by Rick Alcantara My business coach tells his clients to test and measure virtually every aspect of their operations. Communications is no exception. By measuring your marketing efforts you can determine where and how you should spend your communications dollars. Once you have defined your communication objectives you can use research to determine your direction,Read… Read more »
Over the past several months I have read too many disparaging articles regarding the Patent and Trademark Office, (PTO). Check out IP Watchdog and you will get the idea. PTO has been blasted on everything from their budget constraints, patent pendency, quality review and unfortunately the list goes on. What isn’t mentioned in these articlesRead… Read more »
The House will vote either today or tomorrow on granting federal employees four weeks of paid parental leave for the birth or adoption of a child, but it won’t happen without at least one more attempt to water it down. Lawmakers will consider an amendment sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) that would require federalRead… Read more »
Supporters of paid parental leave for federal employees just picked up some big (though not unexpected) support from the White House. The Office of Management and Budget issued the following statement: Being able to spend time at home with a new child is a critical part of building a strong family. The initial bonding betweenRead… Read more »
Below is a near-final draft of Roanoke County, Virginia’s Twitter Guidelines. This is structured as a working guideline document to help guide our local county departments on how to implement Twitter, appropriate usage, while lending some oversight authority to our Web 2.0 Working Group (cross-departmental collection of Web 2.0 geeks). Our county could probably fieldRead… Read more »
The GAO report entitled Better Performance Information Needed to Support Agency Contract Award Decisions (GAO-09-374), lays out a disturbing trend in government oversight and contract management that needs to be corrected on many levels if the government is to increase performance of federal contracts. As noted in the report, the typical information management problem ofRead… Read more »
In my previous post I outlined a 4 step process for a successful performance management program. to recap: 1. Report performance metric data on pre-defined schedule. 2. Analyze data for troubling trends or missed targets. Operationally research root cause of problems. 3. Provide corrective action for metrics where target was missed or data is trendingRead… Read more »
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13760587&fsrc=rss The article argues that the biggest barriers to finanical regulatory reform are not entrenched interests, but rather the regulators themselves.
So where does Government start to show up in the 211 spot rankings? At #16, top honors go to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation…they’ll be bringing on 700 interns in 2009! What I find interesting is that they say Green Jobs is the up-and-coming job area. This report seems to be following the trend. OfRead… Read more »
Would SUGGEST that this blog posting from the Harvard Business Review website has PERHAPS some usefulness across several groups… Author: Steven DeMaio Leading When You Don’t Have Formal Authority Whether you’re a manager, a frontline worker, or an independent contractor, at one time or another you’ve surely had to influence, or even improve, the performanceRead… Read more »