Don’t re-invent the wheel

A lot of time and effort is wasted due to not finding the document or information you are looking for. In most cases the information is re-collected and the document is re-created again. An average white collar spends 1,5 hour per day on searching and probably not finding ! Can this be improved ? Yes we can ! Don’t re-invent the wheel !

The cost of not finding information

I personally say that Hans van Heghe – CEO of Knowliah – is a guru in the domain of knowledge management, the extra layer on top of document and information management. I got in touch with Hans in 2005, when we made a first attempt to simplify project management for small enterprises. Already at that moment he had a vision and a mission to improve the classic “search and find” .

In 2013 he made this 3 minute video about the time and effort wasted on searching and not finding what you are looking for. It’s astonishing to be confronted with not only the numbers of wasted hours, but also the related cost !

Is cloud storage a solution ?

Meanwhile we all know Dropbox, Google Drive, Sharepoint, OneDrive and so many other tools and solutions to make information available at any moment, and to share it with our friends, colleagues and teammates.

But you also know that in most cases we fall back to the classic folder structure that we learned from Microsoft Windows in the 1980s. So more information available on more places does not solve the issue of easy retrieval when you need it. You know it is there somewhere, but you can’t find it. How frustrating and unproductive !

When it comes to project information and documentation, time is money. And so is all your project information ! Not retrieving crucial information or someone using the wrong document version can cost you a fortune, causing an unwanted budget overrun.

Another solution

PM Studio is a structured approach to plan and manage any set of activities to get something done. This can be a simple and easy event (which we also call a project today), or a real life project with multiple participants.

All information related to planning and execution is collected via templates, making it easy for you to keep overview and insight on those things that really matter. One of those templates is the Project Model Canvas, a one-page document to structure your idea or goal into re-usable chunks of information.

Because our solution is cloud based, we can make this information available to many users in a safe and secure way. The entire project information stays structured (thanks to the templates and visualisations) and the information chunks are re-usable among various project documents. So no need of retyping the same info in another document.  Easy sharing of stuff that really matters and the lessons learned.

Need to start another project that looks similar to one you’ve done before. Just copy/past the project and start re-using the project information. This is a huge timesaver isn’t it ?