I wanted to take a moment to share with you why noise reduction headphones are better than the more widely known active noise cancellation headphones. Most people think of active noise cancelation headphones like the Bose headphones when they think of headphones that block sound. All active noise cancelation work the same way. They have little microphones on the out side of the headphones that are constantly “listening” to the noise around you so they can produce an “opposite” sound wave inside of your headphones to cancel the unwanted noise before it reaches your ears.

Noise reduction headphones, sometimes called passive noise cancellation headphones, take an entirely different approach. Instead of using complicated microphones and electronics to cancel sound, they simply reflect the sound away from your ears. The effect is pretty much like closing the door to your room. You are essentially isolating your ears from unwanted noise. There are a couple different companies out there making headphones like this. The best noise reduction headphones on the market right now appear to be the Direct Sound Extreme Isolation headphones.

Here is my top 5 reasons of why you should use noise reduction headphones:

1. Better value for your money. These headphones block more noise than the $300 headphones out there.
2. No “hidden fee” of having to keep buying batteries
3. Much better at block talking/voices than active noise cancelation headphones
4. Better sound quality
5. Longer lasting/better durablity

I’ve written before on the predictive nature of estimation software. Using cost estimating software products as project management software can help show you aspects of your project which you haven’t accounted for, particularly things like risk.

You can’t take that leap back

However, software estimation products can do more than highlight areas which you haven’t seen, they can also peer around the corner and show that which you haven’t done yet. Through the software’s rather developed, and mathematically sound, understanding of your project, that understanding can be leveraged towards making theoretical changes.

Think about it this way, software estimation project management software allows you, the project manager to play the “What if…” game. What if I doubled my workforce? What if I reduced everyone’s workload by 10%? What if deadlines were all extended by 10%? What if I assigned every part of the project to just one person?

The questions can seem trivial, even comical, however they point to a very interesting application for such software – they ability to control, limit, and even potentially mitigate risk. The questions I just posed all center around one significant area – the sharing of a workload to make a project easier on employees.

How does making project members work easier help to control risk? Well, for one thing, for projects which are heavily dependent on multiple deadlines all being satisfied in a particular order, specifically where one group is waiting on the work of another, each deadline represents a potential point of failure. By making deadlines easier to achieve, the risk of failure is thus avoided.

Of course, deadlines represent just one area of risk. I like to use them as an example because hard deadlines seem to exist in every area from newspapers to software companies to automobile manufactures. The flexibility of project management software which employees these estimation techniques means that project managers can juggle all sorts of variables in a project finding the optimal mix. In the end, such juggling helps to control the risk of uncertainty.