cazh1 » Productivity

Field Notes: Video Conferencing for Business Conversations

Jim MacLennan — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:52:00 +0000

This past week saw my first experience with video conference calling – something obvious to consider in these tight economic times. Some observations –

I got quick feedback that my original camera position was disconcerting for the others. I had put it off to the side, which made me look “off camera”, almost in profile, while in conversation. As I thought about it, I agreed – because if I was looking at me, it would be weird / annoying. I do not like it when the person I am talking with is not looking me in the eyes.
On that note – when we’re in a conversation, I’m typically looking at a 6” circle around your eyes. When on a business / working video conference, however, I’m looking at a 2 x 2 inch square picture of the speaker – because we all have other windows open, looking at documents / programs under review. It’s feels more like a “talking heads” newscast than a conversation …
… but you have to take the good with the bad. The ability to bring up a spreadsheet or presentation or application on a shared screen is quite powerful – participants can “see what I see”. You just need to understand that this is a multimedia conversation, and not simply a replacement for a phone call.

On the other hand – my family uses Skype to stay connected with our daughter away at college. When we make the call, we’ll flip the video feed to full screen – and since the web cams on our respective laptops are perched right above the screen, our eyes are focused reasonably close to the other person’s face. Simple conversational video calls, without the multitasking overhead, are reasonably effective.

Microphone configuration is also very important; some folks are using headsets, while I use the microphone incorporated in the video camera. I prefer this arrangement; I’m already comfortable with using a speakerphone on normal calls, and prolonged use of an earpiece gets a bit annoying. The key, however, is to get everyone to correctly configure microphone settings. Everyone’s volume was a little different, and it impacted the smooth flow of conversation.
We are using inexpensive web cams, not highfalutin’ conference calling hardware. In this scenario, the system does a reasonably brilliant job of flipping camera control to whoever is speaking. This seems obvious, but I noticed that when I was speaking, your remote view doesn’t bother flipping to your feed – it stays on the last speaker. This can be a tad disconcerting if that person reverts to typical conference call habits, and looks away / does a little multi-tasking.
I also noticed that people were much more cautious, or overly polite, about talking over one another. I assume that as we get used to holding conference calls in this format, we’ll get more comfortable with the interruptions.

Later in the week, I had a long conversation with a colleague in Germany. Here, the video call format is very effective. Typically, I prefer face-to-face conversations to phone calls – you can react when someone’s facial expressions signal a lack of agreement or comprehension. Of course, this is not practical with meine freunde in Deutschland, where language differences exacerbate the situation. The video call solves that problem immediately and effectively – I found myself communicating in face-to-face mode now, with hand gestures (ex. air quotes) and facial expressions indicate agreement, keep the conversation moving along.

Like any bit of technology, reality is not as smooth as the sales pitch makes it out to be, but still a very effective tool, and something that can be experimented with quite inexpensively.

Experimentation leads to experience, leads to effectiveness.

Previously …

International Meetings – Pick a Convenient Time (April 1, 2005)
Challenges when demoing / training / pitching complex systems (May 23, 2005)
eMail on Blackberry Changes Definition of Acceptable eMail (September 19, 2005)
Hand writing recognition – harder than colored bubbles (November 19, 2005)
Waiting outside their office (February 14, 2006)
Catching up on Mind Mapping; collaborative tools and some “market research” (May 13, 2007)
Alternative KM Tools (3 of 3) (September 25, 2007)
Power Outage Follow Up – Observations (March 28, 2008)

Technorati Tags: collaboration, hands on, Knowledge Management, productivity

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Third Time’s the Charm? Blackberry Bold

Jim MacLennan — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:11:00 +0000

I recently had to part ways with my Blackberry Pearl – some heartache, I suppose, but time and product innnovation march on. There is a lot to like about the Blackberry Bold – I am definitely happy to have made the change …

Acceptable Form Factor: Yes, the Pearl was “perfect” because of it’s candy-bar size – unlike the classic 7200 series, which felt strange when held up to your ear as a cell phone. Bottom line – the Bold still fits comfortably in jacket, shirt, and pants pockets. Plus, when I’m using it as a phone, I’ve typically got the Bluetooth headset plugged in.
QWERTY is Back: You can get used to the predictive typing on the Pearl’s compressed, two-letters-to-a-key keyboard, but the Bold’s “standard” layout has help reduce my typos considerably (alas, I have to take ownership of misspelings again).
So That‘s What WiFi is For … It didn’t register until I connected to my local Tomato to get out to the intarweb – much faster than anything I’d ever seen before, very useful.
Improved Screen: More real estate really helps here, and the applications are much more useful. Not just the “native” Contacts, eMail, and Calendar clients, but the web browser as well; pages just render better on this thing. I mean, it was usable before, but now it’s actually quite effective.
More Applications: A few more games, big deal – I don’t play in meetings anymore. However, there is a wide range of free, Blackberry-aware apps that are really useful – the Google suite, of course, plus Facebook and the Wall Street Journal. I’ve even re-downloaded Twitterberry, which has made a few updates since I last played with it (trying microblogging again …)

