Apps
Key Questions
What is 'Context Switching' and why does using 5 different chat apps kill productivity?
What are the industry standard cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)?
How does the private sector collaborate using modern suites (M365, Workspace)?
Why are tools like Slack and Teams better than email for operations?
What is the difference between ticketing (Jira) and project management (Asana/Monday)?
How do knowledge bases (Confluence, Notion) prevent tribal knowledge loss?
What is the 'Bus Factor' regarding knowledge management tools?
How do collaborative whiteboards (Miro, FigJam) replace physical meeting rooms?
Why do designers use tools like Figma instead of Photoshop for UI? Or alternatives like Affinity?
Learning Objectives
Learning Objectives
Track your progress as you learn
Hard Truths
Using modern productivity tools involves changing your workflows and accepting the risks (e.g. risks from storing your data in the cloud and having your data potentially used to improve AI products).
Employee productivity can increase even with poor tooling - people can produce more work by working more hours or doing things manually.
Organizations can just give employees better tools to produce quality work faster.
Users need to articulate the business benefits from using tools.
IT policy guardrails need to move with the times, not adopting industry staples can incur opportunity costs to expenditure on manpower, productivity, speed of delivery.
Employees can get frustrated when they need to use multiple apps, e.g. Teams for meeting bosses, Slack for chats with developers, having to find documents across different platforms.
However, don't ask employees to use software when it blatantly doesn't solve any problem, like forcing people to spend time logging tasks over Jira instead of doing real work.