Innovation: Ig Noble Awards – Bra As Gas Mask Wins Prize

The Ig Nobel Prizes are to some extent a parody of the Nobel Prize. Yesterday, Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan won the public health prize for a bra that converts into a gas mask. An extract from their patent filing is below. It’s a clever idea, not that I know anything about gas masks, but presumably one of the challenges of gas masks is people aren’t keen to carry them around.

If you’re interested in processes for driving innovation within your organization, my book discusses the topic in detail.

Extract from the patent filing for the bra/gas mask device

The Importance of Tracking

Before you want to manage something, you must first understand it. That sounds obvious, but it’s quite a challenge. This applies to projects, portfolios and even yourself.

To take the personal example, most people would like to be more effective at work, or in their personal lives. It’s hard to do that without knowing what you’re currently spending time on. This is where tracking comes in, where you think you are spending your time, may not be where you actually are spending your time. A neat application for this purpose is Rescue Time, which logs activity on your computer to produce activity reports like the one below:

Example of RescueTime reporting

By using RescueTime, or the following the broader principles it advocates, you can become better at managing your time, and hence improve your productivity. Perhaps the most compelling angle of RescueTime is data collection is automated, so you can get granular detail on how you spend your time without investing time to input a mass of data, or worrying about data accuracy. Both major problems with tracking systems.

A detailed review of electronic time tracking systems can be found here on Mashable.com, and DesignM.ag has this overview of time management principles for those who work freelance, though I think it’s broadly applicable to anyone who has some degree of autonomy at work. Finally, if your a Mac user, Minco is an interesting new time tracking app.

Team Size And Performance

One obvious course of action when a project is behind schedule and you don’t want to cut scope is to expand the number of people on the project. The seldom works as expected.

Firstly, addition of new team members creates new work, the existing team members must spend time getting the new recruits up to speed, if the project has been running for a while, then this tacit knowledge transfer is not a trivial task.

Secondly, expanding the team size exponentially increases the number of channels of communication between people. In a team of 3 people there are three channels of communication A talks to B, B talks to C and C talks to A. By the channels of communication across a team have the relationship n(n-1)/2 where n is the number of team members. This means a team of 10 has 45, a team of 100 has 4,950.

Increasing team size may work, but it introduces its own complexity. Training new team members and the increase in channels of communication can make an increase in team size counter-productive.

This, and other concepts, primarily related to software development are explained in Brooks’ publication, The Mythical Man Month

Channels of Communication Relative to Number of Team Members

Review of my upcoming book

Kiron Bondale has reviewed my upcoming book on his blog, “Easy in theory, difficult in practise”.