Subtleties that Really Deliver: No, I’m not an iPhone hater – but I have discovered a number of little features – not widely talked about, but spot-on useful – that apparently are not matched in the BBKWT. Face it – the Blackberry is spooky self-aware that it’s a phone, first and foremost; open up an eMail, and if a phone number appears in the body, you can click on it to initiate a call. Or start a conversation with Messenger, and click the green phone button – a pop up asks if you want to call the person you are chatting with. Nice.
My Desktop: I also like the fact that I can add custom folders and rearrange icons, even moving them within these new folders. The home screen gives me space for six icons, so I’ve got a folder for messaging apps (email, gmail, IM, SMS, and tberry), Internet apps (browser, Google apps, WSJ, Facebook), plus direct licks to calendar, contacts, and Google Maps (my fave application for the handheld).

No, it’s not perfect – I don’t understand why I can’t create shortcuts for my favorite web sites (Bloglines, Ping, Weather Underground, etc.) in the folders – but I can see myself growing more independent from the luggable [notebook]. If I could only get a decent VNC client …

Previously …

eMail on Blackberry Changes Definition of Acceptable eMail (September 19, 2005)
My first month with the Blackberry Pearl (February 26, 2007)
Rare event: Design problems with my Blackberry Pearl (May 24, 2007)
New Twitter features starting to make things more relevant (June 3, 2007)
Communication is the responsibility of … (August 19, 2007)
Innovation That Matters – Substance Over Style (January 12, 2008)
The Innovation Generation and User Interfaces (April 9, 2008)
Stretching Your User Interface Design Muscles (April 16, 2008)
Finally! Relevant Applications for YouTube and Twitter in the Enterprise! (July 11, 2008)
On the Road: Business Travel, Fall 2008 (October 13, 2008)

Technorati Tags: blackberry, design, hands on, innovation, productivity, technology, twitter

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Hidden Gold in Automating Recurring Processes

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 28 May 2007 16:48:00 +0000

Here’s a typical IT scenario: each quarter, you need to check audit user access to a critical application. Your internal security standards require that you revoke access for those who haven’t been on the system for over 90 days. I’ve seen this before, and the process (at the time) had many challenges:

It’s manual; we did a quick-and-dirty set of steps years ago to cover the minimum requirements, that involves extracts from application logs, file transfers MS Access and MS Excel, and some emails
It’s not drop-dead simple, because there is a list of exceptions – user IDs that were always kept active, even if they haven’t been used
The overall process was never documented

Coupled with the fact that this only happened once per quarter, and involved less than five total effort hours to take care of, the easy response was to just get the task done and move on. But I think this is penny wise and pound foolish; there are long-term quality Problems to be avoided, and short-term Opportunities for internal staff development that we were passing up!

Problem: If we continued to just do the minimum, to satisfy the requirement, it was no surprise that over time, steps were omitted. The lack of documentation forced folks to repeat steps from memory, and pass along the process word-of-mouth as roles rotated and/or people turned over.

Opportunity: Simplifying things required some automation; nothing too difficult, but definitely interesting and non-trivial; for example, we needed a custom table for the exceptions. For staff members looking to build technical skills, this was a perfect training opportunity; small risk, small time requirement – a perfect filler when you are burnt out on the big project and need a bit of an escape.

Of course, the push-back was always the same: I Have No Time For This. Most can easily envision a total solution that is simple, uses familiar technology, gets rid of the multiple platforms and manual processes, and is sustainable. In this case, however, it would take about 16-32 effort hours to get done, and who has the time?

The solution was to attack the problem in baby steps; make the overall process a little better each time. For isses like this, you don’t need to solve all of your problems now, and it’s OK to leave the work unfinished until next time. However, the key is that you must commit to making a small improvement each time you “touch” the thing.

For example – back to the user access audit. For a first pass …

The current task owners walked through the process with me, and I took scratchy notes on paper and in a Notepad text file – stashed on my hard disk
I got the Access database extract and Excel spreadsheet that counted the days. I iterated on the spreadsheet, automating the counts and the formulas for computing days since last log in.
I returned the list of users who hadn’t signed in for 90 days, which were then manually matched against the list of exception user IDs.

This work was a one-time add of about three effort hours – a small start, but a teeny platform on which to build.

A few months go by, and it’s time for pass two …

I moved my scratchy notes into a shared document and iterated on the process, mostly just cleaning them up to be somewhat legible
I still received the list of users and their last access date, but this time I got the list of exceptions. I iterated on the spreadsheet to take this into account
I still sent the results back, but note that now (and never again) does the next person in the process need to edit out the exceptions

This work was another one-time add of two or three hours; but we’d already simplified the overall process, and we saw the total effort (including process improvements) starting to decline.

Next iteration …

We teed up a programming project to build an exception table and automate the log extracts – nothing more than a couple hours of effort
I took a final cut at the process documentation in the shared area, then turned it over to the operational support team

Note that each time you iterate on something like this, you need to feel comfortable with the idea that these works in process, these “interim deliverables”, are clearly unfinished, even raggedy. It shouldn’t matter, because each time you touch it, it gets a little bit better. Plus, the priority was originally low enough that a totally manual effort was OK, so what’s wrong with documentation that is incomplete?

