The whole point of upgrading to Office 2007 is to utilize new or improved features.

LeBlanc was the subject of a piece last week on NPR’s Planet Money program, and his profession is a particularly timely subject in the current economic climate where “more with less” is the mantra and efficiency and productivity are the only goals. (Listen to reporter David Kestenbaum’s interview with LeBlanc.)

LeBlanc works for a global shipping company, and his role is to find ways to streamline processes. He is sent to different locations and told, for example, to save the company $500,000.

As he explained in his interview with NPR’s David Kestenbaum: When he tells people that he can save thousands of labor hours just by moving a printer, they don’t believe him.

This company, PC Helps Support, is also in the efficiency business. (We’re a desktop application and mobile device support provider.) But instead of demonstrating how moving a printer can save money, we show how eliminating shadow support and increasing productivity can influence their bottom line.

Like LeBlanc, we are met with some resistance. A significant number of IT leaders believe there is little or no demand for software support, and thus don’t provide it. As a result, employees find costlier ways to solve problems:

• An employee asks a colleague (the office tech “expert”) for assistance with a problem. While it may seem harmless, it’s actually taking two employees away from their primary job functions to solve a problem. That’s double-downtime.

• Self-help, which is a proven time-waster.

• And no help at all, which means employees are finding unreliable workarounds.

Look at an Office 2007 migration as an example. The whole point of upgrading is to utilize new or improved features. If your employees haven’t a clue how to use the software, and neither does your internal help desk, what good is your investment? Where’s the ROI?

LeBlanc says there are eight types of waste, which he memorizes with the help of an acronym, Tim T. Wood: transportation, inventory, motion, talent, waiting, overproduction, overprocessing and defects.

In the case of an unassisted Office 2007 migration, a few of these apply. For one, talent: If your IT department is fielding “Where’s the File menu” calls all day when they could be working on mission-critical projects, do you think you are using their talents to your company’s benefit?

Likewise, your company probably didn’t hire the office “tech expert” – every office has one – to help her neighbors with their VLOOKUPs and macros. Are you using her skills to your advantage?

For more about Office 2007 & Windows 7 migration assistance, download our free kit here.

When scaled across an entire company, misprinted print jobs cost a corporation dearly.

Sure, big picture savings are great. But the best way to approach recession survival is by starting small. Although an extra printout or two may seem minuscule, when scaled across an entire company, misprinted print jobs cost a corporation dearly.

In the spirit of frugality, here are two PC Helps tips published by IT World that promise printing efficiency.

1. How to Master Excel Spreadsheet Printing
2. How to Create a New Print Style in Outlook

Enjoy, and print responsibly. Got any efficiency tips? Send them our way.

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It’s QWERTY versus Dvorak and the fight is getting ugly.

It’s QWERTY versus Dvorak and the fight is getting ugly. That is, as ugly as a keyboard layout melee can get.

A little background: The first typewriter’s keyboard was arranged in alphabetical order, which proved to be poor design when two keys near each other were pressed in succession. The keys would jam. So inventor Christopher Sholes shuffled the letters around, placing the most commonly used keys away from each other. Thus, the QWERTY keyboard was born.

But there’s another keyboard layout, the Dvorak, which is not widely used. The Dvorak has been around since the 1930s, when an efficiency-minded inventor named August Dvorak placed the most commonly used letters, like vowels, on the “home row” (on a QWERTY, the home row starts with ASDF… and ends at single and double quotes).

Dvorak users contend that this arrangement enables users to type much faster. According to the WSJ article, one user said on a QWERTY he types 40 WPM; on a Dvorak, he types 110. Still, it took 46 years (in 1982) after the layout was patented for the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to designate it as an official alternative to QWERTY.

Back to the present.

With the proliferation of full-keyboard mobile phones, Dvorak disciples are getting angrier and angrier. See, most computer operating systems allow you to change your keyboard layout to Dvorak. You just need to modify your keyboard to match (either by switching buttons or by adding labels). But with smart phones, the few ways to get an alternate layout are with extensions, third-party utilities or jailbreaking.

So here’s the “awfully relevant” part. The Dvorak keyboard isn’t just a snake oil keyboard making outrageous typing-speed claims; it’s the result of years of scientific research including letter frequencies and hand physiology. It’s also the only other keyboard layout besides QWERTY that’s been approved by ANSI.

If it delivers such a high level of efficiency, why isn’t it the standard, or at least close to it?

There are many factors keeping Dvorak down, and chief among them is the cost and effort it would require to train and retrain. And with the said proliferation of smart phones, it’s only going to stay that way.

That’s what I call legacy inefficiency. (Jen Darr)

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In a recent post on TechRepublic, Calvin Sun offers 10 tips on the subject. Here are three that warrant elaboration:

Less Imaginary Widgets, More Genuine Examples

If one of your employees is fumbling with the Access sample database “Northwind,” it’s no wonder. How invested is he, really, in Raclette Courdevault and Geitost*? Give him something that is familiar, like an actual database from your company, with products or figures that have relevance.

If you took a three-day course on jet propeller engine repair, would you submit your resume for a job as an American Airlines mechanic?

“If you can relate to the material you’re studying to something in your own life, your retention will be greater,” writes TechRepublic’s Sun.

Long Distance vs. Sprinting

Sun explains how people are more likely to retain information that is learned in small chunks over time than what is studied during marathon cramming sessions. We know this. We’ve been told at least once in our lives not to cram.

Yet, in the case of Office 2007 migrations for example, employees are given mini courses or just PDF cheat sheets to learn a software suite that is radically different from previous versions. Do you think your employees are going to remember that the chart options have changed in Excel 2007 if they learned it upfront but create only one chart a month?

Use It or Lose It

If you took a three-day course on jet propeller engine repair, would you submit your resume for a job as an American Airlines mechanic? Apply that same logic to standard corporate training courses. While you have given your employees initial training on applications, you cannot expect them to walk out of the classroom as experts.

Still, some companies leave employees to fend for themselves after initial training. On a recent call to PC Helps, the customer wanted to know how to search two Excel worksheets for duplicates. Worksheet One contained 30,000 rows of data; Worksheet Two had 16,000. A consultant showed her how to use a nested formula. The employee was elated, and confessed that she was about to manually vet the data – all 45,000 rows. That’s hardly efficient. It’s an avoidable tragedy. (Jen Darr)

How do you promote efficiency in your office? Tell us in comments or send me an e-mail.

*Raclette Courdevault and Geitost are two products sold by the fictitious Northwind company. The former is cheese that is melted and served over boiled potatoes with lots of ground black pepper – big in Switzerland; the latter is Norwegian dessert cheese that must be sliced paper-thin. But I had to look that up.

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