Thoughts and observations on the intersection of technology and business; searching for better understanding of what's relevant, where's the value, and (always) what's the goal ...
Quantifying Business Benefit of Collaboration Tools (or, What Is This Meeting Costing Me?)
This post started off as an excuse to experiment with Google Docs, and this really neat feature I discovered - embedding a spreadsheet in a web page as a sharing method. However, it struck me as a potential way to cost justify the time, effort, and expense of implementing collaboration systems with the Most Cynical Among Us.We've all been in large meetings, with tens of people from the project team, along with the expensive consultants, sitting around a table listening to the project manager read their slides to us. The meetings always get scheduled for a full hour (
it's the default in our calendaring system!), and everyone feels the need to speak, if only to make sure their voice has joined the chorus of agreement.
However, many of the Most Cynical Among Us have observed the large number of people in the room, and asked the question "How much is this meeting costing me?" It's a worthy exercise to go through ... so I whipped up a little spreadsheet model to quantify the hard and soft costs ...
It doesn't take long to play with the model and see the dollars add up; even if you don't believe in tracking "soft costs", the amount of time spent in meetings can get really big, really fast.
Are status update meetings inherently a waste of time? Absolutely not - communication is critical, and most organizations typically don't do enough of it. An exercise like this just puts the potential cost, in time and money, in real terms - and reminds us to focus on maximizing that investment.
Can this meeting be avoided? Collaboration platforms (blogs, intranets, etc.) let us update the team virtually; people can get the information when it's most convenient for them.
Are we communicating effectively? Sometimes, face to face communication is required and preferred - especially when you need to monitor how the message is being received in real time. Hence the broad focus on effective presentations and impactful communications ...
Look at the cost of your last meeting - did you get your money's worth?PS: I welcome any suggestions for improvements to the model - to request edit access or to get a copy, send email to
jpmacl_docs@cazh1.com.
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Collaboration "in the Wild": Some Observations
An Enterprise 2.0 dream scenario: implementing a complex project across multiple sites, in two different time zones, with a large team (well over 100). The team was reasonably savvy with collaboration tools; core team members were quite comfortable with Instant Messaging, and we have been relying on SharePoint for many months. A centralized, coordinated document repository; a single source, very public bugs/issues list - the foundation was in place for some time, so our "go-live weekend" experience was pleasantly predictable.
During this critical time, we had to coordinate with the multitude, and we did that with a highly structured "hour-by-hour plan", regularly scheduled "all-hands" conference calls, and web-based meeting places so all could review Completed, In Process, and Coming Soon tasks. After a successful weekend, we received plenty of positive feedback, and some interesting suggestions for improvements:
- Conference calls were regularly scheduled, and featured tight agendas - which tended to limit individuals' ability to connect with the right person (until afterward). Since each location had a "war room" where the team gathered for the status calls, some suggested we leave the conference call open 24x7. I wasn't a big fan of this one, primarily because I'm the guy paying the long-distance bill ...
- Few on the team are actively using Twitter, but one of the project leads noted that IM was quite popular, and imagined a Tweetdeck-like ability to see instant messages and responses that have gone out previously; "threaded conversations" that could be visible to all, helping collaborative problem-solving and knowledge transfer. I congratulated him on inventing Google Wave ...
- Like most decent-sized companies, we have a highly structured Process for approving code changes into production - and like most decent-sized projects, we noted a few instances where promotions to resolve problems were delayed (while they worked their way through the Process). Might there be some streamlining opportunities here, since we are working on a high profile project with lots of oversight?
Of course, #3 was a non-starter, but the first two generated some good discussion, Yes, it's conceivable that we could augment our SharePoint site with a few new extensions or plug-ins to address the first two - but I'm actively working against any changes to our collaboration environments for a very simple reason -
we're not finished with the big project. Phase 2 of 2 is coming in just a few weeks.
Am I being
close-minded? Not really, I'm a huge driver of collaboration tools in the company. But, I'm also a realist - and I know two significant factors that argue against change at the time:
Prioritizing "Improvements": We are implementing ERP and other highly intrusive / foundational systems, and there's a lot of change that comes along with that. I understand that an organization can only take so much change at once - so why not focus on the stuff that's bringing real (ie. quantifiable, bottom-line, significant) business value.
: Eight months ago, sharing files by e-mail and ad-hoc, unstructured meetings were the norm. To be fair, we were working smaller projects with teams of 10-20, and usually in no more than two locations. Over the past few months, as we were teeing up for Big Go-Live #1, we've been introducing the newer tools in small bits. For Go-Live Weekend, the team was already familiar with going to SharePoint for status updates, or recording a new Issue in the SharePoint list. The mechanics were old hat, and folks didn't need to think about it - which was nice, since we need them thinking about their Tasks. If we introduce new collaboration tools with little lead time before the Big Go-Live #2, Tasks will be interrupted with people struggling to remember how to communicate.
In the right setting, collaboration tools can clearly add value - even for the most conservative jaded technology users. However, you can't introduce something so new and expect people to "get it" in the short term. Better approach is to introduce the new tools early in the process, when there is no pressure. This lets the team build familiarity, understanding, and skills by the time you need to rely on these tools for critical communication.
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Underwhelming experiences with Google Wave
Took some time today to work with the new communication meme -
Google Wave. I wouldn't call it a fundamentally new way to communicate - well, not yet. I think Google is safe to continue with a "preview" label - clearly not even "beta" yet. No horrible bugs - at least on the Windows platform - but some obviously missing features. And, I am not all that impressed with the basic idea - it's just a mashup of Google Docs, instant messenger, and eMail.
