Geotechnical News December 2011
49
ASFE NEWS
site to an MSWord document. Do
the same for your own website.
3. Black out company names and any
other identifying information.
4. Number each lead paragraph. Pre-
pare a list of the five firms and give
each a letter.
5. Print out the document and circulate
it in your office, asking each person
to put the lead paragraph with the
firm it’s about.
6. Circulate the same document to a
group of client representatives to
learn if they can distinguish one
firm from another by virtue of each
firm’s own words.
If the results indicate that, for the
most part, people cannot tell one firm
from another, you clearly need to do
a better job explaining why your firm
is truly unique; and you’d better be
able to do it up front, in relatively few
words.
Survey Reveals IT Managers’ Computer Issues
A survey of more than 500 U.S.-,
small-business IT managers reveals
that 93% of their companies have
selected IT solutions based more on
price than quality, causing 89% of
those companies to experience IT-
related problems, in particular: low-
performing hardware (46%), out-of-
date hardware (37%), and unreliable
hardware (23%), all of which have cost
far, far more than whatever savings
they provided, given their drag on
productivity. Conducted by Wakefield
Research, the
HP-sponsored survey
also revealed:
• Computer processing speed (35%)
and reliability (19%) are the most-
needed computer improvements.
• IT managers recommend solving
common concerns by upgrading to
newer, better-quality components
(29%), investing more money in IT
systems (21%), and spending more
time researching the best solutions
(13%).
• Planning their company’s IT strat-
egy is a better use of IT managers’
time (41%) than hardware support
(11%).
• One-fifth of IT managers said their
biggest computer problem is inad-
equate vendor support.
Less Is More;
More Is Less
Howdo you instruct projectmanagers to
handle multiple, ongoing assignments?
Just a few at a time? Or do you
encourage high-level multitasking; i.e.,
work on all of them all the time? New
guidance on this topic is now available
from the National Bureau of Economic
Research in a paper titled
Don’t Spread
Yourself Too Thin: The Impact of Task
Juggling on Workers’ Speed of Job
Completion
(
papers/w16502), by economists Decio
Coviello (University of Rome), Andrea
Ichino (University of Bologna), and
Nicola Persico (New York University).
They studied the way in which a
group of Italian judges handled their
cases during six consecutive years.
The judges comprised a particularly
effective sample, the researchers
said, because their cases are assigned
randomly (by means of a lottery
system) and because the judges are
encouraged to “hold the first hearing
of a case no later than 60 days from
filing.” As such, while the judges had
about the same amount of work over
several years, the amount of cases they
opened could vary significantly from
quarter to quarter.
The research data suggest that
“judges who work on few cases at the
same time, opening new ones only
when older ones are closed, can not
only dispose of assigned cases in less
time from assignment, but also increase
their throughput per quarter.”
True: Some judges might be smarter
than others or might have tougher cases
to deal with. But the three economists
said they accounted for that variability
and it fails to explain in toto the varia-
tion in the time required for a judge to
finish a case or the growth in backlogs.
According to the authors, “A non-
permanent increase in new cases
opened in one period increases the
duration of the cases that are yet to be
completed, regardless of whether the
worker is in a constant growth path.”
As they also state, “By adding one task
to those which the worker is already
juggling, she pulls resources away
from her other active tasks which are
closer to being completed. Moreover,
the newly opened task does not benefit
from being opened earlier, in the sense
that it will still have to wait before all
other tasks are completed.”
