Posts By Chaeny Emanavin

7 Tips to Get Motivated — Using Your Personality Type

Motivation is tricky. Many great blogs like Doris Tirone’s post talk about the dangers of believing a supervisor alone can motivate someone to be more efficient. External (extrinsic) motivators like money or praise are helpful, but internal (intrinsic) motivators are stronger and salient. One of the tools I have found most useful to understanding intrinsicRead… Read more »

7 Steps to Productivity

In my last blog, I talked about how to increase everyone’s productivity by tweaking your meetings. What about making your personal time more productive? Technology helps you multitask and do more, right? Wrong. Mutitasking creates lower quality results making you less productive. Here are seven productivity tips that I have combined from inc.com, a listRead… Read more »

7 Ways to Make Your Meetings More Exciting

Meetings compose a large amount of your work time, but are they time well spent? Efficiency can be increased or decimated by the timing and structure of meetings. Think about the impact multiplier for each participant. Starting an eight person meeting 15 minutes late wastes two hours of work for the organization. Bad meetings areRead… Read more »

When COTS Does — and Doesn’t — Make Sense

In my previous post, I talked about the benefits of having a skunk works of federal developers. How can this team help with your Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software choices? Your internal development team cannot (and should not!) build every piece of software you need. They should focus on unique, mission specific processes thatRead… Read more »

The Case for More In-House Development: How a Skunk Works Saves Money in the Long Run

On the surface it makes perfect sense. Outsource your development efforts. When the development is done, the contract developers leave and you’re not paying for their time. Makes more efficient use of your IT dollars! Better! Faster! Cheaper! However, not having skilled developers available misses out on an essential skill set to make your organizationRead… Read more »