Adventures in home working

My company is currently re-launching its knowledge management environment, so I thought it would be useful to re-think my requirements from a personal and then (in another blog post) from a team/project perspective. The diagram on the left represents a simplified view of the personal information management lifecycle and I will step through each phase looking at the commodity tools that I think all knowledge workers should have, by right, in todays world.  Then I will discuss some of the more advanced tools that may only be applicable to certain high value processes or industry segments.  First off I make no apologies for the simple model I have chosen to use.  More complete lifecycles have been modelled, for example this one by David Pollard which is a more comprehensive view of the creative process, and if you want to dig deeper go read his work as it’s better than mine!  However I wanted something that was visually simple and easy for people to relate to.

I will be testing my companies project against the content of this document,  it should be interesting!

First off lets deal with the coloured groups,  the green hexagons (subscribe, search and discuss) are ongoing activities for any knowledge worker who needs to maintain their subject matter expertise.  The blue hexagons (organise, innovate and create) represent the directed activities of an individual or team trying to achieve a goal.  The red hexagons (review and publish) represent activities that relate to a broader community than those undertaking the directed act of creation.  The collaboration hexagon at the centre represents the fact that everyone needs to collaborate throughout the whole information management lifecycle, although the tools and techniques will differ depending on whether the collaboration objective is:

• Co-development
• Co-ordination
• Co-decision
• Commitment

The rest of this post will step through the lifecycle “hexagon by hexagon”:

No new system should ever be deployed that does not have an effective mechanism for people to subscribe to change and aggregate change information that arrives from many different information sources.  Knowledge management projects must realise that no matter now effective they are; knowledge workers will still need to aggregate subscriptions from many different sources both inside and outside the enterprise.  The de-facto standard today for subscription and aggregation is RSS.   I will stress again that this applies to ALL systems from team workspaces, to risk registers to change logs to company news feeds.  Web sites on the Internet are learning this lesson fast and all news sites have probably already learnt it or are dying.  It is no longer acceptable for any information provider to assume that people will pro-actively go to their web site and “look for changes”, nor is an email summary of changes an alternative.  For repositories that contain documents or other media files enclosure support is encouraged.  This naturally means that employees need access to an RSS reader, although it’s difficult to believe that information workers will not already have discovered the need already.  It’s a fortunate coincidence that subscription comes first on my list because it’s probably THE most fundamental commodity requirement.  I have discussed my personal use and ideas around the use of subscription in several blog articles that you can find here.

 Although subscription is often the trigger for maintaining subject matter expertise search is still fundamental to exploring and extending expertise based on the subscription trigger.  Of course the main source of information continues to be the public web and (for IT stuff) analyst web sites.  However effective Intranet search is still important, in my view context sensitive searching is also important, ie the ability to search just within repository but also across repositories, and of course not forgetting desktop search.  Whatever search solution is deployed navigating the results set is made much simpler with a tabbed browser designed for the task, and without comparison for this task I recommend Maxthon, for the following key reasons:

• It allows bulk opening of tabs in the background
• It allows bulk closing of tabs, (all, all to the right, all to the left)
• It allows a set of tabs (ie web pages) to be saved as a group for later review.  In my case I am currently collecting groups of pages that refer to interesting articles on Innovation and SOA, as well as archiving off all of the memorable pages I read each day.

I am a strong believer in exposing ones thought processes, especially decision making processes to the relevant community and there is no better way of doing that than through mechanisms that encourage discussion.  The mechanism for discussion used will depend on the phase of the activity, during this phase – maintaining subject matter expertise – the blog/comment model seems to be the best option.  So any knowledge management solution needs some mechanism to allow people to maintain a personal journal of their evolving subject matter expertise which others can subscribe to via RSS and comment on so that the subject matter expertise of the community evolves as well.  In high value areas its probably worth considering maintaining a journal for the area of subject matter expertise that either automatically or manually aggregates the (most important) content from the SME journals.  This agregated journal can then provide a more focussed area for discussion.  What is absolutely key is that most if not all content that is published needs to be comment enabled,  a “discussion area” is not what is intended in this post. I have discussed the importance of journals in my blog in this post.

The previous activities relate to maintenance of subject matter expertise,  the next set are directed activities towards some objective, most often in the form of a project.

