Tis the season when most get excited about the holidays and gather with friends and family in celebration. For some, the holidays are stressful. There is planning, preparation, execution, and clean up and doing so all on top of your regular daily routines. Oh and it isn’t always just for one holiday but for two, three, or more in a 2 month period. I’m just going to think about Thanksgiving.
We have observed over the last few years that bidding on contracts with the Federal Government is becoming easier and harder; a contradiction yes, but true just the same.
It has become easier because of the standardization of the award vehicles and bid consolidators like INPUT. The task of finding the right contracts to bid on and the less complex responses required make it easier; but now that it is easier, there are many for firms competing, which makes winning contracts harder.
In the many organizations and projects I have been through, I always hear someone saying these words, “We must have more accountability around here.” But, in reality what they ‘really’ mean is, “I want to know whom to blame when something goes wrong”. We assume that by early identification of a scapegoat you have put the fear of blame in you or at least the fear of consequences related to that blame and further assume that fear is an effective motivator.
We have put a lot of hard work into this blog series with building a patron analysis so now it’s time to share the wealth of our analysis insights with the rest of the company. Power BI’s web site and mobile approach with the deployment of Office 365 and refreshable data through a Data Management Gateway, is the perfect solution. The Data Management Gateway has come a long way since the first version and with version 1.2 it now supports many data source types from Power Query connections.
For those of you that know me on a personal level, you know that I own a Thoroughbred Rescue Farm and that I also compete in Eventing in my spare time. Being around and working with horses can teach you a lot about yourself. You have to learn how to communicate with a 1000lb+ animal. It first starts with building trust. And once gained, the horse will look to you to be their leader.
As a first step to any project, gathering and understanding requirements is vital to your success; and yet we spend little to no time on this very important process. Identifying and involving the appropriate stakeholders during the requirements phase is just as important as eliciting those perfect requirements.
I spent many years as a business analyst, and I have found that for me the most effective way to elicit requirements was to conduct requirement workshops. In this workshop, I identify specific topics on my agenda and pick stakeholders with clout, i.e. those that are well versed in their specific business units. Also, I push for using stakeholders from different business units to give the workshop the benefit of multiple perspectives.
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