Category: Collaboration

When I started work I was given some advice about getting people to do things. My boss outlined to me a set of techniques, one of which was the cracked-record approach. In order to get someone to do something, sometimes, and only as a last resort, you have to ask them to do it, and then ask them again, and then ask them if they have done it, and then ask them again, and on, and on, until it is done. This metaphor needs updating somewhat because I realise there are a whole set of people out there who haven’t a clue what a cracked record sounded like, but I can’t say a scratched-CD because that does something radically different to what a cracked-record does (or did).

 

I feel like I have got into cracked record territory on two topics on this blog: meetings and process. Yesterday I was on meetings, today I am on process. Previous postings on process are here, here, here and here.

 

Today’s post is prompted by reading an article on collaboration loop about a collaboration success at HP. This article demonstrates how to do collaboration right:

 

 

Although collaborating on sales guides within HP presented challenges, the issues were far more complex when HP partner companies became involved. Typically, the process involved sending large documents attached to e-mail messages back and forth. Fulkerson felt there had to be a better way.  

 

Since HP already used Microsoft SharePoint Server (SPS) in some areas of the company, Fulkerson leveraged that experience in creating a Collaborative Business Environment for his process. To bring outside partners into the collaborative process, he paired SPS and InfoPath with Groove Workplace, which gave non-HP users a synchronized collaborative environment in which to work. According to Fulkerson “just making a collaborative environment and asking people to use it instead of e-mail doesn’t work. People live and die by e-mail. It’s just so hard to switch.”  What made the difference for HP is that they got the Groove and SPS people to spend time watching and learning how the HP process worked.

 

Now what have I been trying to say to you, it’s not about the technology, it’s about the process!

 

 

The results: first the sales collateral process has been sped up at almost every step. Fulkerson estimates that, with the new system in place, HP was able to shorten the overall process from ca. 39 days to ca. 21 days, a 46% improvement. The implications for HP, on an enterprise-wide basis, for this kind of collaboration, are vast, as is the potential for lowering costs, speeding time to market, and increasing productivity.

 

They didn’t say “lets do collaboration because I believe it can make a difference”, they said “lets apply technology to this existing collaboration process”. It’s simple to say, but it’s a radically different approach which gets and radically different outcome.

Jeffrey Philips joins me on the meeting high-horse.

Meetings are one of the few activities where a person can require the participation and attendance of others without a real justification or value proposition.  It has become almost de riguer to attend a meeting once invited, so few people miss a meeting they’ve been invited to, even if there’s little or no value for them.  The cost of these meetings is astronomical and the benefit in many cases unproven or non-existent.

I like his idea of:

We should create a tool which allows people invited to a meeting to express their 1) interest in the meeting 2) the value they think they can add to the meeting 3) whether or not they think a meeting is necessary (could this be handled some other way) 4) what their expectations are to receive from the meeting in terms of benefits.  It might be possible to do away with some meetings, hold smaller, more topical and specific meetings in some cases, and improve the definition and expected results of other meetings.

Remember:

“A meeting moves at the speed of the slowest mind in the room. (In other words, all but one participant will be bored, all but one mind underused.)”

Dale Dauten

Come on people it doesn’t need to be this way, please, I have better thing to do.

When Cisco and Microsoft work together it’s a big thing for corporates many of which who rely on both companies in their infrastructures.

Today’s announcement is the integration of Microsoft’s Live Communications Server and Cisco’s Unified Communications System (Cisco, Microsoft, Beta News).

Anyone would think there was a conference on about such things , especially as Cisco also demonstrated integration with Sametime (Cisco).

(If you think I should have put them the other way around, i.e. IBM before Microsoft, then sorry but I came across the Microsoft story first so tough ).

Sometimes it’s worth pointing people to common sense – in order to reinforce the common sense.

I rant rather a lot about meetings, I get invited to so many poor ones. As a way of being constructive I am linking to “9 tips for running more productive meetings” – now there’s common sense.

If any of these are a surprise to you perhaps you should consider phoning each of your colleagues and apologise to them for all of the poor meetings you have run in the past .

Time is our most precious asset. Don’t go wasting your’s or other people’s, it’s the worst kind of theft. You can’t give it back.

When is a ‘fix’ not a ‘fix’? When it’s actually reducing the issue rather than actually ‘fixing’ it. It’s a little unfair but true .

If you run a large Exchange environment then you should be having a good look at the Kernel memory on your servers, especially if the users are members of lots of security groups. There are a whole load of posts from the Exchange team about this issue here, here and here.

A hotfix is now available with details here, linking to a KB article here. This ‘reduces’ the issue by about 30% – so not really a ‘fix’ but that was expected because the real constraint is the 32–bit architecture on which Exchange and Windows runs (for now) .

Stu talks about Notes and Outlook – his observations are similar to mine.

