Outsourcing doesnt have to be to a foreign country, it happens all the time. There are organizations with big IT departments that choose to pay outside company to do the work. Is that a good idea? It depends, as with everything. You have to realize that you will spend much more time on specifying and verifying the implementation of requirements, interfaces, etc. than if the developers were in-house. If you don't do that then you're going to fail. This increase of specification cost, is due to communication problems with external parties. If you are prepared to stop coding and start managing - why not go for it. Just be careful and precise with requirements, including non-functional ones (performance, etc.). Always mention that you won't pay if it doesnt adhere to the spec and good practices. If you are going to own their code later on, you should also enforce some standards, frameworks used, etc... You do see where I'm going? You can outsource the grunt work, not the thinking.

this is not true, read "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahneman. There are experiments that show that quality of human thinking degrades very quickly when multitasking. Therefore some system that can detect such situation would be very good for activities that require long attention span and are prone to interruptions.

old news!

Try Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). It's very well described in reference to software development in "Lean Software Strategies" book (which I recommend btw).

Basically you dont rank priorities of projects/tasks not on absolute scale, but on relative scale (project A vs project B, etc.) based on gut feelings, discussions with stakeholders, CFOs, etc. You end up with a matrix you have to solve to get normalized new absolute weights of each project/task.

I had the opportunity to use it once for new project kick off, I liked it and will use this method in the future. The book presents this method in context of other case studies, and it certainly has been used in many other situations.

re-fire reTARDIS!

Let me recommend a book : "Lean Software Strategies: Proven Techniques for Managers and Developers". It containes throrough analysis of craft, mass and lean production strategies and their reflections in software (CMM being on the mass side = already obsolete approach). If you can't abandon CMM because of market conditions, think about embracing CMM with as much lean as possible as Peter Middleton describes, and find auditors who would understand and allow you advance on CMM scale without sacrificing productivity and adding waste to your process. In terms of tools, good issue tracking system with customizable workflows is what I recommend.

What about Google writing App Script interpreter for Excel? Would that be helpful for migrating away from Excel to Apps?

racist ! (in a black coffee kind of sense) sue the bastards!