Every Friday, we will select a few in-depth articles from the week that we think are worth your valuable time as a construction financial manager (CFM). We look for compelling articles not only about financial topics, but about business, technology, and life, that challenges you to think about your role as a CFM in different ways. We’d love to hear from you about how we’re doing, and to have you join our community by subscribing to receive this weekly post by email. Follow #CFMReview.
[hr]
You Have Plenty Of Time. How many times have you complained that there just isn’t enough time in the day, or the week, to do everything you need to do?
Take a moment to challenge that thought. Do you really need more time? That is the challenge presented by the author in the Harvard Business Review article: Relax, You have 168 Hours This Week. “I’m surely not the first to point out that your week contains 168 hours,” he says, “[b]ut until you go through the exercise yourself of adding up your weekly commitments, you probably won’t find the almost three hours per day potentially left over.”
3 hours left over every day? This pithy article makes a pretty convincing argument that we all do have enough time…we just squander it. The author has 3 helpful suggestions to claim some of that wasted time back.
[hr]
What Finance Professionals Can Learn From Hackers. “Software is eating the world,” famously said technologist Marc Andreessen, but with the enormous success of software businesses, why aren’t more industries digging into what is working there and what isn’t? Specifically, why aren’t construction financial professionals looking to see what they can learn from the hackers?
This week, I came across what may be one of my favorite articles of the year about the credit and collections world. It was creative and unique, and it got me thinking about something very familiar to me in one world (i.e. software), but never connected by me in another world (i.e. finance). That something is the agile system.
In his Receivables / Account blog, Blair Wetlaufer suggests that companies consider “using scrum in the collections industry.” Kudos to Blair for such a novel and interesting thought…and, ultimately, a thought I strongly agree with. Challenge yourself to learn more about the agile development system, and think about how this system and scrums can positively impact your credit and collection staff.
[hr]
When Is Your ERP Software Going To Die? This morning, I overheard a team member here at zlien talking to a user about their web browser. The user was using Internet Explorer v7, which is super old. But the user couldn’t update the IE browser because of compatibility problems with their enterprise system. When, I though to myself, will these clunky, on-site, antiquated ERP systems die! They are paralyzing organizations.
Then, along comes this fantastic article from TechCrunch: The Dark Age of Enterprise Software Is Ending. You don’t have to annihilate your ERP platform to take advantage of new technologies and interesting data analytics. You just have to understand how the new technology world can integrate with and complement your legacy systems.
[hr]
[zlien id=”26512″]
Leave a Reply