ProblemsAll of my experimentation has been from a Windows machine - I am experiencing horrible performance issues with Firefox 3.5.3 on Ubuntu 9.04. I freely admit that this might not be a Wave issue - for the last two weeks, all of my Google sites (Mail, Docs, iGoogle, Reader ...) run brutally slow, timing out by graying the browser window. I know it's a weird issue because I can't
Google for an answer (a disturbingly tight loop). Wave refused to even show me the stills from the introductory videos until I disabled
Greasemonkey. Yes, I'm sure it has something to do with my setup, my installed plugins - I'm just surprised that the problems have been this stubborn.
So, to get anything done, it's back to Windows - still using Firefox, but no hint of platform troubles. Just an underwhelming experience with the fancy new toy.
I Am LegendInterconnections on the internet are a wonderful thing; I put out a
Tweet (sic) regarding my Wave invites, and a note in LinkedIn as well. Twitter generated the most responses, with folks I'd never met - great fun to connect like that. The following day, I got a note from someone looking to connect via Wave - I'm guessing from the information that I can see, this person saw one of my original notes via Friendfeed. Amazing how those copnnections were practically spontaneous ...
... while Wave feels like I'm in a walled garden. I still feel very cut off in the Wave world - a different domain from gmail.com means a new address to track, a new contact list to build. And it's difficult to find connections with folks you already know; I received another Wave invite from a friend, but since I didn't need it, I tried to figure out how to connect to him via Wave (I thought it a reasonable assumption that he, like me, has dived in). Unfortunately, I had to resort to an email message and some detective work to find out his Google ID - not something I could explain to most business users.
Yet Another Email ClientYes, I am still at that opinion. Most of the opinions and articles I've scanned make it sound like we are working with a
next-gen email client that does
some of the basics right. I do note that the amplifiers tend to gush a bit, while the attenuators work hard to impress with wit.
Generally ProGenerally ConMaybe It's Just MeOne of my random invites went to
this guy, who's review was a bit more positive than mind. Ok, maybe I'll jump into the
with:public pool and wade around a while - it's probably the only way I'll really
get it. However, I am very willing to be patient and continue the experiment - took me about 3 months to
get Twitter.
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Real Business Users and SharePoint
Introducing buzzword-compliant technology like a wiki, or integrated collaboration spaces like SharePoint, will typically go well with a motivated audience like your internal IT department. But if you really want to understand how this stuff works, try it with "real people" - line employees in sales and marketing, operations, and finance.
Sure, you've heard complaints from these folks (they have better PCs at home, the SAP/Oracle UI is brutal compared to Amazon and AT&T U-Verse, and why can't they just connect their new iPhone to the corporate mail server?). Be warned; demanding users are not necessarily technically savvy when it comes to groupware.
Case in point; we are working a rather large project (many months in length, over 100 people throughout the business) using SharePoint as our collaboration space - and learning an awful lot about what we
thought we understood about ease-of-use and intuitive user interfaces. Our collaboration space is a basic SharePoint project site, featuring the usual suspects - a Shared Document library, an Issues list, and an Announcements section. Simple right? Well, maybe not ...
Documents Check In, but they Don't Check OutJust kidding, the actual check-in / check-out mechanism works fine. It's just very interesting that this basic concept of version control is lost on most end-users.
But let's start with the document library itself - it looks like a really nice version of File Explorer, but becomes very frustrating to folks when they try basic tasks like drag-and-drop. Yes, we found the simple solution - there is an option to open the folder in Windows Explorer, but since this menu option is buried right above the file list, it's hard to find - certainly not "intuitively obvious".
Version control was a difficult thing to explain - thank goodness for the tight integration with Office 2007. We found it easier to show folks how to edit documents with a simple double-click - that works just like their shared folders on the old file server! You can explain the concepts of version control quite easily, but the whole check-in / check-out, keep-a-copy-on-your-local-drive thing just gets too complicated. We did have to deal with the one-time task of checking in a new document after you upload it, but after that, they just open the files directly, and that's it.
There is one feature of Shared Document libraries that I really like - the ability to add custom attributes to documents that can appear as columns in the view. Makes it easier to sort / select / search on documents, and people "get it" relatively quickly. Just go easy on the version control.
... Here's a SharePoint TissueI think the most powerful and elegant feature of SharePoint is the flexibility you have with basic list management - even with WSS. Truly, this stuff should cover over half of the "fancy" automation tasks that folks are are asking for. However, I'm still surprised / dismayed by the fact that SharePoint doesn't include a standard graphical indicator - you know, the classic "stoplight" (green is good, yellow warning, red means um, er...). I've written about this one
before - why can't I have a simple datatype (vs. putting together a
sneaky little script to make it work).
I also have a significant warning / insight about trying to do too much with your Lists. Do you realize that most end-users in a typical SMB have older CRTs? I'll bet you still have a large number of 15" CRTs with slightly foggy tubes, on their last legs (but too expensive to change out for all but the executive staff) (ok, and IT too, sorry). In addition - well, let's just say that I'm not the only one whose eyesight is
beginning to fail them; I can't tell you how often I've tried to talk folks into moving their screen resolution higher than 800x600 - but it just doesn't work.
What's my point? Before you put too many columns in your Lists, or too many gadgets on your Site, check with the average user to make sure that it looks okay on their Screen. Heck, before you even begin your design, use SMS or a simple script to poll the user community and find out what kind of screen resolutions have been set. Catering to the lowest common denominator is not a cop-out, especially when the point of a collaboration site is to get people to actually participate!
Push vs. Pull Messaging(Another opinion:) I think most powerful aspect of collaboration sites is the aggregation of all knowledge about a project into a single, searchable repository. When people send project updates or resolve issues / hold discussions over e-mail, all that knowledge is buried and quickly lost inside people's inboxes. In SharePoint, a typical Announcements web part (yes, I know it's just another kind of List) is quite practical as a messaging medium, because folks can sign up for e-mail alerts.