I am using a broad definition of organise, but in general terms it includes the following main activities.  The formulation of an objective and the requirements/goals and tasks to it.  Information gathered during the previous (green) phase is Marshalled and organised, shared with other team members etc.  The activities that need to be undertaken are broken down into activities, with dependencies.  Progress is measured in terms of key milestones, preferably ones that demonstrate measurable progress towards the achievement of the requirements/goals, and not just expended effort.  During this phase much discussion and debate will take place around key deliverables such as project definitions, requirement definitions, resources, costs and time scales.  The ability to maintain a journal during this process can greatly assist in the process of keeping the team committed and coordinated.  I have discussed this in this post.  During this phase it is important to confront the issue of how well your customer represents your users; and especially for IT infrastructure project whether they understand their own requirements.  This important issue is discussed here.

During the organising phase and thereafter assets that are referenced during the definition and execution phases of the project should be captured and should be available as referenced supporting evidence.  Personal information management tools that provide this level of formality include products like NetSnippets and Onfolio.  Repository designers should ensure that enterprise versions of these capabilities are available or build the publishing processes/capabilities of these personal tools into their knowledge management processes, and should choose a corporate standard to facilitate sharing on this information within project teams.

It is often during this process that negotiations are being undertaken,  high fidelity video conferencing can be important during this phase to ensure that the maximum level of commitment is achieved between team members, managers and customers.

It is likely that any new project will involve a process of innovation.  This topic is discussed elsewhere in my blog but basically involves the following key processes:

• Carefully stating the need, preferably in generic/conceptual terms
• Surveying of existing solution options to address the conceptual problem
• Idea generation and filtering

Formal methods such as TRIZ can add considerable value in this process.  However tool supported implementations of TRIZ may only be affordable for major projects. For many projects applying the TRIZ problem modelling approach (positive and negative factors) can still add value.  Low cost and easy to visualise mapping techniques can complement TRIZ as shown here.

Regardless of the existing assets identified during the previous stages there will still be the need to create some new deliverables from an activity.  In many IT projects this project of co-development will require the full armoury of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration tools and well as the use of journals and subscription to project document repositories, risk and issue registers and change logs.  In addition the project team will greatly benefit from prototyping and so far as is practical trialing the delivered processes and tools them selves and not just relying on formal testing.  This process is often referred to as “eating your own dog food” and its application to systems integration projects is discussed in my previous work on the subject, here and here.  Anyone producing written deliverables – reports – should look to these tips on how to write a good report.

Designers of a knowledge repository should as a minimum ensure that it provides journals, version controlled libraries, project announcements and risk, issue and change logs, that are all comment and subscription enabled.  For inspiration they should look to collaborative authoring technologies like wikki’s.

Development teams that are fortunate enough to be co-located should make sure they take advantage of their workspace, some tips on how to do this are provided here.

Review is NOT an activity that takes place on completion of deliverables,  for project team members and other stake-holders review should have been intrinsically part of the development process, most often in the following ways:

• The development should be reviewed at key milestones, that represent key progress through the project lifecycle.  Sometimes it’s sufficient to describe these in terms of progression through the conceptual, logical and physical design phases.  However my preference is to phrase the review criteria in terms of key stake-holders signing off that their requirements are being satisfied, for example the customer agreeing that the functional specification and prototype meet their requirements, or the service delivery organisation signing off on organisation changes and staffing levels and training needs etc.  In addition lead architects and engineers should be reviewing the decision making process as it progresses, understanding the range of solution options and how these have been refined and chosen.  Again Journals can have a significant role to play in this.
• Reviews should be designed into the programme plan, along with the key deliverables that are required in order for that review to proceed.

Repository designers need to ensure that deliverable status can be easily tracked, commented upon and that changes can be subscribed to.  In addition it should be easy to define sets of deliverables that make up a release, or that are required to achieve a particular milestone.  Finally the repository should make it easy to design and execute the formal review and approval workflow process.

Deliverables are ultimately published, ideally in a long life format and referenceable by a persistent URL.  New published deliverables should of course then be available to support the subscription and search elements of the lifecycle that this document began with.  Repository designers should also look for products that automatically generate PDF renditions of deliverables that are maintained and linked to their native master documents.  ideally published deliverables should be populated with meta-data that can be used by search engines to improve accuracy of results.

