September, 2008
by Rick Ralston, Managing Editor
MeasureIT is published as a free service to both members and non-members alike, so be sure to share this link with friends and colleagues.
Peg McMahon starts off with Pivot Charts for the Fearful. There are times when an Excel pivot chart can make your work easier. Unfortunately, people tend to avoid them because Excel makes constructing a pivot chart seem complicated. At the least, it is perceived to be harder than it really is. In this short tutorial, I will take you through the most common pivot chart tasks that I do. It might take some of the mystery out of it for you & make you bold enough to strike out on your own.
Adrian Cockcroft continues his four part series on Enhanced headroom plot in R,. Part 4 adds some color coding and some enhancements to the histograms.
Tom Kelman interviewed Peg McMahon (one of the CMG’07 Mullen winners), in Getting to Know the 2007 Mullen Award Winner, Peg McMahon. Peg McMahon won a Mullen award in 2007 for her outstanding paper, "Death To Dashboards: Alarming, Performance Management Based on Variance, System Prioritization and Other Thoughts on Data Visualization." In her paper Peg discusses how the use of traditional thresholds and dashboard displays needs to be reviewed in this day of large server farms and endless streams of metrics. In their place she presents the idea of using threshold ranges determined statistically and treemap displays to analyze the results.
Dr. Thomas E. Bell continues his series on retirement in Preparing for Your Final Career: Retirement Post-Retirement Expenditure Level. How much will you spend each year after retirement? Is the amount some magical percentage of your pre-retirement income, like 70% or 80% ? or 100%? The impact of changing your status from "employee" to "retiree" may be either an increase or a decrease (depending on your age and the on-going contributions to your retirement account). Larger increases and decreases arise from changes in your individual lifestyle over the years, and (if you're many years from retirement) those may require a bit of effort to predict. A budget worksheet is included with this article.
Joseph Delano supplements Dr. Bell with Concerns about Retirement and Strategies to Help. You've saved and sacrificed to build your portfolio, now it's time your portfolio worked for you. These days, however, investing for retirement isn't as simple as stashing your life savings in a CD or Treasury bond and living off the interest. Longer life expectancies and earlier retirement age means you may need your income to last you as long as 30 years or more.
Denise Kalm talks working from home in Remote, But Not Forgotten Working from Home Successfully. IBM once meant "I've Been Moved." Now it means "I'm By Myself." Increasingly, people are asking or being asked to work remotely, typically in their homes. Though there certainly are many advantages and cost savings when you work from home, there are also many challenges. Managed poorly, this work arrangement can negatively impact both your career and your personal life. It doesn't have to. Here are some guidelines to keep you as "connected" as you ever were in an office, while ensuring you still have a life.
Inside the CMG Bulletin we have the following:
Bill Jouris, the CMG'08 Program Chair, has an update on CMG'08 in Latest Info about CMG'08
Tom Kelman lists the known October Regional meetings in October CMG Regional Meetings.
We have a review of the Philadelphia CMG September 12 meeting.
We are always interested in receiving your comments, suggestions, and submitted articles. Help us make MeasureIT even better in 2008.
This issue was made possible through the hard work and dedication of the MeasureIT volunteer staff, and the contributions of willing authors.
If you have not yet logged onto the MeasureIT site, go to the MeasureIT home page, http://www.cmg.org/measureit/ and fill out the subscription request form.