• Heisenburg KM (July 13, 2004)
• Communicating Complex Technical Concepts (March 21, 2005)
• Thoughts on Why Tech Folks Hate Documentation (July 8, 2006)
• The Iron Triangle – Quality is a Feature that We Choose to Omit from Projects (October 28, 2006)
• Search as the Killer KM App, and Good Writers will Rule the World (November 5, 2006)
• Innovation That Matters – Substance Over Style (January 12, 2008)
• Facilitating Innovation: Establishing an Environment of Possibilities (August 22, 2008)

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All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/zodiac-of-knowledge-capture/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/inspiration-images-insight-imitation-innovation/ http://www.cazh1.com/inspiration-images-insight-imitation-innovation/#comments Sat, 20 Dec 2008 03:58:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=283 Just a quick post on this pre-holiday weekend, with my design-leaning kids out of school / back from college for the holidays, and a general sense of creativity mixed in with the holiday spirit.

Inspiration …

… can come from many places. Nothing new there, but I like to get inspiration for X from looking at a different kind of Y. Spice up a presentation? Browse a library of web site designs. Capturing a business process? Learn about alternative user interfaces. Brainstorming a new concept? Wander through an image library.

Images

There were more than a few postings over the last few months, regarding Multicolr Search Lab. This site is stunning, both technically (practically defines “intuitive UI”) and creatively (very easy to lose yourself in different color combinations). Pick your favorite corporate colors, and even staid corporations could find some interesting CC-licensed photos to liven up their presentations. (Funny, I can’t get a decent kelly green option on the site – bummer).

Insight

I’ve posted before about visualization libraries, but here’s one I’ve found since then – A Beautiful WWW is a great site to monitor if you like visualization technicques, and are willing to surf and experiment. This post is a nice summary of libraries – potentially helpful for presentations, applications, even reports. Next time they ask for Yet Another Ledger Report, you be the one to shoot Old YALR, and replace him with a total page featuring a few Tuftettes (sorry, sparklines).

Imitation

I’m never above a sincere bit of flattery, and often look to other sites for design inspiration. SitePoint and A List Apart will often post about the techniques required to spin your own magic, but they will also refer to plenty of examples – check out this list of 15 sites to browse for some design inspiration (some I’ve seen before, but PatternTap was a particularly good one!).

Innovation

The most interesting stuff I’ve stumbled upon lately are innovative mixes of site design, UI, and search – for images. A result set of similar offerings, really …

• Pixolu (via) starts with a keyword, and then lets me pick images that are close to a mental image I’m trying to capture. 
• A little bit quicker, a little less free-association, is the “show similar images” option over at Live Search. Points for speedy response, however.
• Today’s addition (ibid): Google Image Search (that old stand-by) – a new search attribute that limits the results by image style.
  

All dynamite stuff, but I think I’ll rely on Pixolu for my style of stand-up.

Previously …

• Communicating Complex Technical Concepts (March 21, 2005)
  
• Customer DNA – A Different Take on Understanding Markets and Networks (June 11, 2005)
  
• Moving from Search to Find: Anticipate the Next Big Problem (April 16, 2007)
  
• Data Visualization: ‘Life’ of Open Source Projects (June 16, 2008)
  
• Linkfest: Data Visualization (September 6, 2008)

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All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/inspiration-images-insight-imitation-innovation/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/no-silver-bullet-for-group-collaboration-over-distance/ http://www.cazh1.com/no-silver-bullet-for-group-collaboration-over-distance/#comments Wed, 23 Apr 2008 03:59:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=246 Lots of organizations have to deal with the challenge of implementing standard work and best practices over physical distances. With sales offices, distribution centers, and manufacturing locations scattered across the country, what’s the best way to get people who know their stuff to collaborate on process improvement – and then take that knowledge back to their home office?

While wrestling with this challenge, one executive I know preemptively ruled out videoconferencing. It’s a common suggestion, but the general feeling was that it’s just not useful, has never proven itself in practice.