I will be discussing collaboration in a separate paper as whilst elements of the collaboration activity have been described in this document full consideration of a subject of this importance demands that collaboration is decomposed into the elements:

with each discussed in some detail.  In addition higher value processes like idea management and innovation management will be included as will the issue of how to support the myriad of business processes that knowledge workers find themselves having to navigate, with little or no tool support, improvement metrics and in some cases even without documentation.

As readers of my blog know I suffer from Adult Onset Stills, a rare disease that affects 1 in about 200,000 people.  Since my last major flare about 13 months ago a combination of Steroids and Immune System Suppresents have managed to get the primary inflammation under control leaving me with chronic pain and fatigue which varies from day to day.  I cope pretty well with this by working from home etc, and its all well documented in this blog.

Right now I just slowly turning the corner after a couple of bad months, but the recovery is very slow and is going in fits and starts. 

The graph shows the daily symptom levels for the last 6 months.  However progress has been made as follows:

• I have reduced my Prednisolone levels to 5mg, which is a safe level
• I have increased my Methotrexate level to 15 mg and the 2 weekly blood tests are showing that I am tolerating it well, ie its not having a toxic affect.  It has however given me migraine headaches every week that last about 48 hours.
• Luckily my GP also gave me Amitriptyline 35mg for the pain, which also has a common side effect of reducing the intensity and frequency of my migraine.  Although it’s not done much for the joint and muscle pain.
• I have reduced my dependency on sleeping tablets as well to 5mg a day of Nitrazepam,  I was struggling to get to sleep because the throbbing pain in my joints was keeping me awake,  but that is not quite so bad now.
• When I do get migraine I am now taking MigraMax which is a special formulation of Aspirin which I take as soon as a sense a migraine starting and so far it has worked like a dream.
• I saw my specialist today and he wants me to also start to take Mobic, which is an anti-inflammatory drug, which he hopes will also help with the pain.

Overall I am feeling pretty positive and after having a couple of weeks off sick and a gradual return to work (4 hours a day on average now) I am hoping to get stuck into a new job within the next week or so. Hopefully the motivation of the new job will also help me work through the pain. 

As always exercise continues to help, but its hard to motivate myself to do it when I hurt, so getting a new mobile media player for walking and swimming is a key investment to that end.

I usually end up disappointed when I buy a new gadget and must admit I was a little disappointed with the keyboard.  However in all other areas I have been very pleased.  A combination of the built in software and the fine tuning done by third parties makes it a superb phone, and the integration of “phone and media player” and “phone and address book” and “address book and calendar” are excellent.  The one handed navigation is also top notch with a combination of the application buttons, touch screen and that 5 way nav-pad allowing stylus free navigation for most functions.  Battery life seems excellent as well. 

There is so much great software its difficult to know where to start,  but the neatest (and simplest) I have found so far is Call Director.  If you are unfortunate – like me – to live in a poor mobile reception area this is a perfect utility.  As soon as you pop the Treo in its cradle at home,  it diverts your calls to your home number, in my case between the hours of 8:00 and 22:00, take it out the cradle and call divert is cancelled.  If you plug it into the charger in the car it realises there is no PC connected and doesn’t divert.  You can setup manual diverts as well for “in the office” or “divert to wife’s phone” etc which you can activate with one click.   This is particular useful for me because it lets me use my speaker phone or DECT phones for incoming mobile calls.

I am also trialling TakePhone which looks likely to stay,  its a very slick integration of the phone and contact database and I am looking for a utility to divert all but personal calls to voice mail for when I am on holiday or otherwise want to be left alone.

Now if only my company would kindly enable GPRS I could test some browsers and push email as well!

Only a few weeks ago I sold my old Pocket PC,  a fairly new Ipaq 4150 and an old Creative Zen MP3 Player.  I got about £450 for the whole lot and included quite a few bits of software and other bits like headphones and stuff I had acquired as free gifts along the way.  I wanted to de-clutter my life and was looking to free up enough money to upgrade my TC1000 Tablet to a TC1100.  Well browsing through eBay I saw a Treo 600 which I though was a great bargain,  for less than £200 I got the Treo, headphones that also work as a headset, and all sorts of other bits and pieces including a 1GB SD card. 