Don't underestimate the attraction of the e-mail. People are used to getting information delivered to them in their inboxes - it's expected! All I'm saying with my Announcements list is that you have to subscribe to the information and pull it towards yourself (versus expecting me, the project manager, to remember to push it to you - and everybody else that might be interested).
Real-world learning: this concept didn't take long to grab hold in our project. It makes sense, people understand it relatively quickly.
On The Good SideDon't get me wrong, there is lots of good that's going on. Now that the larger project is getting used to this new collaboration space ...
- ... our issue tracking list gets better every time someone touches it - and now we have consistent consolidated issue lists for all aspects of the project
- ... we are advancing our state-of-the-art for shared authorship; there is a lot more visibility to who is working on what, and we're getting more participation than a normal project
- ... the combination of all these different pieces - shared documents, issues, announcements, and other things - are massively facilitating communication, and it is noticed by the folks on the team
Yes - these collaboration tools will definitely will bring huge value and streamline communications to your project. Just don't think it's easy or obvious.
Previously ...- Update on Blogs as PM Tools - Tales from the Front Lines (January 20, 2008)
- Butting In to the Conversation: PM Communication Tools (February 26, 2008)
- The Best Way to get Web 2.0 Into the Enterprise (March 3, 2008)
- Optimizing the Wrong Part of Knowledge Management (March 16, 2008)
- The Innovation Generation and User Interfaces (April 9, 2008)
- The Right Web2.0 Tool for the Audience (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook) (May 9, 2008)
- Enterprise 2.1: Exiting the Trough of Disillusionment (July 22, 2008)
- Facilitating Innovation: Establishing an Environment of Possibilities (August 22, 2008)
- Is SharePoint WSS dangerous to SharePoint contractors? (February 4, 2009)
- Low Tech SharePoint Hack: Project Status Indicator (March 14, 2009)
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Business Benefits of Social Networks Exist, but ...
When I see / read articles like
this, or hear the breathless claims of vendors,
pundits, and
True Believers, I'll privately chuckle to myself. All of this stuff - social networking, collaboration, and innovation - are 21st century takes on good old Knowledge Management (KM), circa 1998.
Do these sound like presentations from your recent Enterprise 2.0 conference?
- Managing Cultural Change to Create a Knowledge Sharing Environment
- Effectively Managing Information Overload in the Information Age
- Information Content and Security in Document Management Systems
- Using Technology and the Project Management Workbench to Accelerate Product Development Efforts
- Shifting the Burden of Knowledge Sharing to All Employees
I dug up an old copy of the proceedings from a KM conference from 1998; if I did a global replace on "Innovation" for "Knowledge", I could probably get a bunch of folks to sign up today!
Ok, a little sarcasm is fun, but once you realize the similarities, there are other parallels with 1990's KM efforts - not the least of which is the identification of
business benefits. Anyone involved with projects back then can testify to the
difficulty in predicting hard benefits - clearly quantifiable impact on top line or bottom line, derived in a predictable, measurable manner. Sorry, it just didn't work out that way for KM - and it won't for Social Networks, either! The
hype cycle will prevail ...
Hard Benefits of Social Networks Do Not Exist, but ...Why do people insist on expecting a hard business benefit from social networks, or a payback from a project to implement a funny-sounding technology (wiki/blog/tweet) inside the enterprise? Has anyone
ever gotten a quantifiable business benefit from participating on Facebook, LinkedIn, mySpace?
Well, yes, actually - plenty of folks have connected with friends / colleagues, collaborated on business ideas, come up with innovative new approaches - actually monetized all the goofy sounding tools. I myself have written about successes, and have made
connections I could never have
anticipated. Heck, the old KM conference guide has a couple of case studies as well.
Ah, but do you see the pattern? Business benefits are not predictable, they are always opportunistic and anecdotal. Success is characterized by stories of the home runs (rarely accompanied by comparable stats on strikeouts, by the way). You can't implement a social network within a company or a group, and predict how much and when the profits / savings / growth with start rolling in. You are setting up an
environment of opportunity - nothing more.
When I hear people talk about business value or business return of social networks as if they could predict it, I cringe. They're trying to apply financial controls on something that's governed by chance - you can't do it. The incorrect assumption is that you can
control good luck - but you can tweak your chances.
Active networkers know - I'm talking about people that have been networking for years, when connections were made face to face. Career coaches would exhort us to get out there and build our professional network - make the office visits, get on their calendar, develop some connections. You have no idea what could happen from any one connection or conversation - nothing might happen or something might happen - you trying to make your own luck.
What is it they say, luck is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration? Social networking is just
automation for some of that 90%. And benefits will happen - just don't ask me when.
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Five Stages of Twitter Relevance
I'm already fielding internal (as well as
external) questions about the application of Twitter in a manufacturing company, and I'm developing a reasonably good model, I think - one that will apply to the hard-core, salt-of-the-earth, manufacturing business leader that I've worked with at many organizations.
This "maturity model" approach has been used before; back in December of 2008,
Bhagarva sketched out the
Five Stages of Twitter Acceptance - but that model only helps existing bloggers and social networkers understand this terse little idea
spitter. Kind of like explaining OOP to a COBOL developer -
I get the general idea of coding (communicating),
but you've changed some of the basic rules like procedural vs. event handling (short and immediate vs. in depth and permanent).
This doesn't help explain YACMTTCDFE (Yet Another Communication Method That They Can't Distinguish From Email) for those still struggling with Web 2.0 and Social Networks. If it doesn't arrive in their Outlook inbox, I'm still facing an uphill struggle getting them to understand the mechanism, let alone the concept.
However, I'm getting a decent level of results when I draw parallels to concepts that these folks "grew up" with. The level of understanding and acceptance directly correlates to the level of
relevance that the Twitterverse might have for their current information sharing needs. They typically ask ...
How exactly do I understand Twitter and it's relevance to my work day?
- Pointless: This has absolutely no value add, a complete waste of time - get back to work!