I happened to agree with the idea that videoconferencing wouldn’t help in this situation. The team was talking about productivity improvements for an assembly process – workstation layout and hands-on participation was required to effectively work out the wasted movements. However, when defending the No Webcams position to some gadget freaks around the table, we came up with a/the fundamental flaw with remote video: it lacks spontaneity.

Historically, videoconferencing was set up in specific rooms that had to be reserved in advance. For higher quality connections, equipment is expensive, and the expense had to be pre-approved. Advances in digital cameras brought devices mounted on desktops, but this tied you to that specific location. Today’s nifty notebooks have built-in cameras, but these can be tough to use with a group of people (crowding around).

Yes it’s possible to use videoconferencing, but the physical limitations tend to quickly dim the excitement of all but the most diehard tech fans. In practice, local process improvement teams would just walk over to the workstation in question, skull out the best way to do something, and take a break for some coffee by the time we had the webcam hooked up …

Lack of spontaneity is probably why the vast majority of PowerPoints are delivered with printed decks, and not overhead projectors. It’s still more time efficient to quickly print off a few copies than it is to chase down a projector, lug it and your notebook computer into a conference room, get everything hooked together, and try to remember how to switch to the external monitor. (Hmmm, good thing they added all those cool slide transition effects …)

Truth is, having paper copies isn’t all that bad. Some folks like to take notes on their handouts and file them away for future reference. The medium of communication has its own utility, a sort of residual value that most people understand how to use. The same is true for fancy collaborative technology like videoconferencing. The magic is in the actual conversation, but that can get lost in the struggle to get the technology working before you can actually use it.

Does this mean that collaboration technology is doomed to failure? Of course not – knowledge capture and reuse, and differences in physical location and time zones, are still problems for organizations that rely on the “old way of doing things”. You just need to pick your tools judiciously, and build up to the fancy stuff over time.

• Wiki’s will not work if people don’t already have an interest / desire / skill / method for creating documentation. Wikis solve distribution and access problems, but they don’t make people suddenly want to write.
• Blogs will not work if people don’t already have the need to communicate while competing for people’s attention. Blogs solve time and distance chanllenges and facilitate simple Q&A, but they don’t automagically endow authors with reader empathy.
• Collaboration Spaces will not work if people don’t already have the need to share documents and edit them within a group. Collaboration Spaces solve version control and tracking hassles, but they don’t help groups create impactful documents where none existed before.

We needed to see productivity improvements in component assembly within 60 days, so flying a couple of key people around the country was a small price to pay for the quality of work that we got. We took a small step forward – getting process experts to a different location, to put faces to names, and empathize over common challenges, experience the satisfaction of defining a workable solution – and experience the joy of business travel. Maybe next time we could look into videoconferencing, because interpersonal relationships and understanding of the power of shared best practice has already been established.

Previously …

• Implementing Intranet on Speed: An Uh-Oh Moment (July 31, 2004)
• Blogs as Conversation, and Wikis as Diaries – Not Exactly (January 29, 2006)
• Thoughts on Why Tech Folks Hate Documentation (July 8, 2006)
• More on (sic) experience with wikis (January 31, 2007)
• Do blogs fit in the enterprise? Specific examples (WIIFMs) … (April 19, 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)

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All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/no-silver-bullet-for-group-collaboration-over-distance/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/butting-in-to-the-conversation-pm-communication-tools/ http://www.cazh1.com/butting-in-to-the-conversation-pm-communication-tools/#comments Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:00:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=231 Dennis McDonald and Lee White are conducting an interesting experiment on their blogs, crossposting a conversation about project management and social media. I’ll add my voice, with both input on the topic and observations on the method.

(Topic) The Right Tool for The Job – depends on the Job

The first part of the conversation talks about whether social media could replace classic project management tools, in terms of communicating project status. I agree with Dennis – you can never get rid of gantt charts, project budgets, and stoplight issue lists. It really depends on who the recipient of this information is; most of my project sponsors are busy executives who rose to the top in the era of e-mail and PowerPoints. Communication is uni-directional – you to them. Team members and external consultants, on the other hand, require bi-directional, collaborative tools, and most expect web-based environments accessible in and out of the corporate network, instant messaging for quick status checks, and blogs for general updates.

