Action-Fraction

Useful Resources and Articles

Why you should profile your customers

11 April 2014

Profiling your customers will help you to target the right areas for marketing and promotional activities. Here is a simple way for you to really understand who your ideal customers are.

 

5 top tips for better everyday focus

14 March 2014

These five tips are FREE, easy to achieve and will make a huge difference to what you achieve each day, how you feel at the end of the week and help to train your brain in a positive way.

 

All I need is another day in the week!

6 March 2014

There are never enough hours in the day to get everthing done, but sometimes we need to plan a bit better, think about what we are doing, take a breather and focus on essentials. Rather than running around from one project to the next, let's look at what can be done to get more done in less time.

 

Focus on your process more than your goals

14 February 2014

We take a look at how goals can create overwhelm and a sense of 'never being achieved'. But a well designed process that you are committed to can make sure you achieve your goals easiliy.

 

Don't let fear and self-doubt stop you from business progress

07 February 2014

This article takes a look at how self-doubt and fear can stop us from progressing with our businesses, make us make poor decisions and ultimately stop us from being creative.

 

Forming good habits will increase your customers

01 February 2014

How can Dave Brailsford's techniques for winning the Tour De France help your business to increase its customers this year..we explore further to see what business owners can do.

 

Ten steps to more customers in 2014

13 January 2014

Increasing the number of customers you have in 2014 may be a hopeful wish or your number one goal. Use these ten steps to help you on your way and ensure that 2014 is your best year yet.

 

Meetings cost more and achieve less: research findings

27 November 2013

Businesses in the East Midlands are spending a quarter of their working week in meetings, with up to 40% of that meeting time achieving nothing productive.

 

How much money is wasted in meetings?

4 November 2013

The annual cost of unproductive meetings where nothing much is achieved and little improves as a consequence can be staggering. For a medium sized company this can be the real difference between making a profit and making a serious loss.

 

Does it pay to share knowledge?

1 October 2013

The benefits of sharing knowledge internally in the business are immense, but could we argue that the outcomes from sharing knowledge can result in saving bottom line revenue?

 

Ten common software implementation mistakes and how to avoid making them

16 August 2013

Minor mistakes are embarrasing and avoidable, but larger mistakes have serious consequences in reducing profit margins, creating time delays, negative market reports and disgruntled clients.

 

Do meetings in your business equate to lots of procrastination and no outputs?

03 August 2013

Are productive meetings that produce real outputs just a pipe dream that we all wish for? Could the majority of businesses benefit from taking a reflective look at how meetings are conducted and whether there is too much procrastination and not enough action?

 

How can companies benefit from not making repeated mistakes?

10 June 2013

We often hear in the press of lessons needing to be learnt in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes over and again. But do organisations and in particular, government actually learn from the lessons they identify as needing to be learnt.

 

Top tips to ensure meeting, project review or away day success

09 June 2013

Make sure that your company reviews and strategy meetings are a valuable use of everyone's time and that stakeholders come away with outputs that will be acted upon to make significant improvements to the business.

 

Can the wider organisation benefit from learning lessons?

08 June 2013

Reviewing what your organisation should do more of and areas where there is room for improvement can be applied to many areas to find cost savings, improve on output and get make things happen, rather than just being 'discussed'.

 

Actions speak just as loudly as lessons
30 April 2013
Action-Fraction explores whether project based businesses are falling short at just identifying lessons and having them ‘filed away’ somewhere, never to be looked at again. Or do the lessons result in an action that is carried out and embedded in the entire organisational process?

 

Action-Fraction provides a book review: Post-Project Reviews to Gain Effective Lessons Learned
3 April 2013
In Post-Project Reviews to Gain Effective Lessons Learned, there is a significant amount of detailed research into the concepts and understanding of how organisations learn lessons from projects they have undertaken. Taking the results of a survey of literature on the use of lessons learned, Terry Williams looks at the motivation for learning lessons, the concepts of knowledge and learning, the current learning lessons situation, factors that facilitate or hinder the creation of knowledge and the transfer of knowledge and lessons in organisations...

 

Involve the client on project reviews
19 March 2013
Talk to the vast majority of businesses involved in client delivery programmes about how they conduct their post project reviews and they will largely be done internally with the central team from the project. This may consist of a senior manager, the project managers and some of the team involved in the projects implementation. Occasionally, you may get the odd supplier or contractors involved also...

 

Daily Telegraph to report on Project Management
14 March 2013

Well it is great to read that the Daily Telegraph are reporting on project management, in a special report due out on 3rd April 2013. The report is going to highlight the key issues that organisations need to focus on in order to make projects more successful. There will no doubt be input from consultants and organisations in the field and the Association for Project Management (APM) will be supporting the report...

The Customer Perspective
12 March 2013
Infrastructure works and developments of all kinds usually affect the end consumer somewhere along the line. We may be looking at general disruption caused from the works; mess, noise, muddy roads, increased traffic or we may be looking at more serious disruption that affects supply of services. Either way, these disruptions can cause ill feeling towards the providers and suppliers on the project and worse, bad press from complaints...

 

Project Management Mistakes
7 March 2013
Mistakes do happen, it is a fact of life and without these mistakes there would be no requirement for learning lessons from them. But there are many simple mistakes that can be avoided, whether that is at the planning stage, during management of the project, at communication level or fundamentals such as time projections...

 

Defining Roles and Responsibilities
5 March 2013

The importance of knowing who is in charge of what and their responsibilities within that role has always been of importance within the organisational structure. But this is even more important when we are dealing with multi £million projects. But do we go far enough with defining roles and responsibilities or just scratch the surface; we know whom the project manager, sponsor and team members are, so that will be fine...

Learning lessons in construction
28 February 2013

Given the complex nature, multi-faceted elements and tight controls within construction projects, it would be right to assume that lessons learnt are ‘standard practice’. When mistakes potentially cost £millions in more materials, repeating effort and throwing more resources at the problem, it would be critical to reduce the likelihood of this happening...

Results or just long hours of work?
25 February 2013

Why is there such an inherent habit in business that the perceived ‘norm’ is to work long hours so that you look like you are busy and dedicated? Employees work long hours and quite often, over hours so that they do not appear to be slacking in front of other colleagues that are still ‘working’ after their time to go home. In reality, how much real work is being done in these hours after a full day and tired brain. Is it more the case that we appear to be working but are probably achieving very little...

 

Revolving Project Management Improvements
22 February 2013

Every project is different, different deliverables, different teams, and different challenges – as project managers we know this already. Everything changes from the moment you have delivered one project; you reset everything and start all over again. But do project managers look at the detail of what should change with the changing project brief? Do we stop often enough to consider progress and spend time looking for changes that could be made to the overall improvement of project delivery...

Who makes a good project reviewer?
18 February 2013

Exploring what skills and qualities are needed from the right project reviewer.

Barriers to learning lessons
10 February 2013
Do organisations have internal and external barriers to learning lessons from projects?

Failings in risk management of a very basic nature
13 February 2013
Could architect's failure have been prevented by a risk register?

A lack of time for project learning
5 February 2013
More can be done to learn lessons from projects, read more to see how your business can be more effective.

Is there a lack of Lessons Learnt in Business?
14 January 2013
Read Action-Fraction's feedback review from the project management community.

Project review is a vital tool for business success
16 November 2012
Business owners and managers need to understand the insightful and critical role of project review.

How good and well used is your best practice?
10 October 2012
This may be a simple question to answer in your business...

Is it really as bad as they would have us believe?
6 September 2012
With construction projects going on all around us, why are the press still insisting there is no light at the end of the tunnel?