Hey There

Greetings from sunny/cloudy/sunny, COLD, downtown Melbourne.

I’m going to keep this one relatively short, simply to say – 

Colin is Alive! 
(mostly)

For reasons I’ll get into in the next newsletter, as of this writing, the paperback edition isn’t available yet, BUT, Colin is available in e-book and hardcover formats (I am avoiding the less popular Razorback and Nickelback format).

So, here’s the big reveal of the title and cover:

Colin Doesn’t Call the Help Desk.
(Clever right)

Here’s what you’ll find in Book Two

Fail to Plan Koala and you Plan to Fail
As part of the annual business planning process, the team needs to get Agile, so Bob brings invites Agile Coach Lynda to help out. Things don’t go quite according to plan as Graham remains unconvinced when Lynda suggests that as part of developing the customer requirements, his key stakeholder should be the customers. Colin offers to help source customer information from Allanah, in the Data Analysis Reporting Team, but first he needs to get his life jacket organised in case he needs to visit the data lake, and his pick and shovel for any data mining he’s going to need to be involved in. Does Graham get the customer information Linda maintains he needs, or will he be able to stick with his tried and tested methodology of – Last years costs, plus 20%?

A Company is Only as Good as Its People Koala
It’s time for the annual How you Doin’ culture survey results to be announced, and the team get to attend a presentation by Arthur from HR. Colin wonders if Graham is psychic when he correctly predicts the top three employee concerns, but they just turn out to be the same as the past seven years.

However, a new item jumps to number one, and Colin volunteers to be part of a series of company-wide workshops to try and identify why people think they spend too much time in meetings.

When the results are cascaded to team level, Bob is shocked to learn that he scored badly in the area of trust, and calls a meeting to insist that the team be transparent, and own up to their anonymous comments.

Efficiency = Flexibility + Resilience ^{(x Koala)}
The company decides to increase employee productivity and engagement by introducing flex-desking, and Poppy from Property visits the team to run them through the benefits.

Colin bids a fond farewell to his usual desk (but promises to come back and work there again in the future – flexibly), but is excited to become more efficient – by setting up at a new desk each morning, then packing it all away again at the before he leaves.

But when it turns out that there’s not enough desks to go round, Poppy’s helpful support is to re-iterate that all the research says it’s a better way to work.

Against his better judgement, Bob is left with no option but to let the team work from home, raising concerns from Colin about whether he will be able to keep up his new efficiency gains without being able to change desks every day.

Here’s the link to the e-book version (no-one is buying a hardcover except me)

Thank you for supporting Colin, and my growing delusions of grandeur.

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This month – When it’s okay to lie about your age

I’ve mentioned my favourite phrase before –

As soon as you give your information to someone else you lose control over what happens to it.

But sometimes you have to give out your info to set up an account, or you want to give it out to join a loyalty program.

The unfortunate risk is that if the shop that’s giving you a 10% discount has a data breach, you’re 100% more likely to get phishing emails.

So what can you do to protect yourself?

Set up a new email address for yourself that you give out to shops, online stores, annoying people trying to pick you up in bars or to websites that want you to sign up to a newsletter to get a free story.

This keeps your information and accounts separate from your real and important accounts.

Now here’s the fun part – when you set up the account, don’t put any real information in it. Make up a fake name, fake birthday, fake address, fake everything. This way, if that email account is somehow hacked because of someone else’s data beach, there’s no real info about you.

Next, when a loyalty program wants your birthday to send you discount emails, make one up!

It’s great to be appreciated, but I always end up getting more discounts than I can handle, all at the same time.

Take a leaf from Colin’s book and be Agile, change things up a bit, and provide a different birth date to each business.

I make mine different months and now I get vouchers and birthday wishes all year round.

I may even knock a few years off my age while I’m at it.

Well, I think that about wraps it up for Issue 10, thanks for tuning in.

Cheers till next month.

Elwood