Truth be told, the most valuable tools in the project manager’s communication kit is typically Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.

(Topic) The Perfect Tool for The Job in Unlikely – but Opportunity Knocks …

Another one of McDonald’s posts lists features a wish list of features for the perfect collaboration environment. It reads like a feature list for MS SharePoint, and McDonald anticipates the reaction well (I, for one, welcome our new Comment overlord … )

I KNOW that many of these features are already available in off the shelf products. Comments that are thinly disguised sales pitches without a sincere effort to contribute to this discussion will be mercilessly and gleefully deleted.

It must be that time of year – I’ve gotten a number of calls from vendors in the last few weeks, pushing any number of PMO environments that promise to manage my resources and solve all my prioritization woes. In these times of tight IT budgets, capital investment for new software like this rare – the dollars are better spent supporting the business.

However, all is not lost. The collaboration requirements of most PMOs can be delivered quite nicely with a collection of FOSS tools, MS Office automation, and a little ingenuity. Looking for a low risk project to throw at aspiring web 2.0 technicians and Millennials suffering from wanderlust? How about those developers trying to learn what makes effective user interfaces?

Every PMO I’ve ever worked with / built up relied all or in part on locally developed tools; the cobbler’s children can usually hack up something serviceable. And to borrow a phrase from Lee White – most of the skills for project management and collaboration comes from creating the tools, not having the tools.

(Method) Not the Right Tool for the Job

I’m not sure I fully understand the technology that Dennis has used to combine the text from these blogs, as well as everyone’s comments. My first reaction on reviewing the feed was less than positive; like a typical blog feed, it probably puts the most recent entry first – so if you want to follow the conversation, you must jump to the end of the list and page backwards. Of course, once I dove into the content, I got a bit lost. I’m not exactly sure of the order of the items in the feed, but best I can tell, the conversation starts in the middle and then sort of bounces around.

Discussion forum software does better at this task. The start of the conversation appears first; as I move down the page, I can scan the main conversation thread as well as any branches from the comments.

That’s the other challenge with this method of capturing and displaying a conversation. There are a number of interesting comments, but I can’t figure out how to comment on the comment, nor can I figure out how to add another voice to the conversation.

I’ve written about this previously; the best tool for the job depends on the type of collaboration you are trying to initiate …

1. Use an Announcement to make a statement, inform of an event, where you expect no comments or replies. The flow of information is in one direction only – out from you to the readers of the web page.
2. Use a Blog to make an observation, deliver a status update – capture a well-formed thought. One or two folks may have question or want to add a follow up, but in general you expect a few comments at most.
3. Use a Discussion Forum when you are asking a question, making a proposal, or establishing a new standard. Here, we expect a lot of discourse, with threaded conversations and branches and such.
4. Use a Wiki when you are making a statement / documenting a fact. You should expect refinements, additions, and other edits – but not full-on discussions.

Authors Note: I officially despise ecto at this time. This is the second time that I’ve written this post – spent an hour and a half on it last night, only to have ecto mysteriously delete my work. I’m switching back to w.bloggar for now – gave up on it a long time ago, but it appears to have gone through some pretty extensive improvements.

Previously …

• Implementing Intranet on Speed: The Beginning (July 27, 2004)
• Communicating Complex Technical Concepts (March 21, 2005)
• Excellent series of posts for PMs communicating with non-techs (March 26, 2005)
• Blogs as Conversation, and Wikis as Diaries – Not Exactly (January 29, 2006)
• Guidelines for Success with your Skunk Works project (June 19, 2006)
• Documentation Redux – a Shorthand Proposal Framework, and the PMO Surprise (July 30, 2006)
• Project Status Dashboards Best Practice (and a PowerPoint trick) (May 3, 2007)
• 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)
• Driving Participation and Contributions on Internal Blogs and Wikis (July 7, 2007)
• The Right Web2.0 Tool for The Job (July 16, 2007)
• Communication is the responsibility of … (August 19, 2007)
• Five Simple Rules for Project Names, plus Four Sample Lists (January 7, 2008)
• Update on Blogs as PM Tools – Tales from the Front Lines (January 20, 2008)