It arrived today and so far I am very happy, here are a few of the reasons why:

• Great phone, good media player, great Lotus Notes integration, the touch sensitive screen is easy to use with my small fingers, so I hardly need the stylus.  Replaces everything I sold in one device and adds a phone into the bargain.

I made a few upgrades:

• Using an existing licence for mNotes that I had purchased to sync with my Ipaq 4150 (the licence allows you to also sync with palm), I have very slick calendar, email and contacts synched.  At long last my Contacts in Notes are the same as the ones in my phone and hopefully always will be!  I don’t have wireless sync as my company is too stingy to GPRS enable my contract, but as I work from home and have GPRS on my Tablet for serious email its not too big an issue.
• I upgraded Pocket Tunes Standard to Deluxe, which is a really great media player.  It syncs perfectly with Windows Media Player and so I now have a pretty good music collection on my 1GB SD card.  I also copied over a whole load of technical conferences from IT conversations.  PTunes can be configured to automatically bookmark your location if you stop listening to an eBook and switch to something else.  I added a little utility called Freedom which allows you to listen to music/ebooks though the phone headset and auto pauses if you get a phone call.  I can see I am going to get through a lot of technical conferences while out walking!
• The standard phone software seems pretty good.  At long last I will probably manage to put people on hold, conference call etc,  now all the functions are so easy to see how to use.  Even better while on a call I can take notes and schedule appointments.
• I upgraded an old copy of eWallet for Palm and installed that.  I have always used eWallet to store my passwords, credit cards, licence keys, insurance details etc.  Now I always have that with me.
• The built in camera is not too impressive,  but the number of times I have wanted a quick snap shot when out an and about and not had my “real camera” with me ,  The resolution of 640*480 is perfect for blogs and I used a little utility qset to reduce the compression and hence improve the image quality and TreoShutter which makes the volume up and down buttons take a picture (easier)
• I have not tried it but I installed a movie recorder – movierec – as well,  I guess it won’t be too impressive,  but its worth a go.
• I also added a sound recorder soundrec, which is freeware and does the job.

Any disappointments:

• The phone microphone seems a little on the quiet side
• The keyboard is not a patch on my old blackberry, but I here the 650 is better.  The 650 also has a high res screen, but this one seems OK, it’s low res but small so it looks quite sharp to me!

Any other plus points:

• My wife gets my old phone to borrow, a 6310i, a great and very simple to use phone
• My eldest daughter gets my wife’s phone, a Orange SPV, a lovely smart phone locked to Orange.  Much too complicated for my wife ,  but Stephie has already got it mastered
• My Second eldest gets Stephie’s old phone.
• We have two spare phones now ready for when Stephie or my SmartPhones pack in (unfortunately all too likely) or for the twins when they are 9 (2 and a bit years).
• I have found ways around the TC1000’s performance issues, so I no longer have a desperate need to upgrade!

A week ago I blogged a little about InfoPath and the fact that Bill Gates had said that InfoPath will probably be the closest thing today to the dominant Microsoft forms technology moving forward,  so Bill why not just buy InfoView and leave InfoPath for forms design and offline usage scenarios.  What’s InfoView:

With InfoView your organisation can:

• Publish InfoPath forms to the web – providing external users who do not have InfoPath on their desktops the same rich and dynamic user experience of InfoPath forms with web forms
• Leverage XML standards to capture data via web forms and route data into back-end systems with no manual operation

Just recently I read a blog post (which I can no longer find) that cast doubt on the business case for portable computers.  The basic argument went like this:

• Portable users worked for 14% more hours
• Portable users produced 13% more work
• Therefore portable users were 1% less efficient

Assuming I remember this correctly it seems a pretty strange analysis, so here is my counter analysis.  First the case for portables and productivity:

• Portable users do more hours when they have a portable device because it allows them to work when they would otherwise be undertaking some leisure activity, depending on the portable device in questions, these times are most often, whilst waiting in airports, travelling by train, sitting in front of the TV etc.
• Portable users do more hours because its easier to “just spend an hour” working at the weekend, than it is to drive to work and do it there
• Portable users spend more time with access to time critical information sources, email, IM etc and so respond faster reducing lead-times, and improving decision making
• Portable users make better use of their time in the office, processing email, expenses and other low low importance high volume tasks tend to be done at home.  Higher value tasks requiring face to face collaboration, leadership and problem resolution tend to get done in the office
• The vast majority of portable users do not get paid for the extra hours they work
• Even if they did get paid the marginal cost of their hours, compared to the full cost of an additional employee for every three portable users, is very considerably less
• Most portable users are happy with the improved flexibility a portable device affords to balance their time in the office and their time at home