- Cute: An interesting and different communication medium, but I gotta get back to work. Maybe over lunch ...
- Web-Based Texting: Conversations about nothing in particular, but at least you're starting to connect. Not sure how it is better than IM, but some don't even use that ...
- A Cocktail Party (or maybe the corner bar): Twitter is filled with cliques that are easy to eavesdrop / butt in on - a chance to develop your skills and awareness, and engage larger, targeted networks with pointed conversations about specific topics that I deal with every day. But no pressure, we're just hanging out ..
- A Community: Like a trade group, guild, or local Chamber of Commerce, one that requires and rewards participation. At this highest level, Twitter is both a source and a use of awareness, knowledge and understanding; conversations are multi-directional, real business value is being generated.
I can illustrate these levels with examples from my favorite Twitter Search columns in my
Tweetdeck (
Search:SAP)
- Do I really care if the sap is running this spring?
- Funny, I get hits when people watch sap-py movies. Oh, those wacky homonyms ...
- Twitter as a job board - every SAP job listing pops up. Wait, did I just see a trend tweet by?
- Hmm, lots of interesting SAP practioners are talking about live projects and cutting edge programming work ...
- Interesting conversations pop up when Oracle buys Sun, or SAP announces the latest product enhancements - I can get a near-real time pulse on market sentiment
I've piqued their interest, but now they want to know what "real business value" really means. I'll post on that next time ... stay tuned!
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Is SharePoint WSS dangerous to SharePoint contractors?
Firing Up Internal OpportunityIt was true last year, but even more so now; SharePoint is very important for corporate IT, both strategically (medium- and long-term) and tactically (short-term). Sure, it's a terrific way to iterate on collaboration, internal portals, document management, etc. - "enabling innovation" in every buzzword-compliant sense. But there is solid benefit for even short-sighted, plodding, tactical IT - and it's all about staff retention.
SharePoint
WSS represents a nice opportunity for folks in IT to get some hands-on experience, building relevant (if small) applications with some
"cutting edge
" technology. Staying "cutting edge" is important for most IT folks, but let’s face it – most of us don't work in software development houses. The typical manufacturing company spends <3% of revenue on IT; on top of that, the current economy has everyone focused on cash flow. I was speaking with a vendor yesterday evening, who told of his interactions with IT management in multiple companies over the past few weeks - and the primary concerns all had to do with system availability and cost cutting.
This nuclear winter environment, freezing spend on training & tools, would typically drive all your best IT talent away - we all want to work on latest and greatest, and experience non-trivial growth in our skills. So, how might you feed this "edge mentality", with little or no cash?
SharePoint provides both sizzle and steak ** - it’s got market hype, it looks and feels significantly different than your current, boring green screen stuff, and it’s fast twitch (small projects, lower priority, low risk if something messes up). With all that going for it, it should be easy to get internal folks to work on the new, quick and dirty stuff that the business wants.
** Ok, maybe not Morton's, but it's not Steak and Shake, either!
Drying Up External DemandUnfortunately, I think this leaves SharePoint consulting houses bereft of good opportunities. Cash-hoarding businesses turn inward for their development needs - and this time, they can get good-looking results!
I remember when
.Net came out a few years ago - had a very enlightening conversation with a typical small-firm rep. Microsoft's new technology platform was great for sales, the story went, because the projects all took 30% less time than before (such a deal!) Unfortunately, the other shoe soon dropped, and the sales team had to generate 30% more business just to keep the pipeline full and billable hours flat to the previous year. The downward pressure on rates wasn't a help, either.
Stable [end-user] companies may not fear large turnover in the current economic client, but the good ones will continue to stress internal training and new technology skills. I see plenty of SharePoint interest (and resulting bandwidth) from internal IT - where will this leave the contractors?
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Zodiac of Knowledge Capture
The start of a new year gives me a rare chance to measure my knowledge capture output over time. I maintain electronic
journals for the various projects I am driving, business units and functional areas I support, and people I work with. This results in a hundred or so separate MS Word documents, with generally the same format - still, it would be quite tedious to take a word count each week to check my outout.
However, at the beginning of the year, I start a new folder and a new set of Word files - which means that after week 1, I have the easiest scenario for figuring out how much data entry for the week. And, since last week was typical, I set out to total up my data entry - starting with tthe personal journal files, but including other media:
Format Words
===== ======
MS Word 15,300 in 22 documents
Notes 3,000 in 4 documentsBlogs 3,100 in 6 entries in 4 blogs
MS Excel 500 in 5 spreadsheets
Notepad 500 in 4 text files
Mind Maps 300 in 7 maps
Twitter 900
Power Point 700 in 5 presentations
Wiki 500 in 2 wikis, 2 different dialects
------
24,800 words in 1 week
Hmm, that sounds like a lot - accoprding to
this guy, I could / should be writing eight books per year ...
But then I though of all of the other formats that I was
not counting ... texting via phone, IM over eight different accounts (thanks, Pidgin!), emails over four different accounts (and four different clients). And what about the code? That wiki item at the end got me thinking; most
wiki syntax is faux-HTML, right? But I've also had to do work just this week in HTML, CSS, ASP, SharePoint, VBA, dokuwiki, TiddlyWiki ...
This whole exercise conjured a series of images in my mind, avatars for a new
Zodiac of Knowledge Capture ...
Sisyphus: The
never ending task of documentation. At times, my "backlog" gets so big, I just file a big chunk away under Future Projects ...
Hercules:
Prodigious output should be the expectation, not the exception. The world / your work group is ever-hungry for more structured knowledge, and they don't want to wait thru the backlog - they want stuff now!
Job:
Patience is a must - you will write stuff and get no response for months ... but every once in a while, a glimmer of hope. Had a conversation this week with someone who noted my
Emotional Intelligence post from 14 months back (!). They had seen a class offering at a local college, and we ended up talking about how applicable the skills are to our jobs.