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All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/butting-in-to-the-conversation-pm-communication-tools/feed/ 1 http://www.cazh1.com/rules-of-golf-project-prioritization-process-needs-clear-documentation/ http://www.cazh1.com/rules-of-golf-project-prioritization-process-needs-clear-documentation/#comments Tue, 19 Feb 2008 04:17:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=230 Different areas of our IT department are using internal blogs, wikis, and collaboration spaces, with varying degrees of participation, readership, and success. Some observations:

Blogging is Easy …

The blogs and wiki(s) have effectively removed the hassles of capturing and distributing information quickly. One important early decision was to not implement an editorial approval process for the wiki, and most blogs are wide open for public comments. No more excuses or complaints about a lack of documentation; if the explanation is not clear, or needs examples to make it relevant to multiple situations – all are fully empowered to fix it.

Some find the blog to be an easier way of communicating because of the “immediacy” – a sudden insight or pithy observation pops in your head, so you jump on the blog and capture the thought. These are the folks that have had a little insight, and gone beyond the idea of blogs as just an electronic replacement for a weekly status report. It might be difficult if you feel an obligation to say something every day – but if you really understand what you can and should be writing about, you’ll probably make multiple entries every day.

… but Empathizing (with the reader) is Difficult

I still get pushback on the blogs – even among the groups that are currently our “best demonstrated practitioners”. These folks are generating a decent amount of participation and content – but still not quite enough stuff to be effective. The challenge, it seems, is to get folks to empathize with the reader – a skill that I’m surprised more folks don’t have, because many like to complain about what they don’t know, or should know, or wish they knew.

Always ask yourself, what did I do or learn today that others would find interesting? No, it’s not that the world wants to understand how my day went, or how I’m feeling. But I like to hear when people are starting (or stopping!) projects, or attending meetings and learning about events or decisions that may have an impact on my my work over the next three months. Empathize with your [potential] readers, anticipate their interest, and practice what I call the “beneficial assumption” …

• Most people think the same way I do …
• … so I will anticipate what I’d like to hear about my organization, my projects, and my meetings …
• … and write about that

Self-Policing the Content

What about stuff that [possibly] doesn’t belong in a blog – even though it’s internal? Key thing is to use common sense; the blog entry is just as permanent, and much more public, than an e-mail. Especially when it comes to “negative events’; sometimes the specifics aren’t really relevant and don’t add much value. Specifics, like somebody made a fat-finger mistake and deleted some data, or opened a hole in the firewall, or copied the wrong file. A blog is typically not a root-cause, problem analysis tool … it’s a general FYI platform, and specifics (especially the negative ones) moght be taken out of context by the readers.

Of course, we note that content should not be limited to all that is sweetness and light. There’s nothing wrong with fact-based bad news, but there’s a lot wrong with bad news that no one finds out about and then gets worse, or no one learns from. We don’t write about this stuff to get folks in trouble, but we definitely do it to prepare, inform and educate.

Communicating is Still an Art

Some folks will rattle on in too much detail, while others are too terse. The fundamental challenge – most folks can write acceptably, but may feel they can’t write well – they lack the confidence to capture it on paper. Confidence is something that comes with practice, but mandating participation is not going to encourage spontaneous composition.

Where Are the Comments?

Some folks surprise themselves with a good blog entry, and then become doubly surprised when then get no comments. Bloggers in a closed community / internal blog can’t judge themsleves based on numbers and responses that you mgiht see on the Internet – heck, it’s taken me two years to get up to about 50 subscribers to my feed [feel free to subscribe, dear reader!].

