New Strategies for Lean Times

When the going gets tough, the tough retool and start working smarter. As the economy skids further out of control, we are all looking for ways to make it through. Maybe you’ve decided to cut down on business travel. Maybe you have considered laying off staff and working on an “outsourcing” consultant model.

Whether you are a lone eagle or a member of a multi-national corporation, now is the time to take a look at how you do things, focus on your operations, and find new ways to increase your efficiency and productivity – to get you through this little rough patch, and to make you more effective overall in the long run.

REDNP is an online team coordination software focused on simplifying the team-based project life cycle, addressing the challenges of inefficient team communication and data transfer.  This software application makes it easy to manage multiple projects, with multiple team members each.  It offers a professional solution to your overwhelming inbox.

We all want to do more with less. We all are looking for ways to take advantage of technology to make things easier.  REDNP empowers us to do just that.  Today, this is no longer a strategy of convenience or laziness, but rather a matter of reality and survival…

Synchronize projects with local calendars

REDNP® launched a new calendar function last week that provides its users the ability to synchronize their custom project schedules with their local calendars using what is known as the “the iCalendar standard.” This functionality is incredibly useful, allowing users to keep their local digital calendars automatically up to date with their multi-member project schedules.

As you may know, REDNP® is a web-based platform on which decentralized teams of individual users collectively manage projects of all types. On the REDNP® platform, “projects” are maintained and constantly updated by multiple users. The benefit of which is that every individual user gets to see a dynamic, always-up-to-date version of the project task list – i.e., what’s coming, what’s due, what’s complete, and what’s past due. But the user used to have to be to be logged in to see the updates to the project schedule. Not anymore.

REDNP’s shared calendar function operates similarly to, and is completely compatible with, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, and other calendar applications that allow synchronization with remote calendars (see this list of compatible calendar applications).

What makes you more efficent?

According to Dictionary.com, the term “efficiency” is defined as:

“1. The state or quality of being efficient; competency of performance.
2. Accomplishment or ability to accomplish a job with a minimum expenditure of time and effort.
3. The ratio of the work done or energy developed by a machine, engine, etc., to the energy supplied to it, usually expressed as a percentage.”

In today’s information age, we are presented with many opportunities to increase our efficiency. Facebook lets us connect with people, YouTube empowers us to share media, and Google helps us access information in ways we never dreamed of just a few short years ago. These are just three well-known examples. There are literally thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of products available today via the world wide web that help us do things cheaper, better, faster than ever before.

So how do you choose which products are best for you? Obviously, you must first define what you are trying to do cheaper, better, and faster. That will narrow the choices considerably. But even then you still left with a virtual sea of choices to wade through to make a selection.

The single most important criteria to me is “ease of use.” If a product does everything I need it to do to make me more efficient at whatever I am doing, but is difficult to use or learn, or difficult for the people I work with to use or learn, then it doesn’t do much at all to enhance my “state or quality of being efficient,” or allow me to “accomplish a job with a minimum of expediture of time and effort.”

REDNP addresses this problem head on. REDNP is an online software application that actually increases personal efficiency by focusing first and foremost on providing a robust application that is EASY TO USE – for everyone involved. The software has lots of neat and beneficial functionality, like organizing information onto one universally accessible central location, and enhancing team communication and accountability by integrating directly with users’ local email systems and calendars. But beyond that, what makes it actually increase your efficiency is the fact that it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to learn how to use, and it instantly increases your output-for-input efficiency ratio (Go back up and re-read #3!).

The bottom line question is, does what you are using now to organize tasks, documents, and communication really make you more efficient, or no?

REDNP not just for Real Estate Development

While the REDNP® platform was originally built with real estate development teams in mind, it is a product that is and always has been useful for project teams in multiple industries. Any team that needs to coordinate task lists and share documents back and forth will benefit from the centralized access and at-a-glance organization of the REDNP® platform.

On that note, I am pleased to announce that Maureen Russell, Inc, a Denver-based Marketing and PR firm, has engaged REDNP® to facilitate the transfer of large documents between members of her team. We placed a widget on Maureen’s website to allow her team members to access REDNP® directly from her website. We can do the same for you!

Urban Planning and Development Essential to Our Survival

It occurred to me years ago, in my Master’s of Urban and Regional Planning program at the University of Colorado Denver that real estate development and urban planning are two of the top ten – if not the top two – most important factors contributing to the future success or failure of the evolution of human civilization.  While continuing advances in scientific discovery, public health, energy production and information technology (among countless others) are undoubtedly of critical importance to the health and possibly  the survival of our species, it is in my mind the individual’s day-to-day experience and interaction with others within the local physical environment – urban, rural, and everywhere in between – that determines the success of all these other areas of human thought and development.

The relatively recent advancements in urban planning theory, promulgated (arguably) first by the Congress for the New Urbanism, represent a concerted effort to pull back from the last fifty plus years of building where and how it was “easiest” to build, and to start looking more holistically at the where and how we “should” be building. As the new theory goes, we now try to consider a host of factors that go into our planning and development decisions: local infrastructure concerns, the global environment, walkability, regional connectivity, sustainable building practices, mass transit…the list goes on.  In fact, these are the subjects of ongoing debate and discussion (as well as the ever-present “what to do in our challenging real estate and housing market” conversation) in the current professional conferences, such as the Urban Land Institute’s upcoming Place Making conference in Denver, Colorado.