That’s not to say that portable users are always more productive, there are some cons:

• The constant intrusion of work into leisure time leaves less time for rest and probably contemplation and innovation (I am guessing about that)
• The constraints of the portable device format can reduce productivity.  For example when I am away from my home office I have a laptop or tablet and am a lot less effective than I am with my three screen desktop, cordless mouse, conference phone ….
• Working with distractions like TV, family etc can lead to mistakes or overly terse emails and the like

So in summary I think it’s only to be expected that portable device users work more hours, but that those hours are slightly less effective.  However the overall business case for portable usage is very strong.  I personally believe that in most working environments, except task working environments, provided the workspace is designed well, all users should be able to work flexibly within their work office and at home as well as whilst travelling.

I remember writing my first “paper reduction” based business case about 15 years ago, and using the “paperless office” phrase in a business case for the first time about a decade ago, it’s interesting to see how much “progress” we have made.  It seems that the average office worker in the USA now consumes over 12,000 sheets of paper per year!  In cost terms that’s probably well in excess of $500 a year. 

Last year I had the opportunity question my own usage of paper and was staggered by the extent to which I depended on it.  I also came across an interesting article that discussed why no one seems interested in solving the problem which I discussed in my blog last year. 

However I am now able to say that I live an almost paper free life, and briefly here are the things that have made it possible:

• I use a Tablet PC for all reading and reviewing
• I use a 3 screen environment at home which means I have plenty of screen real estate available to have multiple documents open at the same time
• I have a great scanner, and the even better PaperPort Pro which lets me scan every bit of paper that arrives through the front door that I want to keep, before it goes into the recycling bin
• I increasingly buy e-Books, otherwise I borrow books from the Library, so I actually don’t use any paper – the library does
• The only paper I tend to consume is the Saturday paper and a couple of magazines, which I would subscribe to e versions of if they were available and readable on my Tablet.
• Because I don’t use my Tablet as my main computer I can have it laying flat on my desk ready to be used to make notes in OneNote

So what needs to happen to get almost completely paper free:

• eVersions of magazines, getting there slowly – but maybe RSS will eliminate the need for magazines altogether provided I can get a Tablet screen thats visible in sunlight
• A Tablet PC screen thats a touch bigger than my TC1000, higher resolution and visible in sunlight.  I could buy one of these now but they need to come down a little in price first.
• eLibraries, which are coming

Not long to wait I suspect!

I have worked in this area for most of my working life and it continues to amaze me that it is still an area of IT that has the – untapped – potential to transform peoples lives.  Most of the customers I work with are struggling to deal with all the information they have to cope with in their work and home life (which are becoming more integrated).  They live high-bandwidth lifestyles!  Its with great interest therefore that I read the following results from the Information Work Productivity Council (IWPC) which is an independent group of companies and academics that have joined together to study the issue of information work productivity. The goal of the Council is to build a model that measures productivity in today’s information-centric business environment. 

They recently published the results of a survey into how the average user spends their time at work.  According to the study, the average user:

• Spends 3 hours and 14 minutes a day using technologies to process work-related information—just over 40% of an 8-hour work day
• Devotes 1.58 hours/day to e-mail (49% of the information processing time, and 20% of an 8 hour day
• Spends 47 minutes, or 24% of IP time on telephone and voice mail
• Receives 44 e-mails daily (a few people received as many as 500 a day)
• Sends 17 e-mails daily and has more than 3 e-mail accounts
• Receives 18 calls, places 15 calls, and gets 7.6 voice mail messages
• Participates in 2.75 conference calls a week (if any)

There are huge opportunities for companies to help workers be more productive personally, in teams, and in the context of the organisation in which they work, and I look forward to continuing to help them!  This blog touches on a few of the areas I am interested in including the processes and technologies associated with:

• Personal Knowledge Management
• Personal Effectiveness
• Team Effectiveness
• Collaboration
• Team Working
• Workspace Design
• Home Working
• Mobility
• Work Life Balance

