all the urge I can muster to go to the r-word website and take action.  Now!

I’m building an Access database. It’s nothing fancy, and I haven’t built one for a while, so I’ve created a table that I want to delete. I can’t see easily how to do this, mainly because I’ve had to migrate to Office 2007 which is the LEAST intuitive thing Microsoft have ever produced. So I turn to the Help facility.

After spending a couple of minutes scratching around I finally find the entry I’m looking for, only to be taken to a VIDEO to explain to me how to do this. And to cap it all, before I’m allowed to see the damned video, I have to watch a 48 second commercial for Chevrolet cars! Which I can’t buy ‘cos I don’t live in the USA, and which I wouldn’t buy anyway because by now I’m steaming! Oh, did I mention that I didn’t have the right Flash player installed, so I had to wait while that downloaded and installed too. The whole exercise took over 5 minutes.

All I need to do is right click on the table, and select ‘Delete’.

Would it not have been a whole lot simpler just to tell me that? In text. In 10 seconds.

Please, if anyone out there has anything similar, comment. I’d be interested to know if there are other instances of stupid unhelpful help out there.

In my course “Running Successful Projects” I use the example of decorating a room to illustrate the principles of project planning, on the grounds that most people are familiar with what has to be done when decorating a room. And it works pretty well.

Recently, I had to really decorate a room, and I mentioned this at a course, to be greeted with demands to see my Gannt chart for this project. When I announced that I had no chart, you can imagine the jeers and catcalls – until I explained why.

I listed the tasks that were required to complete my project. I put together a network to show what had to happen and in which order. I even estimated the length of time each task would take. But then I stopped. I didn’t work out the plan in any more detail. And why? Because I work as a consultant, and I can’t guarantee which days I will be working. If a client calls, do I tell them that I’m busy painting tomorrow, or do I attend to their needs?

So my planning went as far as I needed it to, and I could figure that, if I had no interruptions, then the job would be complete in about 7 days. Because I had a plan, I could make sure that I had all the supplies required ready in time to use them, and I knew what I was doing next. And when things didn’t go quite right I could juggle the remaining tasks, because I had a plan.

In the end I had a couple of days in the middle where I needed to look after a client, but that didn’t matter. I was able to keep on top of the job because I knew what was happening next and what supplies I would need.

So, the answer to the question is yes. Always yes. But how detailed a plan depends on so many things. How complex is the project, how many resources involved, how critical is it to your organisation, etc?

But you always need some sort of plan.