Matt LeBlanc (not the actor) lines up his toiletries in the order in which he uses them. I’d say he takes “doing more with less” a little to the extreme, but that’s his job as an efficiency expert.

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. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Office 2007 Migration Assurance Program, Worker Productivity David Kestenbaum, efficiency, hidden demand, Matt LeBlanc, NPR, shadow support

I’m sure it wasn’t intended as a humor piece, but this morning’s NPR radio report about the e-mail gaffe that occurred at the Bush White House in 2002 and 2003 was fine entertainment. In particular, this quote from Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy from 2007 made me laugh: “That’s like saying the dog ate my homework. Those e-mails are there. They just don’t want to produce them.”

While many companies do have admirable archiving systems in place, just as many firms leave the details up to chance, the honor system, and other faulty methods.

Although I have never tried to get out of an assignment by saying a dog ate my homework, I have fouled up plenty, and confessing was quite difficult in some cases. But, what I have learned over the years is that if you ask for help, you will commit fewer blunders and have less mess to clean up.*

Back to the government e-mail issue. According to an article by Computerworld’s Patrick Thibodeau, the whole mess stemmed from a Domino/Notes-to-Microsoft Exchange migration. The old archiving system was phased out, but the new one was never implemented. From that point on, Thibodeau explains, the government manually archived messages. The result was millions of “missing” e-mails. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney FAIL, This Week in Tech News archiving, Douglas Schweitzer, e-mail, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, NPR, Patrick Thibodeau, Sen. Patrick Leahy