Tag Archives: Process

Traffic shaping for my inbox

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I’ve not written here for far too long. I love writing, but the only writing I seem to do these days is email! Since I joined Symantec my work day seems to never have time in it for stopping, contemplating and composing but I’m going to change that. I’ve realised that if I continue the same pace for too long I will basically run out of stored energy. For me, I am able to continue at a strong pace for a long time, but then I crash!

I’m on my way back from Barcelona right now and one of the things I have been thinking about is controlling my email inbox. The first day I was here, the in-flow was still it’s usual pace (a.k.a. far too much). The second day after people took note of the out-of-office reply they got, it slowed. The third day, it was even less. During the last 3 days I have sent very little email as I’ve been manning a stand here at TechEd. To me, that demonstrates that I’m actually generating in-flow probably by sending mail myself that requires a response (via email). I am going to make a conscious effort to send less email. Think before I send. Pick-up the phone. Do more digging before I reach for the “New mail” button.

Remind me of that in a week.

Legal Exoskeletons

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I like to think most of the IT systems I work on as being best suited to extending human capabilities in an “exoskelaton” manner. In doing so we gather data about interactions that are of varying importance that occur person-to-person, person-to-system (and even perhaps system-to-system). Sig likes to talk about passing an object through a workflow and storing the changes in state as it goes. I wonder however in these days of information laws such as the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act, how much and to what level of detail, we are allowed to capture, store and use before we are touching the edges of legality.

Using the technology of “now”

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One of my great influencers is a guy called Jon Udell and I’ve mentioned his work here before. He recently joined Microsoft after a long career in various journalistic roles including time at Byte Magazine and more recently InfoWorld. His role at Microsoft will be to continue to make abstract technical capabilities into real-world, exciting use cases but he’s going to try to also move the audience to a less “geeky” one. Jon is such a geek that he uses the term “outlying data point” to describe himself, which is in itself a geeky phrase!

The reason I wanted to write about it was I’ve been thinking along these lines for the areas that I’m working in at the moment. If you can’t make your technology accessible, understandable, relevant, etc. to end-users then it can be the most life changing software in the world but it will not gain adoption.

Technology will continue to advance at an enormous rate, but will it be adopted at even a moderate rate?

I recently attended a training course for Groove 2007 in Berlin, Germany which took place after the SharePoint Conference. Groove is an excellent software tool that I used to run my consultancy a few years back before it got acquired by Microsoft … Groove that is, not my consultancy! It’s best used as a tool to enable small teams to collaborate on a shared goal or goals. It encompasses document creation, communication, note taking, data gathering and many other things. It’s even clever enough to have the right mix of technology to be peer-to-peer and manageable by an organisation. Most people think of peer-to-peer in the negative sense of disruptive and bandwidth-intensive. One of the many things that struck me as interesting on the course was that they were acquired back in April 2005 and released no products from then until the release now of Office Groove 2007 which actually has features removed from the version 3.1 which was their last before Microsoft. Sure they’ve added some manageability features and made it fall under the security programme that Microsoft run, but how much more innovation could they have had outside, in the agile start-up world? Then I realised that it didn’t really matter! Groove as it stands now has enough features now to more than satisfy most peoples needs. What it needs is adoption by passionate lead users who will invite colleagues to work with them and help them overcome the inevitable conceptual and technical problems will have.

Groove will have a helping hand because it is very different to most enterprise (not consumer) software that exists today because it is viral. When you want to work with someone in Groove you “invite” them. If they don’t have Groove they can get a 120 day trial and by then they’re either hooked or they’ve finished the project but lost nothing.

Most software doesn’t have this advantage but what can we do to make sure that our friends, colleagues and clients can get hold of the knowledge and understanding that will help them run their organisations better? I believe one of the key ways will be defining use cases and finding ways to present them better. Whether this be podcasting (subscribe-able audio downloads), videoblogging (capturing people talking on camera), screencasting (videos of software demonstrations) or any of the presentation methods yet to be invented it has to be language that is accessible and use cases that are relevant.

Another key way will be not telling people about things. It sounds odd but sometimes my passion makes me tell people about stuff that is not ready for prime time. I often haven’t realise how many work-arounds I’ve unconsciously done to make something work until I try to introduce it to someone else and then I have to say “Oh yeah, ignore that button for now it’ll crash it” or other such phrases.

I look forward to the future of technology but I think a job more important is to make the most of what we have now.
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What do you want to do today?

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I once got this CD from Microsoft (perhaps the MSN team) with “What do you want to do today?” in bold black writing on an orange background. I liked it so much that I made it into a clock by ripping the guts out of an old ugly clock.

What do you want to do today?