Previously …

• Heisenburg KM (July 13, 2004)
• I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry (April 6, 2005)
• Blogs as Conversation, and Wikis as Diaries – Not Exactly (January 29, 2006)
• The Law of Large Numbers – or, why Enterprise Wikis are Fundamentally Challenged (September 26, 2006)
• Do blogs fit in the enterprise? Specific examples (WIIFMs) … (April 19, 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)
• Driving Participation and Contributions on Internal Blogs and Wikis (July 7, 2007)
• Communication is the responsibility of … (August 19, 2007)
• Update on Blogs as PM Tools – Tales from the Front Lines (January 20, 2008)

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All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/rules-of-golf-project-prioritization-process-needs-clear-documentation/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/five-under-emphasized-powerpoint-best-practices/ http://www.cazh1.com/five-under-emphasized-powerpoint-best-practices/#comments Tue, 08 May 2007 04:02:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=180 Catching up on old links that I wanted to comment on – here is a selection regarding some PowerPoint best practices, including five of my personal favorites that I don’t often see in those ubiquitous articles / postings detailing the Secrets of Presentation Success …

Under-Emphasized PowerPoint Best Practices

• Never Embed Objects: I grew to dislike embedded objects years ago, when computers could barely handle the launch of an Excel instance from within Word, or Visio from within PowerPoint. This approach also explodes the size of the file, making it difficult to eMail around the office. A much better approach – build the drawing, the table, the project plan, etc. in the source application as a separate file. When finished, copy to the clipboard, and paste into your presentation using Edit, Paste Special-select
  the Picture (Enhanced Metafile) option. You get a nice, small object, that looks exactly like you want – you can even resize it to get things just right.
• Use the Right Tool for the [Drawing] Job: Related to #1 – if you need a drawing of an organization chart, a project gantt, or a process map, don’t hack it together using the drawing tools within PowerPoint. Go to an application that’s loaded with excellent drawing features, and create the image you need; then, paste the result into the presentation using the method outlined in #1.
• Same goes for tables of figures; don’t kill yourself with a manually created / formatted table; use Excel to build your figures, do full formatting (including conditionals!), and just paste the results into your PPT file.
• Shrink your Graphics Files: Put a single image into your presentation (ex. for that useless Company Products slide you want during the introduction), and your file goes to multi-MB just like that. A better approach would be to get a decent graphics editor, convert the image to a GIF file, and learn how to save as an Optimized GIF – this will really shrink the size of the
  image,making it much more manageable.
• via lifehacker, here is an excellent tutorial from Agarwal, telling how to use the Compress Picture functionality
  in PowerPoint. This is especially helpful if that corporate standard template insists on slapping your logo on every slide.
• Don’t Read: When presenting front of a group, or walking through a deck around a table, it’s exceedingly bad form to read the bullets. More often than not, everybody in the room can read as well as you can; besides, you sent the file out for a pre-read, right? Right? The key is to pick off the major points you need to make, not recite every single one. Another option is to provide more detail, specifics around the
  text on the screen – the slide is just a prompter for your pithy examples and amazing depth of understanding.
• Don’t Forget to Breathe: I need to remind myself of this one all the time: you’ve practiced so many times, and you’re aware of the dwindling time allotment (45 slides in 30 minutes, hmmm). Young captured this nicely in this post, especially Hack #2. When I rush through my sentences and start to run out of air, I will stop to breathe; it was nice to read Young’s statement that the audience doesn’t
  really notice this.

Do you like Top 5 lists? Check out ProBlogger’s latest Group Writing Project …

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All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/five-under-emphasized-powerpoint-best-practices/feed/ 1 http://www.cazh1.com/project-status-dashboards-best-practice-and-a-powerpoint-trick/ http://www.cazh1.com/project-status-dashboards-best-practice-and-a-powerpoint-trick/#comments Fri, 04 May 2007 04:49:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=178 For a simple, easily understood indication of project or task status, nothing beats the Traffic Light metaphor (Red / Yellow / Green). My IT organization is putting together standards for Project Status indicators in our PMO application; an interesting series of discussions and emails around the assignment of those Green / Yellow / Red (GYR) status lights …

Words: What do we display on the screen? Green / Yellow / Red means …

• Good / Fair / Poor? Hmm, nobody really wants to say their project is “poor”
• Good / Caution / Warning? Slightly better, but semantics can be a delicate thing
• On Time / Late / Really Late? This assumes that all projects “health” is based solely on the time dimension – what about features and budget?

