More cool tools

I just had to write down somewhere two new cool tools I found:

SyncToy 1.0 from Microsoft may be something I've really been wanting, I haven't had time to look into it much.

In a little wandering related to my dream of owning a Tablet PC, I found an interesting blog in which a majority agreed that Mind Manager is their favorite software . . .

As soon as I can afford it, it may become my favorite software too!

Semantic Web Software

As I search for software to empower my thinking (even more than PersonalBrain), I keep coming back to Semantic Web concepts as being closely linked to what I want. I found an exciting gpl project: MindRaider which might become exactly what I'm looking for. In looking deeper, I saw some integration with gnowsis which also may become very useful.

Of course, as I do with new software, I'll wait for a stable release to try them, but I'm very excited about the prospects.

FRank / Feedback system

I have a brainstorm I need to get down to think about later. The CTO of the organization I work for (the LDS Church) set a goal we failed to reach this year. He wanted us to identify ten employees that could be reallocated to more important jobs. I have no idea why we failed, but I assume it's a tough thing for managers to do.

Nevertheless, I think it is a very worthy goal, and I'd like to set similar goals if I'm ever a CTO. So I need a way to answer the question, "What efforts are we making that are least valued by the important stake holders?" Once we have that answer, we can cancel those efforts and reallocate the employees to other, more valued efforts.

My original idea is this: for quarterly employee evaluations, employees could be asked to write 5-10 "contributions" they believe were the most valuable things they did, and who derived value from each. Then those lists would be combined from all employees, and handed to the "customers" or people identified as deriving value. The customers would be asked to rank the contributions, with no option to say all were valuable. The feedback from these surveys could quickly show which employees contributed in ways that were truly valued by customers.

Of course, like other ideas I've had that I thought were valuable, I can't help wondering if this would be valuable on a bigger scale. In this case, I'm very confident that an easy-to-use, general-purpose feedback / ranking system could help an organization in many, many ways.

To go further, I struggled at my last company to come up with metrics that a development team could use to measure success. The one metric I felt was most valuable was customer satisfaction, but I couldn't come up with a good way to measure that. This tool would give me that power.

Oh yeah, and the reason I titled this "FRank" was just because "Fancy Ranking system (FRank)" was a silly name I came up with for this as a product.

Well, as always, I have a load of thoughts related to this, but no time to write them, so I guess this will have to suffice for now.