Great video by XPLANE, a visual consulting company. The video shows how employers must deal with up to four different generations in the workforce.
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photo credit: pedrosimoes7
When you read the paper or listen to governments speak about their plans to make up for budget deficits, you realize that they’re playing a phony game. It’s all about trimming around the edges. Take a few thousand from the printing supplies budget line, cut a few travel expenses, and maybe eliminate some positions due to retirement or attrition. On paper, that may reduce the gap. However, what has government really been doing to fundamentally change the way it does business.
Let’s take a hypothetical example. A city has a budget of $400M. It’s revenues are $350M, leaving a deficit of $50M. In order to close that gap, the city starts to trim around the edges, making small incremental cuts. Department heads all say that they are too important to be cut. If we cut police, who will protect the children. If we cut the fire department, who will save the children. If we cut parks and recreation, where will the children play. So eventually, the city will cut things, shift current needs to the future, and play accounting with the budget and claim that they successfully closed the gap. Until next year. Rinse, wash, and repeat.
What if we started with the premise of “if we had $350M to build government, how would we do it?” If we can just take a blank slate, and build things from the ground up, how would it look? Do we need as many departments, scattered across the city? Do we need to build processes to control $20 transactions?
If you simply flip the problem on the other side, it suddenly changes the ball game. This would be a very interesting case study if a government entity can find a way to build from the ground up.
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The majority of my posts to this blog has been more of insights and lessons learned. In preparation for the announcement of the alumni bloggers in the Dean’s Winter Report, I just wanted to give my visitors an update of where I am since graduating from Pepperdine School of Public Policy in 2005.
photo credit: ***roham***
Since graduation, I have accomplished the following notable items:
- Worked at an IT strategic planning firm in Bellevue, Washington with two major clients in the City of Boise, Idaho and Surrey, Canada.
- Worked at the California State Auditor’s office on medical contracting practices with the Department of Corrections, audited Proposition 69 DNA Identification Funds, provided oversight functions for the State FI$Cal project.
- Implemented electronic workpaper system (PWC TeamMate) for the California State Auditor’s office.
- Joined Macias Consulting Group, the consulting arm of notable accounting and CPA firm Macias Gini and O’Connell as Senior Consultant.
- Implemented an organization-wide change management program for a large transit agency in California.
- Promoted to Manager at Macias Consulting Group.
- Assisted the Washington State Auditor’s Office in identifying and prioritizing performance audits by developing and implementing a statewide risk assessment.
In all three of these professional jobs I’ve held, I innovated new ways to analyze and present information using design, layout, methods and techniques, and cutting edge tools.
Keep coming back for more updates and many more exciting adventures to come.
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A short report, presentation, letter, memo, or document is often many times as hard to write than its long counterpart. Anyone can write a 20 page report, it takes talent to condense all that information in to a one page briefing. So why do you see such poorly written documents both online and offline?
The amount of effort required to draft, edit, and produce any type of document increases exponentially as you approach one page. However, short documents are many times more effective at conveying the message and initiating action.
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” – Mark Twain
An example of a writing program
Washington State Governor Gregoire issued Executive Order 05-03 which requires all Washington State public agencies to use simple and clear language when communicating with the public and businesses. The “plain talk” guidelines include:
- Understand customer needs
- Include only relevant information
- Use words your customers use
- Use the “active voice”
- Use personal pronouns
- Keep sentences and paragraphs short
- Design clear pages
photo credit: geishaboy500
Simplify your writing to effectively communicate your ideas
Writing is a life long learning process. It takes years to develop an effective style and voice. I’ve found that my best work often is the shortest documents but also took the most of my time to develop. All my writing is customized based on need, audience, and subject matter. In all cases, it’s written so a layperson can understand it without needing to know background context and technical jargon.
“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” – Another Mark Twain quote
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People often ask me how I know so much about computers and how I get all these things done so fast. Webcomic xkcd just figured out my trick and made a flow chart. I rarely know all the shortcuts or where the buttons are in an application, it’s a matter of poking around and just figuring it out. Usually, I succumb to the last box, “Google the name of the program plus few words related to what you want to do.”
Here’s a few Google Searches I’ve done before:
- microsoft outlook mail merge
- excel vlookup
- excel macro pulldown list
- word page numbers by chapter
Tech Support Cheat Sheet <xkcd>
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