We settled on what I think was a brilliant suggestion (not mine); just say Green / Yellow / Red. Most business audiences will understand your meaning without a translation guide – the whole point is to focus the conversation on the reds and the yellows, so we can take corrective action.

Ideas: A longer series of discussions developed around the ground rules for setting these status flags.

• We set the baseline assumption that we’re only talking about active projects. Rothman’s recent post added a fourth color, blue, to indicate completed projects, but aside from the color-blind issue (see below), I find it easier to relegate closed / completed project to another list, a separate slide – a different conversation altogether.
• To a great extent, a project’s status is subjective, and in most organizations, you have multiple PMs assigning status. How can a dashboard view have meaning without some level of consistency? The challenge is that different projects have different critical success factors, typically one of four – scope, quality, time, budget. Our solution was to capture the critical success factor in the project description:
  • Is there a critical must-have feature?
  • Are there rigorous testing and documentation steps to be completed?
  • Is this a time-boxed project, working to a deadline?
  • Is the project budget capped?

Whatever the critical success factor is, the project status assignment becomes simple:

• • Green: On target
  • Yellow: We are approaching the limits of our success factor
  • Red: Missing the critical success factor is imminent (or) we have missed

<aside> I still believe that there are only three success factors, and quality is a feature – but I lost that argument (hhh) … </aside>

Pictures: Many applications have some form of status indicator icons available for reports and displays. The visual analog of an LED indicator on a dashboard doesn’t quite work, however; as Rothman points out, colors can get transformed into shades of grey that are tough to differentiate. And it’s not just the color-blind; a more practical issue is the availability of reasonable quality color for the
final display.

Let’s face it – most PowerPoint presentations aren’t presented, they are printed and distributed. And even if your company is rich enough to provide all departments with color copiers, you still run the risk of people copying or scanning or otherwise rendering your beautiful dashboard into a muddy series of gray dots.

Most applications that provide colored icons for status indicators also differentiate by shape – a round ball for Green, a triangle for Yellow, and a diamond or square for Red. A traffic light icon is cute, but if you are an international company, might be confusing. It’s also cumbersome to manipulate icons next to the text in your slides / reports.

My preferred solution is to use the Wingdings family of fonts, laying down shape and color:

˜ “Green” ASC(152) [~ tilde] font-family: ‘Wingdings 2′

p “Yellow” ASC(112) [p] font-family: ‘Wingdings 3′

n “Red” ASC(110) [n] font-family: ‘Wingdings’

Click to enlarge ...

If that doesn’t come out on your browser, here’s an image of the final product:

With this method for displaying status, we can communicate the GYR “health” of the project with a reasonably good feeling that the message won’t be lost across multiple display mediums.

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Post tags: Art, color, Communication, dashboard, GYR, MS PowerPoint, PMO, Presentations, project manager, Science, status flags, status indicators, traffic light, Wingdings

All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/project-status-dashboards-best-practice-and-a-powerpoint-trick/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/shift-happens/ http://www.cazh1.com/shift-happens/#comments Sat, 21 Apr 2007 03:34:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=175 via MeFi, some thought-provoking fun with numbers and facts. Maybe a bit heavy, but what the heck, it’s Friday.

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All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/shift-happens/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/lighten-up-francis-loosen-up-that-powerpoint/ http://www.cazh1.com/lighten-up-francis-loosen-up-that-powerpoint/#comments Sun, 15 Apr 2007 02:13:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=172 Ok, the next post will be my Best Practice hints on everybody’s favorite insomnia cure – Corporate Presentations! But first, something fun – because I got a really good reaction on my latest attempt at lightening up the boring PowerPoint routine.

In the presentation, this was my segue slide from slides to a live demonstration of some software. Everybody recognizes it in an instant, but I made some pretense to leave it up on the screen, so they could see the embedded wit (sic) in the text.

Click to enlarge ...