These two great video (one and two) interviews with Scott Guthrie on IIS7 and ASP.NET show off Microsoft at its best, you might even go so far as saying a new Microsoft.  The IIS Team and the Indigo team seem to have learned some key lessons about standards compliance and compatibility (not always the same thing).  Of course it’s a key requirement of their market segment, and they don’t dominate it,  but its still nice to see the focus in these areas.  Two other things stand out for me in the interviews:

• The continued focus on making IIS a great platform upon which people can build additional infrastructure richness and of course great applications. This is achieved by modularising the platform and documenting the APIs of the standard modules and allowing new modules to be easily created.
• The second is that with IIS a raft of the most common open source applications are going to be provided, and integrated,  from forums to blogs, another really great move.

I just wish they had given him advanced notice of  the key question, “how do you differentiate yourself against apache” (which he didn’t really know how to answer) and asked him a follow up question of “how you differentiate against PHP and JSP” (which was probably the most important question).  That said I think this stuff is going to demo pretty impressively to developers!

I just came across an interesting article that discusses the Product Management role.  As you can see from this post it’s quite topical, so I have commented on some extracts below.

What is Product Management?

Most people accept that “product management” is a term used to describe the sum of diverse activities performed in the interest of delivering a particular product to market. Such a broad definition, used by many companies today, is the root of much grief because it dilutes the professional focus necessary to achieve successful results and allows virtually any product-related task to be assigned to the product manager.

I agree that this definition is too broad,  I believe we address it in my company by assigning project managers to do the delivery management and focusing on ensuring that the lifecycle management activities can be achieved effectively, rather than trying to do them all ourselves! 

The overall perceived obstacle that the typical product manager encounters is the pervasive lack of professional focus. One can be adequate at many things, but it is difficult to excel at many. Many product managers therefore view themselves as trapped in a never-ending juggling routine. Having too many tasks to juggle eventually leads to tasks being dropped; the outcome is poor overall performance by the product manager, which is detrimental for the company.

I think the next section makes a useful point.  Product Management in my company is focussed on the Planning element of the management role, rather than the marketing, but its important that the products are well positioned and have clear roadmaps so that Marketing know what to market.

The two main disciplines residing in the product management domain are product planning and product marketing, which are very different from each other. But due to the collaboration between these two disciplines, some companies erroneously perceive them as one discipline—which they call product management.   If done carefully, it is possible to functionally divide the product management domain into product planning and product marketing, yet retain the required synergy between the two.

This next section talks about one of the key roles of Product Management, that of defining the requirements of the market and also the potential demand.  However it misses, in our business, the fact that our products are in fact services that have a life beyond the initial sale.

Product planning is the ongoing process of identifying and articulating market requirements that define a product’s feature set. Product marketing is an outbound activity aimed at generating product awareness, differentiation and demand.

Product planning and product marketing are different and distinct professional disciplines, because they foster different roles and different quality goals.

With such a conceptualization, it is easy to address the respective tasks of product planning and product marketing as belonging to the roles of a product planner and a product marketer.

It then goes on to provide a very nice example of one of the challenges faced by the Product Manager, the fact that the buyer is rarely representative of the user.  This is particularly true when you are selling enterprise IT services.  It is doubly important because not only is the making a sale important but also long term customer satisfaction.

To clarify: an intuitive example of this is a child’s toy. The parent is the buyer and has an interest in whether the toy is safe to use, will help the child grow smarter, will keep the child occupied and is reasonably priced. Product value is therefore marketed to the buyer, the parent.

The child cares only about product functionality, such as whether the toy is fun, engaging and visually pleasing, and whether it will do what he/she wants. The toy’s functionality is designed for the user—the child—and not for the buyer.

This next section illustrates perfectly where someone like me can help,  it describes how often tactical activities divert Product Managers from the strategic elements of their roles.  As someone highly motivated and to some extent constrained to focus on longer term strategic goals this is very relevant.

The recent fast-paced growth of high-tech industries and the shifting interpretations of product management created skewed responsibility sets for product managers. The already-problematic, broad definition of product management was further complicated when tactical activities were added to a product manager’s job definition.

Tactical activities are assignments, usually self-contained and specific, that fulfill short-term business needs. Those assignments—such as delivering a presentation, writing collateral material or assisting a salesperson—are time-consuming and demand a disproportionate allocation of individual resources (mental focus, time and physical effort) in relation to their overall importance.