While this evolution in theory and practice is all well and good – indeed, we may not have been able to survive without it – it has presented quite a problem for the fundamental logistics of planning and development.  As we have all become “enlightened” as citizens and professionals, so too have our local public officials; lagging as all of our American political infrastructure does, behind evolving public opinion. As a result, municipal planning – and more specifically the local building review and permitting process – has become an increasingly arduous process for the local development applicant.  The process now takes months to navigate, and now requires a whole team of technical specialists to get through the lengthening list of technical reviews: preliminary review, zoning approval, local neighborhood planning, environmental impact, landscape review, architectural committees, historic preservation…this list goes on as well.

These new requirements, while mostly well-intended, cost the applicant thousands more dollars to navigate, and have made even good development ideas economically infeasible to pursue. But, they are not going away anytime soon.  These changes represent a fundamental shift in the real estate development process, and the development industry will have to evolve to meet these new standards.

This is why I built REDNP®. It is my goal to facilitate and simplify the complex process of effectively integrating multiple project participants – such as the multiple participants on a real estate development project – on one easy to use custom project platform, so people can focus on the complex tasks we all face, rather than on mundane logistical issues, like where they stored that document you emailed them last week. 

About REDNP

Do you work on projects with multiple participants? Have you ever found it difficult to keep everyone in the loop with what everyone else on the team is doing? Are you affected by other team members’ work flow? Do you share documents? Collaborate with others? Work together on group tasks? Rely on other people’s work products for the work you do? Have you ever found yourself looking for “that document you just knew someone emailed to you the other day,” but now you can’t find it and whomever sent it is out of town and won’t be back until it’s too late? If any of this sounds familiar, then REDNP is for you.

REDNP is a web-based project team collaboration platform that provides an easy-to-use, central location for project teams to store and share project data and manage group tasks remotely, from any computer, anywhere in the world. Using REDNP, project teams of all sizes share a dynamic, custom platform where the changes I make here can be seen immediately on your computer, and vice versa.

REDNP was built to provide an easy solution to a complex problem. I would love to know if it will work for you.

Intro to Urban Planning – A Dwell Primer

The October issue of Dwell Magazine showed up yesterday. One of the cover feature stories was “Cities Making Cities” – what you should know about Urban Planning. On page 204 – An Introduction to Urban Planning. Now, I understand that urban planning should be understood on a general level, I doubt that this should be taught to the average modernist-enthusiast, architect, designer, planner, etc. The details involved can be overwhelming. Should we keep it to the professionals?

The genesis of REDNP was urban planning – not just urban planning but the process. It is a PROCESS. Time, money, sanity – it all is the nuts and bolts of urban planning. As one reads the article further, it’s really just a history and some key concepts. Not the time management, development process, fees and well, patience that is involved in working with developers, city planners, architects and builders.

Read the article, though. Excellent resources and examples including Urban Land Institute. An organization the REDNP deeply supports.

Rocky Mountain Builder’s Show – Beaver Creek

The Annual Rocky Mountain Builder’s Show is coming up this fall in Beaver Creek. This year’s theme of the Conference and Expo is all about weathering the tide that we are right now. The have an interesting line-up of speakers and presentations all designed to assist the builder/developer community in remaining innovative in slow and troubling economic times. These include:

• Colorado Housing Market Pulse and Perspective by the Genesis Group
• Hybrid Communities by Chris Moore of DTJ Design
• Architects – Contractors – Lawyers by Paul Logan with Architectural Alliance Group

Just like these folks, REDNP is designed to help real estate development businesses “weather the tide” as well. The project management software is designed for efficiency in all processes including time management and resources.

Denver Prepares for the DNC

The activity going on in Denver right now is contagious. The Democratic National Convention is just days away. Not one detail seems to have been overlooked as the city prepares for the onslaught of 50,000+ people. One event that needs to be highlighted is the Green Frontier Fest.

The Festival will be held at the Denver Convention Center on August 24th. It’s a community Celebration of sustainable choices in the New West. Now, we’ll be there but we won’t have REDNP at a booth or anything for you to look at. However, REDNP is the type of product that belongs there because it is sustainable. No paper, no oil, no hassle. We know in the future that many of these companies will be seeking out REDNP as the choice in their project management software. Maybe we should have named it GREENNP….

Asbury Green – First LEED Certified Student Housing in Colorado

Yesterday we had the privilege of touring the first LEED certified Student Housing project in Colorado – Asbury Green. Asbury Green located on the DU campus, is MacKenzie House’s first LEED project. Kristi Budish, Mackenzie House project manager led the tour. She said that ultimately that is where the Colorado-based developer of senior and student housing is headed.

Funny, that is where REDNP is headed as well. We are constantly updating and revising REDNP to add the maximum amount of value and benefits to our end users. Who are the end users? Anyone in the Real Estate Development industry - architects, planners, developers. Soon, REDNP will have all the LEED documentation and resources a real estate development project team member needs for research, certification or to incorporate into their task manager and calendar. Would this be helpful?