by Benjamin Ellis | Jun 14, 2012 | Milestone Planner
The latest release of Milestone Planner is now live. While the timeline page remains the same, we have completely rewritten the rest of the application from the ground up. We have introduced a number of new features already, but most importantly, the new structure...
by Benjamin Ellis | May 30, 2012 | Announcements, Productivity
These are my (live) notes from Tom Chatfield’s (@TomChatfield) talk at Thinking Digital 2012. As Tom started to talk, my ears pricked up and I thought this would be interesting to many of you. The following are Tom’s thoughts (which I strongly agree with):...
by Benjamin Ellis | May 28, 2012 | Announcements, Event, Leadership, On the road
With thanks to The Big Partnership, this is their interview with me, just after I stepped off of the stage at the 2010 Like Minds event in Exeter. In short: We don’t know what we don’t know! Many businesses are obsessed with information technology....
by Benjamin Ellis | Apr 20, 2012 | Knowledge Work, Leadership, Management, Milestone Planner, Project Management
Look at pretty much any job specification for a project manager and you will see (in the UK at least) a requirement that candidates are PRINCE2 certified. For those not familiar with it, PRINCE2 is a UK government endorsed, project management methodology. It stands...
by Benjamin Ellis | Apr 17, 2012 | Management, Milestone Planner
We often blog about Milestone Planner as a commitment tracker:- what have I committed to do for who… But it seems the right time to talk a bit more about management by commitments. It’s not a well known concept, but in the places that I’ve seen it...
by Benjamin Ellis | Mar 28, 2012 | Knowledge Work, Leadership, Milestone Planner, Productivity
One of the phrases that sticks in my mind from the Internal Communications panel session at Social Media World Forum was from Andrew Barendrecht. Andrew talked about social in a business as a “Structured Revolution”. As a Collaboration Strategist at Apache...
by Benjamin Ellis | Mar 22, 2012 | Milestone Planner, On the road, Productivity
During the recent Social Media Week London, I had the privilege of chairing a session on psychology. The silent revolution behind social media has been to create an environment where there is more data about what we are doing, where we are doing it and who we are...
by Benjamin Ellis | Mar 19, 2012 | Leadership, Management, Milestone Planner, Productivity
I seem to spend a lot of mental effort battling between the benefits of structured versus unstructured approaches to doing things, so a 1972 essay by Jo Freeman (aka Joreen) recently caught my attention. The article was originally published in the Berkeley Journal of...
by Benjamin Ellis | Mar 2, 2012 | Milestone Planner
Commitment, that’s what makes teams work, and lets teams work together. Actually, it’s commitments, which is why Milestone Planner is a commitment management system, at its heart. What are my commitments? Who have I made them to? When am I expecting to...
by Benjamin Ellis | Feb 20, 2012 | Management, Milestone Planner
Hands up if you feel that things in your business are changing faster than they used to? Are priorities constantly changing? Do you find yourself reacting to customer issues which seem to blow up from nowhere? Do you feel you are working for more than one...
by Benjamin Ellis | Feb 16, 2012 | Milestone Planner, Productivity
To-Do lists are on our minds in the office at the moment. We’re constantly debating the pros and cons of them, and what makes them work and what makes them fail as task management tools. Yes, we’re thinking about new features for Milestone Planner. A...
by Benjamin Ellis | Jan 6, 2012 | Leadership, Milestone Planner
Prompted by lifehacker’s call for the best goal tracking app or service, I thought now was a good moment to share how I use Milestone Planner to track (and more importantly, achieve) my personal goals. In last year’s (still popular) blog post on...
by Benjamin Ellis | Nov 14, 2011 | Management
A conversation at the recent Dell B2B event at Google’s UK HQ, and a subsequent blog post, have finally prompted me into writing down some of my thoughts around the current trend of scoring influence, and the related social metrics industry that is being birthed...
by Benjamin Ellis | Nov 9, 2011 | On the road
Over the past year I’ve been fascinated by the way business interactions and processes weave their way in-between the on-line and off-line worlds. Digital has become the default format for the majority of business data as so much of our interaction and data...
by Benjamin Ellis | Nov 1, 2011 | Knowledge Work
I had the privilege of speaking at The Social Media Workplace conference in London today. A well organised, wonderfully targeted event, looking at how Social Software can build the Social Workplace. Lots of conversations about how’s and why’s, without...