This is the phrase that came to mind recently when I was contemplating “What is the Thingamy?” and “How do I promote it to people?”. Sig has taken to referring to it as a Value Creation System or VCS and I guess this is what most people who run businesses what to hear. They want a system that rewards them for using it not punishes them!

What I was trying to with my resurrecting of the “What do you want to do today?” (I hope that’s not a trademarked phrase) was this forward looking mentality where the key word is ‘want’. Of course there are a number of things in life that you ‘have’ to do but when you want to do something you are more likely to drive through its success and shout about it when it happens. Is your passion to provide superb customer experience? If so don’t you think it could be good to make sure that their order doesn’t get lost? If they have a query don’t you think it would be nice to answer their question by looking for the answer, finding it and telling it to them? I remember a colleague in and consultancy group that I used to work for telling me some enormous percentage of calls to call centres (or is the correct phrase “contact centres” now) are because something has gone wrong. However, they rarely are logged as “complaints” they are just handled. We have armies of people whose only job is to deal with exceptions that if they were captured in a coherent manner could probably be dealt with to stop everyone else suffering the same fate. Of course if you product or company is so dire that it can’t change in response to issues you might as well just give up now!

What the Thingamy can do is capture your processes quickly and when they need to change, change them quickly. It puts them in one place if you let it. This responsive agility enables accelerated innovation. Wow! What a phrase… Want some of that?

Unintended consequences of looseness

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The other day I was lying in the bath thinking about the use of enforced textual hierarchies in tagging (like most people do in the bath I’m sure…). Tagging is a method for assigning words (or sometimes phrases) to an object. Most often users are presented with an empty box within which to type these words in which are then associated with that object. My favourite example of the use of tagging is del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site. The beauty of this style of “categorising” is that the user is left to assign to it what they want and not what a committee has decided are the categories.

However what can sometimes happen is a hierarchy starts to develop. An example would be getting users to prepend customers with a key word so those relating to “Joe Bloggs Inc.” would look like this: “client_JoeBloggsInc”. This is very helpful if you are trying to scan through a load of data and if you’ve ordered a list alphabetically you’ll get all the clients grouped together. However, what you’ve done is reduce the opportunities for unintended but positive consequences.

You want to make it so that stumbling across the object you are tagging is as likely as possible. That someone who doesn’t know your self-created hierarchy can locate it with minimum effort so that they can add value to it.

Fluid-Strict-Processes

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Been doing some more thinking about processes today and hit upon this thought of Fluid-Strict-Processes… you like that? I just made up a word I think!

Here’s the pitch:

Strict – you must follow the current process
Fluid – you can change the process at a moments notice

This collides with the concept of trying to promote process to Small and Medium businesses that don’t currently embrace them in a formal fashion.

Have some process, follow it, test its results, change it, test it again, etc!

Process fear

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Why are you afraid of process?

Is it because it gets in the way of intuition?

I spend a lot of time railing against organizations and teams that fall in love with process at the expense of innovation. This is not a post about that.

It’s about the opposite.

Our culture embraces the intuitive craftsman. We don’t talk about Harlequin Romances or artists who paint by number. Heroism is about writing a novel or making a sale based on what’s deep inside of you… not by following a prescribed pattern.

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If process makes you nervous, it’s probably because it threatens your reliance on intuition. Get over it. The best processes leverage your intuition and give it room to thrive.

That is a quote from a recent post on Seth Godin’s excellent blog (well worth reading the whole thing)… I love the way this collides with the thoughts I’ve been developing on Thingamy. Process is something that causes most people in small and medium businesses to raise their eyebrows and tut because they believe that “it’ll just mean the boss interfering. In large enterprises an individual’s entire department is often part of a huge orcastrated set of processes to them so their understanding of where they fit in is often hidden from them and wrapped in several suffocating levels of politics.

Think about the situation I’ve been considering for Thingamy… A company who’s value is in creating original entertainment material for distribution through various “channels”. What is their most valuable asset? The “idea”. However, they don’t make their money from the “idea” they make it from the “execution” of it. The ideas though are so important and build the intellectual capital of the company and therefore the capture of them is essential. What I was originally looking for was something to support the development of what I was calling the “ideas bank” but what I see Thingamy’s value is being able to extend beyond the bank and track an idea to its execution and beyond. What this will do in effect is not only please The Management (because they’ll see where the bottlenecks are etc) but also The Workers (because they’ll get credit for the original idea). Coming full circle back to the quote that started this ramble where it talks of being “nervous” about process, where a bunch of creatives who would be nervous or reluctant about it, they will now hopefully see the benefit that is brings by increasing the visibility and viability of their ideas.

Have no fear! Embrace the process!