Mandelbrot: You need to be facile when plotting and navigating many
levels of abstraction. The reader needs to absorb slowly, peel the onion one layer at a time ... but they better be able to drill to the required level of detail!
Pavlov:
Repetition - Don't be surprised when you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, over and over, until you get folks used to the idea of going to the wiki, searching the portal, reading the manual.
Deming: Constant Improvement must be in your mind all the time. There is always a better way to get an idea across (which relates to ...)
Xerox:
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Let's not lose sight of the goal - capture and transfer knowledge . So, if you see a more effective method of communicating - learn from it!
Tufte:
Clarity in communication is everything. You might think this one should be
Strunk, but Tufte drives for clear and effective communication graphically / pictorially, as well as in the written word.
Muse: Don't rule out
creativity; you are competing in the market of attention, and you need to capture the mind before it's ready to receive. You also can't always rely on the Same Old Stuff when capturing knowledge; keep experimenting with different tools, take the best, leave the rest.
Cthulhu (
CNZ?): Develop skills at multi-tasking, maintaining many threads at once (or
multiple arms). Multi-platform, multi-editor, multi-laungauge, multi-markup, etc.
Heisenburg: Be aware that documenting processes can be like measuring them - you will probably introduce some
change. This is "stealth process improvement", and might even be manifest laziness (it's easier to document a simplified process ...)
This zodiac needs a twelfth sign - any ideas?
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Back to the Future: Twitter "microblogging"
"That's pretty good, Johnny, but that ain't the way I heerd it. . . ."I recall when all this "blogging" talk started, way back in 1999 or so (thanks to
Hallett for a decent history). The idea was to post thoughts and feelings, observations about technology, society, or whatever - anything from a daily diary to a project notebook.
Scoble and others became (in)famous for posting multiple times a day.
Time marches on, and the medium has morphed over the years. Blog post frequency (
BPF?)
stopped being the measure of success; sites became electronic versions of trade magazines, marketing slicks, talk radio .. along with the occasionally Really Good Blog (
couldn't resist), capturing knowledgable insights or technical tricks.
Then along comes
Twitter, which has made
little sense to me to date. Well, ok ... let's say my appreciation for the
applicability of this site has
slowly matured - along with their
ability to
avoid the
Fail Whale. And I've seen another recent burst of activity - mini-
Twitter apps,
breaking news source,
alternative interfaces, even metrics for
personal validation. When
talk turns to monetization and
open source competitors appear, I guess you've arrived.
I recently happened upon
Mr. Tweet, who has helpfully suggested a series of influential tweeters to follow. When
Kawasaki and
Scoble appeared on the list, it was like a flashback to the old days ...
... but this actually got me a bit more enthused. Posting multiple times per day makes a bit more sense when it's only a brief thought - and Twitter enforces brevity with the 140 character limit.
<aside> Sort of an electronic Strunk; I've had a few posts that took more than a few minutes to compose as I struggled to squeeze in the full thought. </aside>
So, now I'm trying to
post more frequently on Twitter during the day, like a blogging old-timer - encouraged, I will admit, by posting into a
tweetosphere more amenable to spontaneous connection; a
few thoughts during a Sharepoint presentation brought a quick
response from a SharePoint
guru and
author, with more than a few tech details on some of the finer [Share]Points (
aiw).
We'll see how long this lasts ...
Previously ...- Twitter (March 22, 2007)
- New Twitter features starting to make things more relevant (June 3, 2007)
- Thoughts During a Power Outage (March 27, 2008)
- The Right Web2.0 Tool for the Audience (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook) (May 9, 2008)
- Finally! Relevant Applications for YouTube and Twitter in the Enterprise! (July 11, 2008)
- Enterprise 2.1: Exiting the Trough of Disillusionment (July 22, 2008)
- On the Road: Business Travel, Fall 2008 (October 13, 2008)
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Dueling Collaboration Portals
I noticed an interesting phenomenon this afternoon; we are experimenting with SharePoint as our internal project management / collaboration portal. A nice platform to choose, because it's popularity is growing, and there are a wide selection of add-on products and development partners ready, willing, and able to help us spend our money to make it even better.
The interesting part is that we are running into other companies who are also working with SharePoint. Specifically, third-party consulting firms that want to work with us on projects - they have (wisely) set up outward-facing portals, so they can effectively connect and collaborate with the paying customers.
Basic training is clearly not an issue here - but after a few hours, some of the (ah, what's that word? oh yes ...) interesting issues come bubbling up ...
Mechanics
What's the protocol here? An internal project could start their own team site, and when the external partner is selected, we'll want to pull them into our collabora-party. Intuitively obvious, but most end-user firms do not regularly extend their intranet / SharePoint servers outside the firewall.
Of course, your external partner may be righteously convinced of the superiority of their portal-enabled project management process - leaving us with a new type of distributed version control problem. Even if we manually keep document libraries in sync - I'm to lazy to deal with dual entry of issues.
Intellectual Property
There may be an IP assumption that needs some clarity. I'd wager both parties have a certain interest in any intellectual property generated during the engagement - will this portal approach make it easier or more difficult to control? And what about the IP represented by the blogs, wikis, discussions, etc. embedded within - will the end of the project deliver an electronic version of all that stuff? You may need to revisit your Master Consulting Agreements.
Interoperability
Data sharing is straightfroward when both organizations are running SharePoint. It becomes problematic if different portal platforms are used. I'm currently not aware of any standard workflow or portal object API - possibly another great opportunity for some entrepreneur - portal synchronization over the Internet?
In Retrospect
None of these general concerns should surprise - it's just the latest iteration of a common problem when dealing with electronic meda. We've all seen engagements where organizations are on different e-mail systems, different versions of MS Office - even different platforms (Macintosh vs Windows, AutoCAD versus Pro-E). I'm sure more are on the way - Dokuwiki vs. MediaWiki? Et 2.0, Brute?
