Monthly Archives: June 2010

How To Face Your Harshest Critics

Can you relate to this? A major project has fallen behind schedule. It is way over-budget, morale has collapsed, and your leadership is being questioned. It’s got real nasty. It’s your fault. They’re pointing the finger at you. What should you do?

If the criticism is from outside the organization, then define the ground rules for your Communications Plan. Identify who is responsible for what type of communication, how it will be delivered and what messages you want to convey. The benefit of a cohesive Communications Plan is the message coming from all staff will be consistent and ensure that your core values are communicated effectively.

12 Steps To Becoming a Business Consultant

The BBC quotes research from Barclays Bank which shows that semi-retired workers are responsible for 50% more start-ups than 10 years ago. In the UK, 67% of small business owners are over 45, while a mere 8.7% are under 34. Such data suggests that running a business actually plays to the strengths of older people. […]

How to Stop MS Word Files From Crashing

If your Microsoft Word files suddenly become huge and start crashing, here’s how to fix it. Sometimes MS Word files explode from 1 to 10 MB in a few minutes? Why? Why Bullet Lists Creates Large MS Word files? The first offender is Bullet Lists. If there is one thing that’s guaranteed to crash Microsoft […]

S.P.E.E.D. Writing – 37 Ways to Increase Your Business Writing Productivity

technical-writer-ivan-walsh-chinaWorking in China means more business and less technical writing, especially proposal development, web marketing case studies and white papers. As some friends I hang out with on LinkedIn are also moving into biz writing, I thought I’d add a few tips here. While there is some overlap with technical writing, it does require a different mindset, for example, to understand the emotional drivers that persuade customers to accept or reject business proposals.

Business Process Design Tutorial – Part 1

At the end of the workshop, our client confessed, ‘I didn’t know our business worked like that’.

We’d moved onsite and over three months mapped out the processes in his Finance, Sales and Operations Depts. For me, one of the most rewarding aspects of Business Analysis is discovering how a business works and then mapping it out in Visio.