Incremental improvements on the primary goal (automated user audits) with tasty side benefits along the way (mini side projects to keep stretching your tech chops) … win-win.

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Writing like a fiend

Jim MacLennan — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 00:23:00 +0000

It may not look like I’m blogging here all that religiously, but I am writing like a fiend these days. It’s a productivity habit I picked up last year; I keep journals of most/all conversations and meetings during the business day, sort of like a blog for myself. This began a few years ago, as my contact management database was getting bloated from all of the conversations and meetings I was recording there. For folks I deal with on a regular basis, I needed to move those longer journal entries to something separate … as long as I could still easily work with the embedded information …

There are two important tools I use to make this work:

MS Word: A huge productivity boost comes from the spell checker, making many corrections automatically as I type. My typing accuracy skyrockets when I use Word (too bad I’m having trouble getting the Blogger add-in to work). Also, I wrote (ok, recorded!) a simple little macro to add a date stamp, so each day’s notes has a nice identifier.
Copernic desktop search: This is where it really pays off, when I need to recall any conversation I’ve had in regard to a general topic. I just use Copernic to search all old documents; it’s also going through presentations, old emails, everything. A mini-Google that reminds me of every snippet / contact / chunk of information I’ve captured over the years on this topic.

Some blogging concepts work for my “personal blog” efforts; things are captured in diary / journal entries format with date stamps, generally written as a report / note to myself, stuff like that. Keyword tagging is not really relevant, because of the full text search of Copernic. One important thing to keep in mind – these are definitely notes for myself; nothing actionable, but some things confidential.

This effort does add overhead to my day – some days, it takes a good hour to catch up on all notes from the day before – but it’s really effective way to manage the huge stream of information coming my way. I also leverage this “electronic memory” for conversations with my direct reports – this really makes annual performance evaluations easier (because I remember the good and the bad) and better (because I don’t forget the bad and the good).

My somewhat promiscuous electronic publishing output also ties in with my long-established habit of writing monthly status reports; I’m glad/sad I kept this up, because the group I work with now expects weekly status reports (well, at least it’s not too big of an adjustment). I’ve learned over the years that these are best kept to a reasonable length, should not be used for a detailed accounting of every completed task, and get really powerful when we throw in some information / thoughts about what is out there on the project horizon. I’d like to convert the whole internal process to a dark blog, and take advantage of the subscription model for info distribution, but we need to get a few key foundation technologies in place.

There’s other writing going on – this morning, I wrote a long email for the guys in my old Fantasy Football league – back in the day, we would write scathing email attacks on each other, part of the whole league experience, and I would liberally borrow from timely CNN articles, changing all the right words to insult as many people in the league that I could. Heck, at this moment, I have three blog posts open and in process – there is a progression of thoughts going on as I’m doing a little surfing, I want to tee them up for posting over the next couple of days, and I’ve budgeted a nice chunk of time to work on them. One of the benefits of the winter, it’s easier to justify staying indoors during the daytime to write; on days like this (sunny and low 80′s), I end up sneaking in most of the work at the end of the day …

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Post tags: Blog, full text search, journal, MS Word, Productivity, writing

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Coaching for the day – some basic time management skills

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 11 May 2005 03:19:00 +0000

Most folks will tell you they are woefully short on resources, with way too many requests / tasks / todos coming their way. It’s seems to be a tough thing for folks to Just Say No to all the ad hoc requests that come their way. Same thing goes for the mythical “written requirements” for programming / technical requests; it is much easier for folks to wave their hands and describe what they need, and it’s generally easier to listen than it is to insist on written specs.

This becomes an unsustainable way to manage your work time – never seem to get anything done, and the interruptions are quite costly. Some key tactics that I recommend, leveraging Outlook / your company’s calendaring system:

Set up scheduled time to review requests / requirements – a meeting invitation, location, and agenda. Now, all involved can plan for a solid 30-60 minutes of thought and review, not a hurried conversation in the cube / hallway.
Block out work time for other projects – uninterrupted stretches of quality concentration time can skyrocket your productivity. If you don’t take ad hoc meetings, just ask folks to set up time to chat about other issues (see 1. above), then you can get the concentration / quality time that you need.
60/40 rule – literally schedule 60% of your day for maintenance / quick hit work, and 40% for project work (or whatever mix you like). This allows you to make progress on the “investment” work while also covering your maintenance / operational bases
Schedule maintenance processes (file upload / download, audits, batch processes, etc.), and don’t deal with them ad-hoc. Concentrate your grunt work, do it when you are closing up for the day or getting ready to go to lunch and need a quick 15 minute task to fill some time.

I had these conversations today with one of our techie groups, and you could see the lights go on. Even I read lists / hints like this every day in the various blogs / trade rags / newspapers out there, it’s the kind of knowledge that is obvious once it’s pointed out to you.

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Post tags: calendar time, MS Outlook, Productivity, time management

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