Previously ...
- Strategies for Fee Structures in Consulting Engagements (March 5, 2006)
- Strategies for Intellectual Property in Consulting Engagements (May 8, 2006)
- Strategies for Risk Sharing in Consulting Engagements (May 12, 2006)
- Strategies for Malware in Consulting Engagements (May 28, 2006)
- Corporate Web 2.0 is Spreading - Here comes the Blog (May 15, 2007)
- What's the Difference between Announcements, Blogs, Discussions, Wikis? (June 26, 2007)
- More Challenges for Applying Web 2.0 inside the Firewall (July 2, 2007)
- Innovation That Matters - Substance Over Style (January 12, 2008)
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A Plea for Empathetic Communication
It's impossible to over-communicate
Sounds a bit strong, but if you think through your real-world experiences, this shouldn't surprise anyone. No matter how hard you try, your message will be missed by someone ...
Problem: It's all their fault!
Rely on Web 2.0, and ...
- ... they won't subscribe to the RSS feed; they don't understand the concept, and have no other information sources that supply feeds
- ... they won't sign up for the email notifications; that feature is hidden, no one told them about it
- ... they won't read / browse / search the wiki; there are too many unfinished pages in there, and they don't consider it reliable
- ... they can't find it using intranet search - they don't know where this feature is located. And even if they did, the results aren't as targeted and "right-on" as Google
So, you try to rely on "first generation" electronic media, but ...
- ... they didn't read the email, it got lost in their inbox with 100 other new messages today
- ... they didn't see, therefore, didn't read the attachment
- ... they did not check their voice mail
Even the "old fasioned way" doesn't always work ...
- You are having a face to face conversation, but it's not sinking in because they are checking their Blackberry and thinking about the currently unfolding interruption ...
Solution: Don't jump on the latest communication bandwagon and expect a
Silver Bullet - you need to balance flexibility and focus. Different media work for different people, so work to communicate your message using a variety of methods. Of course, if you try to supply all media for all tastes, there won't be enough time to get any real work done. Just know that there is no one best way to get information out to all who need to hear your message - and adjust accordingly.
Problem: It's all your fault!
If you can get them to the electronic content, you still have to create content that actually communicates the correct information. Even if they are capable of subscribing to RSS feeds, or opening a document attachment - if the content does not convey with clarity, they won't catch your drift. Worse yet - if the first one or two samples don't convey
anything, they will stop listening to
everything.
Solution #1: Practice practice practice - The only way to get better at anything is to keep iterating.
Observation: It's no one's fault - it just is ...
Think about it - don't you receive messages in your inbox that are not clear / difficult to read, or hear about things after the fact or through the grapevine? And don't
you glance at your Blackberry during meetings? When you set your phone to vibrate, you avoid distracting others (good!) but you are invariably distracting yourself (who just called ....?)
Fact is, we are all swimming in a sea of information, bombarded with messages from all sides - and we're bombarding others as well. A little humility and a lot of empahty go a long way ...
- Get feedback - if your medium or your content are not effective, find out why. Ask your intended audience what works best for them. Majority rules, so if you have a few email holdouts that don't know how to set up an RSS reader, do it for them. Better yet, do it with them - and show them what else they can subscribe to!
- Understand what the current corporate / organizational / local culture is, and play to that. You don't have to accept the status quo - but don't tilt at windmills just because wiki is a cool sounding word that would look good on your resume. Introduce change judiciously, and don't let it override the goal at hand - you need to get the status of this project updated!
- Never undrestimate the power of face time. When you craft a beautiful, concise, complete summary of the upcoming meeting, and someone still insists on calling you up and talking about it - don't look on this with disdain - it's an opportunity! What was it about the email / document that was incomplete? Was I not clear? Also, since most recipients of project updates are getting them for a reason (stakeholders!!), it's a great opportunity to make sure they get the big picture, understand the original objectives, and are still in support of the initiative.
- Projects end, but relationshps go on. It's always good practice to improve your communications and connections with the various technology and business process teams, in and out of the company. These is always a "next time", and next time could be that much easier if you are consistently building your foundation of clarity, openness, completeness.
Effective communication is very difficult, and requires constant work. Realize this, model your actions accordingly, and your impact and influence will grow.
Previously ...- I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry (April 6, 2005)
- eMail on Blackberry Changes Definition of Acceptable eMail (September 19, 2005)
- Gee, this social network - presence - IM - knowledge management - collaboration stuff really works (September 25, 2005)
- Success, Failure, and Insights after 12 Months of Internal Web 2.0 (March 10, 2008)
- Optimizing the Wrong Part of Knowledge Management (March 16, 2008)
- RSS: Underappreciated Web 2.0 in the Enterprise (May 1, 2008)
- Opportunistic Insights from the RSS Stream (June 5, 2008)
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On the Road: Business Travel, Fall 2008
I don't travel a significant amount in my current position, but when I do, it seems to come in chunks. I'm about half way through a round of travel this fall - mostly business, but with some personal travel mixed in. Six cities, three countries in less than four months. Some observations at the halfway point ...
@ the Data Center: The Surreal Life
I'm finishing this entry around 4am - just off my second night in a row on the "late shift" for our Disaster Recovery (DR) exercise [Note: final edits and post mid-day, after I got home]. I've been deep in the "bunker" - a highly secured building with acres of processors, busily working away for any number of companies. No matter what city you are in (even New York!), the traffic is very light between 1 and 3am! And I'm definitely on a different cycle than the majority;
yesterday morning, I got off the elevator heading out, and some late-night revelers were stumbling to their rooms after their own "late shift" at the local night spots. No fun like that for the IT folks - gotta keep the brain waves clear, working the checklists.
