To avoid career-threatening errors Ok, so it doesn’t happen every day, but there are lots of horror stories about disastrous spreadsheet errors. An Excel catastrophe can strike anywhere and anyone: from Harvard professors whose internationally-renowned research on government austerity was found to contain a significant error in a spreadsheet formula to a UK government department that failed to understand the assumptions a spreadsheet was based on, costing their taxpayers £millions.

With the General Election just round the corner, last week’s Budget gave us an important insight into the Government’s priorities.  For SMEs there was quite a lot to be enthusiastic about. But more should be planned for upskilling the UK workforce.

Source: http://may2015.com/category/poll-of-polls/

Things were delightfully simple in the early days of spreadsheets. The distance from multi-column analysis paper to its on-screen equivalent was relatively small - just involving a whole lot less Tipp-Ex and doing the calculations for you. Very quickly, as we moved from VisiCalc to SuperCalc to Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel, the capabilities of spreadsheets increased. As well as moving from single sheets to books of multiple pages, available calculations and functions became more extensive, macro and programming languages were included, and graphs and charts were introduced.

Rain Check, New York, Tom Eversley (isorepublic.com) We live in a rapidly changing and sometimes volatile global business environment, that makes decision making fraught with complexity. But, many corporations are still relying on management tools that were developed in the 1980s for a completely different, non-internet era. New tools are needed.  How do you create options for growth in your business when the fast moving uncertain environment makes the future highly unpredictable?

  TUNNEL By Ousseynou Cissé You are building a new web app. You’ve chosen to build the front-end and back-ends as separate applications. You only have a small team of three devs.  They have asked you, as the manager, if they can have one person work on each part of the system. The database layer, the REST layer, and the front-end app. They say they would each not have to learn so much (most of the tech is new to the team) and that it will help them not get in each other’s way. They also say they can be more productive as they will know everything about the one area they would be working on. This seems reasonable and the statements do sound logical.

  Roger Martin* (former Dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Canada) maintains that in his 30 years experience as a strategic advisor to large corporations, the vast majority of strategic plans he has dealt with are simply budgets with highly detailed explanations! Quite often, people confuse the formulation of organisational strategy with preparing a strategic planning document and use the terms interchangeably. But, they’re not - strategy is not planning.

Today, I’m excited to share the availability date for Windows 10. In fact, I thought I’d let Cortana, the world’s most personal digital assistant, share the news. You can ask Cortana for the answer, or if you don’t have a Windows phone or a PC running the Windows 10 Insider Preview handy - you can hear it for yourself here:

So what is "spin"?  Spin is a name applied to the misrepresentation or distortion of information, to persuade someone either in favour or against a certain point of view.

A Project Manager(PM) conceptually is the person charged with delivering defined scope on time and within budget. Sometimes it can feel like the PM has been relegated to be the status person.