Collaboration

Managing Change: Knowing, Understanding, Empathizing

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ February 28, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Do you know your job, or do you really understand your job? One difficult part of change is getting people to see the difference.
Of course, this is seriously delicate stuff – you can’t just walk in and ask people if they understand what they are doing. You know you’d be insulted if someone asked you [...]

Quantifying Business Benefit of Collaboration Tools (or, What Is This Meeting Costing Me?)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 24, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

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 [...]

Collaboration "in the Wild": Some Observations

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ November 15, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

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 [...]

Underwhelming experiences with Google Wave

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ October 17, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

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 [...]

Perfect IT

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ August 4, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

I once met with a rather thoughtful Project Manager to catch up on things. An interesting person to talk to – it’s the cadence and style of his chat, he’s a fairly laid-back guy. I asked where his Stress comes from – he shows no visible signs of any, and it made me Ponder. We [...]

Technical Debt and the Cost/Benefit of Knowledge Retention

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 27, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

A rather rigorous, Financial-sounding title for a high-concept line of thought …Thanks to Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror, for calling my attention to this article by Martin Fowler on Technical Debt:
Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and [...]

Real Business Users and SharePoint

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 14, 2009 ⋅ One comment

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 [...]

The Delicate Art of Pushing Back

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 5, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Commiserating a week or so ago with an old friend, struggling mightily with some external consulting firm providing technology talent, developing customer management systems for Big Sales Company. There were some critical dependencies on the server side, and the (internal) project team needed some on-site assistance working through the issues. Ad hoc phone support [...]

Failing Faster

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 14, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Here is a simple question to ask yourself: do I insist on solving problems myself? A noble goal, until it takes too long to get the answer. Why don’t we fail fast enough to ask the question to someone who knows? Remember, we pay a ton of money for annual maintenance to our enterprise software [...]

Business Benefits of Social Networks Exist, but …

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ April 26, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

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 [...]

Collaboration

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