I've got an easy role; I'm a Shift Manager, just the "manager-in-charge" for the time I'm on. The techs are doing all the heavy lifting, although I get to join in the chorus should we need to escalate anything with our DR hosts. That, and making sure the folks trying to tough it out and go 20+ hours straight are not falling asleep at their consoles.
The general preference is to work in the windowless rooms - time goes faster when you can't see the beautiful weather outside. Added bonus - excellent bandwidth to the Internet, which makes it a much better place to work than the hotel room. There are also less distractions (junk daytime TV), and plenty of free food. Alas, that's the other difficult thing to manage when on the road - gotta watch the calories!
Staying Healthy
I'm getting too old to party much on these business trips. Typically, I've got some emails, presentations, or other such stuff to work on during my off time. I can't always count on a decent health club / fitness room - I don't typically stay at the high price joints, but every once in a while I'll luck out and find an elliptical. However, I do like to walk around in the cities that I visit - big or small, always good to get a sense of the place.
Healthy eating is the other big challenge - typically, I'm eating in restaurants, and most American eateries serve up oversize portions that don't help the cause. In general, I find I don't gain much during most trips - never out long
enough to develop any seriously bad habits. Unfortunately for this trip, the data center kitchen is always well stocked - has to be, the DR team is working a 24x7 task plan with a ton of stuff to get done in the alloted time. Gotta feed folks well to keep them awake and happy - lots of water, too.
The Crash of 2008, as seen from the Night Shift
It's a strange sensation, working on a weekend project that really destroys your regular schedule - makes following the news of the week a bit disjointed. And what a week - the Dow lost more value than any other week in history. As we wait in the airport, rest in the hotel, or stare at the consoles as tapes load, conversation can wander towards events in the financial and business world - and this adds to the feeling of disconnectedness. It's almost too big to comprehend - but the blogosphere is nicely provides a nuanced, multi-faceted view of the situation, stuff that really makes you think.
Staying Connected
I must say, traveling over the last 2 years has been a joy, now that I'm armed with my Blackberry Pearl and the Internet. I've downloaded the Google Maps application, and while my Pearl doesn't have GPS, it can swag my location by triangulating against cell phone towers. I never get lost, and it's easy to find the right spot to eat, shop, or visit. I
was surprised to find out my current location has no pancake houses near the downtown area. Disappointing ...
When you can get a decent connection, the Internet lessens that disconnected feeling. These days, I get the majority of my news from websites and blogs, and those stay comfortably constant, no matter where I'm at. Interesting sensation: the environment has changed considerably, but you are just as connected as when you are sitting at home.
Soon, it's time to load up the van and head for the airport - and another round of experimentation with Ping.fm. I've been experimenting off and on with Twitter again, and since I've recently made the leap and started a page on Facebook, I thought I'd also try this multiple status updater. Note that I don't send travelogue updates to LinkedIn - as I've noted before, the "what am I doing" feature doesn't seem to be used much by my network, so I'm sure that the group doesn't care to know when I take off and land. I assume Facebook will become my semi-professional, friends-and-family social network, while LinkedIn stays all business. Twitter? Well, I'm still not sure how relevant that is to me, but I'll ping stuff every once in a while. I do like Ping.fm's ability to quickly toggle parts of your notification list - I will Ping all (including LinkedIn) when I post to this blog, but the "social" stuff doesn't go to the business network. Labels: collaboration, facebook, hands on, LinkedIn, twitter, Web 2.0
Where to Start? (1 of 2) Process & Procedure
Where to Start? (1 of 2) Process & Procedure
If you need a one-slide, three-bullet, PowerPoint special for describing the basic tactics for "How to Achieve Operational Excellence", try these:
- Process and Procedures
- Metrics and Measurements
- Continuous Improvement
The first two are nicely alliterative, but you might consider substituting Standards and Processes as your lead-off if we're talking about an IT, Finance, or Engineering department.
Now What?
Of course, now you have to generate the details; the "motherhood and apple pie" routine only lasts thru the first meeting. Here's where many organizations discover that it's hard to know where to start. Most people find a blank sheet of paper intimidating; they prefer editing to creating. Also, folks are easily overcome by the volume and complexity of all of the processes they go through every day.
<aside> And for some reason, people seem to gravitate to the most difficult thing to document - "experience". It's like whistling - hard to describe on paper, but easy to demonstrate, with multiple variations and endless complexities. How can I possibly convey my thought processes when I'm debugging a system, triaging a set of problems, or pulling together those first few critical design elements?
Well okay then - let's not think about that right now. We'll talk ourselves out of any process documentation before we even start! <aside>
Start Simple
For every job, there is a recurring list of "stuff" that folks do every day - administrative and busywork tasks that must be done, just to keep the wheels turning. This is the kind of "process" that lends itself very easily to documentation (and, afterwards, automation, but that's another post). It's the little things that you do, unnoticed until you take a vacation day or call in sick. All of a sudden, things stop working or start breaking, because you weren't there to reboot the server first thing in the morning, or clear a cache, or check a job queue for stuck items ...
So a great place for your team to start is to build a ToDo list of repeating tasks. It can be a simple text file, a Word document with nice formatting, a spreadsheet with convenient rows and columns - it really doesn't matter. My personal favorite is the spreadsheet - I use tabs to break up the lists into nice sized chunks ...
Click on the picture for a full-size image!
I've posted a few simple files on my Source Code page:
There are some nice features in the spreadsheets - like color coding for when a task is done (x) or undone (o). Also, the current day, week, month are highlighted automatically.
Collaboration Suggestion
If this idea makes sense, consider skipping the documents / spreadsheets, and create this as a wiki page (or collection of pages). Then, the entire group can add their recurring tasks - and the group will develop a shared master list. This makes it much easier to encourage shared tasks, standardization of work, etc.
