Productivity Improvement Examples

[waxwing1]

A handful of folks at my company are trying to bring OneNote in but we're
meeting some resistance. I don't think the product is understood and since
it is not included in our Enterprise license we've got to jump through many
hoops to even test it. This includes estimating the ROI of the tool before
testing it. What productivity gains have you realized from using OneNote
(either personally or as a team)? Do you use it with Sharepoint or
standalone? What metrics would you suggest to justify the ROI? Thanks.

 

[John Waller]

To me, this is hard to answer without knowing how you intend to use it.

My useage, which helps me immensely, may be irrelevant to you.

First of all, have you defined the problem you're trying to solve? What
issues do you currently face?

Or, do you have a solution in OneNote but you haven't yet identified a
problem that needs solving?

If the answer's not obvious to you then perhaps none exist?

Metrics such as time and cost immediately spring to mind. But also
procedural improvements to make workflows more efficient.

 

[georgeogoodman]

Daniel Escapa has an item 'in his blog' (http://tinyurl.com/kw7zno) that
you might find interesting. Here's an excerpt:
DWAYNE
SMITH: UNUM'S TWO MILLION DOLLAR MAN (\"HTTP://BLOGS.MSDN.COM/DESCAPA/ARCHIVE/2009/06/05/DWAYNE-SMITH-UNUM-S-TWO-MILLION-DOLLAR-MAN.ASPX\")
Recently I found that 'Unum'
(http://www.unum.com/), a Fortune 500 company that provides long term
and short term disability, group life and long term care insurance for
more than 100,000 companies, uses OneNote 2007! Looks like they save
over $2 million by switching to OneNote by going to a paperless system.
In the economic conditions companies are always looking to save money
and get the most of out of their IT investments (wow I didn’t mean to
sound like a marketing person).
Anyhow so I got access to an article written about Unum’s story and
man behind it all: Dwayne Smith.

 

[David Olsen]

For one, there is more chance that the corporate knowledge that disappears
into Post It notes and black books will be retained by the organisation.

 

[georgeogoodman]

For one, there is more chance that the corporate knowledge that
disappears
into Post It notes and black books will be retained by the
organisation.

Interestingly, that could be both a positive and a negative based on
the type of organization and their document retention policies. I don't
know that OneNote is any greater an issue than email in this regard, but
it is yet-another-repository.

 

[Steve Silverwood]

A handful of folks at my company are trying to bring OneNote in but we're
meeting some resistance. I don't think the product is understood and since
it is not included in our Enterprise license we've got to jump through many
hoops to even test it. This includes estimating the ROI of the tool before
testing it. What productivity gains have you realized from using OneNote
(either personally or as a team)? Do you use it with Sharepoint or
standalone? What metrics would you suggest to justify the ROI? Thanks.

In my personal case, both in a corporate environment at my previous
employer and in personal use at home, I've found OneNote to be a great
tool for organizing information. At work I used it to store technical
notes and procedural documents, so that I could keyword-search them at
any time to find data that would be hard to keep track of otherwise.
At home I do pretty much the same thing with stuff about my ham radio
hobby and general computer info (usage tips and the like), plus
information about purchases through the web and license information
for software I've registered online. That way, if I need the
information to help someone out or to reinstall something, I can just
look for the info by keyword and pop it right up.

I would have LOVED to have a program like this when I was working at
Ashton-Tate, dBASE Inc., etc. when doing tech support. Someone
calling in or emailing could have a problem with such-and-such, and
instead of having to either remember where it is in a big notebook
binder or hoping someone put in the correct keywords in the keyword
field of our call-tracking system for that particular glitch, I could
have just searched the entire text of every OneNote document just by
putting in any keyword I thought would be appropriate in the search
field. So if there was a bug with the CREATE command in dBASE, for
example, and under the old system the originator of the item didn't
put CREATE in the keyword field of the database, I could never find
that item by putting in CREATE as a search key. But with OneNote you
don't NEED to put in keywords, because every word of the document
automatically is a searchable keyword!

Another helpful approach was to take each checklist -- system
configurations, new network and email accounts, and so forth -- and
make them into templates in OneNote. Whenever I had to set up a new
computer system, therefore, I just created a new page in the Current
Projects notebook from the system-config template, and I had a
checklist for that particular system. Then if I had to stop to "put
out a fire" elsewhere and then come back to the configuration process,
I would know exactly where I left off. (It also helped if I was
configuring more than one system.)

I am sure you could come up with many other applications for the
program, but I think I made my point.

//Steve//