<aside> The green looks like heck on this image; but the actual slide looks great. It was surprisingly easy to put together, using standard fonts that came with Windows. I’ve stashed a copy of all of these slides on my source code page, and here’s a link to the PPT file </aside>

Side note: I saw this post later in the week – same idea, no “source code”, swear to goodness I came up with mine before I saw this … still funny, tho …

I don’t like to go for the belly laugh, just something that makes folks know they should pay attention a bit when I’m presenting; I’m not just reading bullet points. Another element of my personal style is to put graphics up that have a multi-step, obtuse connection to the slide content.

• The agenda slide with the picture of a recycling bin (because I copied slides from other presentations)
• Making a point about the power of following process, with a picture of Archimedes (with a lever and the right place to stand …)
• A long laundry list of ToDos, with a big bee in the background (a carpenter bee, of course … Karen Carpenter … We’ve Only Just Begun …)

Ok, fine, that last one did get a groan – but only because my teams are used to this stuff, and they are asking about these offhand references I’m throwing out there. Which means, of course, that I’m succeeding – by keeping people engaged and paying attention!

I can also embed fairly subtle hints about areas of technology and current IT and business thinking – try throwing this little graphic on a slide, and see who reacts …

Click to enlarge ...

Finally, a little fun with a new passion of mine – I wanted to indicate an opening and closing section for questions, comments, suggestions …

Click to enlarge ...

Viva Chivas!

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All articles, blog entries, and other content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License    ]]> http://www.cazh1.com/lighten-up-francis-loosen-up-that-powerpoint/feed/ 0 http://www.cazh1.com/a-short-collection-of-random-links/ http://www.cazh1.com/a-short-collection-of-random-links/#comments Tue, 19 Dec 2006 04:36:00 +0000 Jim MacLennan http://qc.cazh1.com/?p=149 It’s the end of the fiscal year, and that brings project deadlines, holidays and vacations, performance reviews, and all sorts of tasks that fill up the days, evenings, and weekends. I am remiss in posting for a bit, so I’ll pick off a few items that I’ve been saving in my blogroll …

• Don’t Worry, We’ll Fix It! There are plenty of places to find war stories from the tech front out there on the web, but Papadimoulis’ site is a cut above the rest – primarily because the tales are so well written. This one made me laugh out loud at the punch line, which is a rare event. Scanning the feed is usually enough, but the follow-on comments on this site can be just as amusing.
• Ten Things to Learn This School Year: An entry from last Fall on Kawasaki’s always excellent blog, this one is full of pointers that I wish more folks in the current business world would read. The best of the best …
  • How to talk to your boss … Your role is to provide answers, not questions …
  • How to run a meeting … the primary purpose of a business meeting is to make a decision … not to share experiences or feel warm and fuzzy …
  • How to figure out anything on your own … force yourself to learn how … there are no office hours, no teaching assistants, and study groups in the real world …
  • How to explain something in thirty seconds … at the end of your thirty-second spiel, there should be an obvious answer to the question, “So what?”
• In Defense of Difficult Clients: This article is a nice little drop of wisdom amidst the ocean of web design brilliance at A List Apart. It takes a strong faith to withstand questioning, and if you can’t test your closely held beliefs every once in awhile, the “difficult clients” will gladly help.
• Consistency or personality? Many moons ago, I was in a room full of pharmaceutical marketing folks, who were stunned when I announced that McDonalds represents the textbook definition of “quality”. A predominantly North Shore (Chicago) crowd, they were amused and aghast, but they hadn’t been exposed to Deming, quality circles and ISO-9000. The trick, of course, is that a customer-attuned quality circle will guide it’s incremental quantitiative improvements towards the customers’ needs and wants, and that will typically lead towards the qualitative improvements that most folks think of when they think … “quality”.
• Pete’s Estimating Laws: These are clearly tongue-in-cheek, but might be good to share with those on your project team that are non-PMs, or short on experience. More best-of-the-best:
  • Software Engineers are always optimistic (generally REALLY optimistic)
  • Don’t let yourself be bullied into committing to something you cannot achieve
  • Most people’s estimating skills improve with experience; some don’t
  • Look up the word “estimate” in the dictionary. You may find it useful in a meeting
  • Schedules are (almost) always wrong

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