He goes further on Notes/Domino as an application platform. I’m still unsure as to whether (for most customers) Notes/Domino as an application platform is a good or a bad thing. Many customers that I talk to regard it as a problem rather than a solution, but many of these customers are the ones unhappy with Notes/Domino anyway so perhaps my view is skewed. It certainly works as an application platform, but would anyone choose it as the preferred application platform if they were starting in a ‘green filed’ environment today? I don’t think I would.

There is a theme that comes up in the newspapers regularly and it relates to our education system. It tends to go something like this: “education is not relevant to work”; “young people not given the basic skills for work”. The basic premise being that education doesn’t prepare our young people for the real world.

It’s early evening now – I’m still working and will be for some while – again.

In his bedroom my son is also ‘working’ – I think (he was earlier anyway). They still call it homework but the Internet and IT in general has changed it to be something radically different to what I remember. At least it has for the privileged teenager in our house who has grown up regarding a whole set of technologies which I would have regarded as dreams as normal.

For the most part I did my homework in isolation. I lived a good bike ride from any of my school friends the need to collaborate wasn’t strong enough for me to be bothered. As we speak Jonathan is talking to two of his friends over Skype, they are using MSN for IM and file sharing. The barriers to collaboration are so much lower, in terms of effort, that they are choosing to collaborate. It’s part of their culture. It’s how they do it. They will be so disappointed if they start in employment and their employer doesn’t allow them to interact in this instant rich way.

The other day the three of them worked online and produced a flash animation on World War I as a response for a history question that they had been asked.

They regularly collaborate on a presentations and present them to the class.

So here is my question – are employers ready to release all of this fresh new employees into the rich collaboration experiences that they are used to? Are they going to provide them with the flexibility that goes with it? Or are they going to be subjected to the endless boredom of poorly structured meetings running at the pace of the slowest person with little or no value.

Just a quick pointer to an article in the Guardian which mentions yours-truly .

Comes from this post.

(It’s shame I don’t have a picture of Jimmy and Grandad reading a paper – don’t have time to take one now)

An inability to step outside of one’s own head may be behind e-mail miscommunication, according to recent research.

So starts an article in the American Psychological Association: Monitor

It would appear that we grossly over-estimate our ability to communicate, especially when we write (oh, dear):

The participants then listened to or read their partners’ statements, guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.

Both the e-mailers and those who recorded their messages were highly confident that their partners would correctly detect their tone–both groups predicted about a 78 percent success rate. The speakers weren’t too far off–their partners got the tone correct about 75 percent of the time. The partners who read the statements over e-mail, though, had only a 56 percent success rate–not much better than chance.

What’s more, the participants who received the messages were no better at predicting their own success–both the listeners and the readers guessed that they had correctly interpreted the message’s tone 90 percent of the time.

I suppose that means that half of you reading this have absolutely no idea what I am talking about, but I believe that nearly all of you get it.

Rubyard Kippling: “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

Via CMS

The Guardian today: Survival of the unfittest.

Lotus Notes is used by millions of people, but almost all of them seem to hate it. How can a program be so bad, yet thrive?

Ed comments:

With a kickoff paragraph like this, you can only guess where the article is going…

He then goes on to complain about how the article was constructed and he does seem to have a point.

I’ve written previously about my opinions and others have responded.

IBM really do need to get on the front foot on the client. We’ve heard a lot over the last couple of years about the changes in the Domino infrastructure, we’ve heard a lot about Workplace, all this meant that we heard (and by this I mean listened and took in) little about the changes in the Notes client. Personally I have had numerous discussions with IBM in which I raised the issue of the users disliking the client – their response was nearly always to minimise the issue. I have left many a discussions with IBM with no answer to the question, “What are you doing for the end-user?”. Ed is starting to stand up to the mark but there are a lot of minds to change and a lot of technology to deploy.

Bleeding Edge highlights a view of collaboration that I have a lot of sympathy with – the simple one. They then go on to highlight a new service based on email; I’ve not tried it so I’m not going comment on the particular approach.

I have a lot of sympathy for the simple collaboration approach but I don’t actually subscribe to the black-and-white one in Bleeding Edge:

What we eventually learned about groupware and collaborative software, after the expenditure of more than $US1 billion dollars, was that it led to a dramatic blow-out in IT budgets, for little increase in collaborative productivity. The only tool that did boost collaborative output, it emerged, was the one we’d all started out with at the beginning of the networked society: e-mail.

I agree that email has by far outstripped every other collaboration technique, but I don’t see it as the ‘only tool’ that has boosted collaboration output. Where my perspective is different though is within teams within organisations where they have managed to build a common sense that has made the team significantly more productive than it would have been without it. The main impact wasn’t the technology, it was the ‘common sense’ (the working process). These teams moved t the point where they lived in a collaboration space and practically never used email, email actually became an annoying interruption.

Email makes sense to people because it’s ‘common sense’ is obvious, other collaboration techniques suffer because they expect people to learn a new ‘common sense’. Other technologies may have a simpler common sense and lead to a step change in collaboration but I don’t see that happening any time soon. In the present teams will become more productive if they use technologies and build a ‘common sense’ but that takes time and effort.