Note: Does this structure remind you of 43 Folders and Getting Things Done? Well, that's definitely in the ballpark, but GTD focuses more on personal productivity. Daily / Weekly / Monthly Process Lists add structure and enhance productivity for a group. If you can scale the ideas in David Allen's book to help an entire group - and make it easy for folks to join and leave the group - go for it!
Some Task List Best Practices
- Tasks on the lists should be one-liners. "Reboot the Server" or "Empty a Job Queue" are great, but if a single task actually has a series of process steps involved, best make that a separate, more detailed task list
- Continuous improvement and ongoing documentation are themselves recurring tasks; consider putting a task to start each day thinking about items that are on your plate today that could/should make this list
- The sample spreadsheet features the color-coded "checkmarks" that indicate when a task is complete. If you use a wiki (like TiddlyWiki), there may be plug-ins / extensions (like this one) that allow you to put checkboxes in the wiki itself. Checking the box when something is complete makes you think through each process step-by-step; if you just scan the lines every day, it's easy to slough them off. Plus, it's psychologically satisfying to see all those unchecked items get crossed off the list!
Previously ...
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Enterprise 2.1: Exiting the Trough of Disillusionment
Enterprise 2.1: Exiting the Trough of Disillusionment
"What will you do with that car if you actually catch it?"
-- what the cat asked the dog (from the Chicago Reader, circa 1989)
So you've gone all "Enterprise 2.0", spinning up a wiki, a blog, and a SharePoint or Drupal server inside your firewall. Now what happens?
The groundswell of interest in "cool tools" brings a wave of users and a burst of feed reader activity - for a few weeks. Before long, however, the organization will get some rush orders, a month-end close, a project deadline, and/or a few vacations on the team ... and the same old excuses begin to weasel their way into the conversations. Folks begin to realize that collaboration and participation is more than reading (I actually have to type something into this thing?). Management styles are tested, and we find out if KM can be pushed on or pulled from the group. The questions start on a familiar note ...
Why?
The classic pushback against documentation; we see no immediate value added. When I'm programming or implementing a system, I'm making stuff happen; when I'm documenting, I'm only creating files that no one reads (and some ambient white noise for my cube neighbors). Of course, if there's only one person in the department that knows how the system works, and if they happen to be out on vacation when a problem arises, it's all hands on deck and a general scramble to figure out how things work. Imagine your consternation when you find out it's a five-minute fix ... if only they had written something down ...
There's also the career flexibility issue; if you're the only one that knows how something works, you'll never be able to move to the next interesting technology - stuck maintaining the Unknown System. Unfortunately, a plea to the value of Future Flexibility doesn't help when you're dealing with someone who likes to maintain control over the Predictable Present. Sooner or later, the benefit of getting rid of their inflexibility far outweighs the cost of reengineering anything ... it's just delayed pain.
Who?
Another classic question (who is supposed to write this stuff? Not Me!), with a contemporary twist ... the collaborative tools allow us to quickly broaden our audience/author pool, including folks outside of IT. In fact, this is a significant difference from fads gone by - non-IT folks are getting exposed to collaborative documents on publicly available, open environments like Wikipedia and Google; it's getting easier to talk to a growing number of people about interacting in a collaborative environment; the team isn't limited to the techies any more!
Which?
A much more important question - which platform should we use to capture this knowledge? When do you use a blog versus a discussion forum? Will I wiki, or should I SharePoint? Choosing IM over eMail is easy, but when should I tweet instead?
If you're working on this question, it's actually a good sign - folks have enough hands-on to understand the good and the bad about a variety of collaboration media. Experience is your best guide here; wiki's are great for fast entry and immediate distribution, but (IMHO) it's difficult to maintain a table of contents, index, or any multi-chapter / multipage chunk of knowledge. At home, I'm building the fifth generation of my home software development environment, and I've already passed over my personal wiki tool as unsatisfactory. Too many processes and interlocking technologies surrounding the servers, development environments, and push-to-production processes. It's much easier to create an actual Administrator's Guide (sample); a formal document with table of contents, chapters, diagrams, even page headers and footers. If I bothered to print it out, it'll look great - but I don't care about the paper. I like the structure that a book gives me - this is broad collection of information about a set of technologies and processes required to do one basic thing.
Each of the different Web 2.0 / KM tools has different strengths and weaknesses - flexible info structures, formatting efficiencies, ease of distribution, and support for collaboration / version control. The light will come on when you understand your biggest problem is collecting the knowledge; presentation, distribution, search, and sharing are covered nicely by the various intranet technologies, but the magic is in the making.
Doom and Gloom - and a Silver Lining
Disruptive technologies come and go, there are no silver bullets, and there's always a problem somewhere. If the environment is user friendly, it won't scale. If users accept the concept, they won't have the time to create content. If you can get all of these budding authors to write prose that is readable, you'll struggle with making it findable.
But hey - we're trying to pull out of this "trough of disillusionment" - so focus on the things that Web 2.0 does well ...
Lowers the technology bar for collaboration - all you need is a browser!
You're not introducing new ideas, you're just making them work within your company
Widens the author pool (and experience base!) for knowledge capture
... and focus your attention on the "next version" (2.1) - practical questions of why? who? which?
Previously ...
- The Law of Large Numbers - or, why Enterprise Wikis are Fundamentally Challenged (September 26, 2006)
- Search as the Killer KM App, and Good Writers will Rule the World (November 5, 2006)
- Moving from Search to Find: Anticipate the Next Big Problem (April 16, 2007)
- More Challenges for Applying Web 2.0 inside the Firewall (July 2, 2007)
- Driving Participation and Contributions on Internal Blogs and Wikis (July 7, 2007)
- The Best Way to get Web 2.0 Into the Enterprise (March 3, 2008)
- Success, Failure, and Insights after 12 Months of Internal Web 2.0 (March 10, 2008)
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