Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

If you use tools at work, and who doesn’t, have tool experts around.

I am a big believer in having specialists working on a project – people who know one thing well. Yes, there is a place for other people, but most projects I have experienced have all generalists and no specialists.

The one area I want to see specialists is tools.

If you use MS Word on your project, have an MS Word expert around.

What? Everyone knows how to use MS Word. That is true, but few people know how to do fill-in-the-blank-with-some-obscure-function in MS Word. I had the pleasure to work on several proposals where we had an MS Word expert on the team. She would hold down the function-control-F## key and viola – things happened. She saved hundreds of man hours with her expertise.

I also worked on a project where an expert in MS Project (a scheduling program) arrived and saved the project tens of millions of dollars. The project was organized around half-a-dozen teams. Each team had a leader, and each leader created a schedule for their team.

In theory, the half-a-dozen schedules connected to create a master project schedule. Theory didn’t work. The project was a mess.

The MS Project expert walked in, spent a full day with each team leader, and viola (there’s that magic word again) – the master schedule worked.

No one really understood what the expert did. Everyone understood the result of what the expert did. The project didn’t correct itself, but the people on the project could understand what was wrong and what had to be done.

Spend the money to hire tool experts. They will pay their own salaries in savings.