By monopolizing the scope of work, tactical activities detract from the product managers’ ability to fulfill the strategic responsibilities assigned to them.

So what is a Product Managers key objective, this section describes it nicely: 

The product planner determines and defines product functionality, and therefore the prime goal is to have product buyers and users who are satisfied with the product. This means (1) contentment with the product’s ability to solve business or consumer problems and satisfy needs and (2) satisfaction with the intangible aspects of product ownership, such as service, price, warrantee, status or prestige.

I also think the Product Manager is key to helping the product marketer achieve their goal:

The product marketer’s goal is to have a satisfied sales force. This goal is somewhat indirect to the marketing actions being performed, but it is an excellent predictor of how effective the product marketer’s actions are in generating awareness, differentiation and demand for the product.

Salespeople have a relatively easy job when product marketers perform their roles well. The market environment created by the product marketer leads to a favorable situation in which the market actively buys the product rather than the salespeople having to actively sell the product. Salespeople are very happy when “the product sells itself,” which really means that the sale cycle is minimal or reduced because of quality marketing by product marketers.

The next point is “music to my ears”, the need to work together as a team:

In short, product planning’s quality goal is satisfied customers, and product marketing’s quality goal is a satisfied sales force. After defining the strategic roles of the key disciplines within the product management domain, there is a need for a cooperative scheme—a team concept—to maximize the effectiveness of these strategic roles through collaboration and complement them with outbound tactical support functions.

Product management is not accomplished successfully by only one person but by a product management team, the members of which fulfill various roles and functions.

Team design is not easy though, in the team model described below, my proposed role is closest to Product Planner role, which of course may be delivered by a team not an individual.

The product management team is a task group that organizationally resides in the Product Management department and has four distinct roles: product planner, product marketer, sales engineer and marketing communications (marcom) manager.

These four roles are the basic providers of the planning, deliverables and actions that guide the inbound-oriented product definition and the outbound marketing efforts:

And that Product Planner role is nicely described here:

The primary responsibility of the product planner is to constantly research the market and identify market needs, which are later translated into market requirements that will foster new products or new features to existing products. The product planner prepares the documents that profoundly impact the product’s success. These documents include the Market Requirements Document (MRD), product use cases, product road map and the pricing model.

I extend that role in my conceptual role though because the product/service needs to continue to meet the needs of its customers, so understanding the evolving business need, the service delivery performance and the level of customer satisfaction is key as well. Also key is working with our researchers to understand what disruptive business, social, political or technological changes may be coming along that need a more radical review of the products/services.

The next sections describe the product marketer role:

The primary responsibility of the product marketer is to analyze product-oriented business opportunities, formulate plans that evaluate those business opportunities, and plan and guide the subsequent marketing efforts. For example, the product marketer prepares the product business case and following approval, writes the marketing plan, launch plan and communications plan.

Then comes the sales engineer role, this role is interesting because I believe that I can help create many of the assets that sales engineers in the field will need to do their job, and also provide advice, so maybe “making Sales Engineers happy” could be part of my role, while the product marketer is making the salesman happy:

The sales engineer is primarily responsible for outbound product-centric activities, such as presale support and product demonstrations. Relying on their technical skills, sales engineers help customers understand how the product delivers the necessary value and functionality that address the customers’ business or consumer problem. The sales engineer’s other objective is to provide critical input to product planners on customer needs and problems.

Sales engineers often operate under titles such as product evangelist, technical evangelist, technical sales support, presale engineer, outbound product manager or technical product manager; yet, regardless of title, all perform a relatively similar set of tasks.

The final role is marketing communications, which is a similar to our Services Offerings team:

The marcom manager is primarily responsible for creating interest and demand for products through the conception and copywriting of all collateral material, advertising, direct response mail, Web and other types of communications media. This person is also tasked with maintaining a consistent company image and positioning in the marketplace, according to messages and directives provided by the product marketer.
The product management team is managed by the director of product management, or vice president of product management, who provides overall product vision, product line strategy and team management. Other titles are sometimes used to designate this leadership position, such as director of products or vice-president of products, in order to indicate the encompassing nature of this role.

This person provides guidance to team members and is responsible for furnishing them with resources, tools and uniform processes to do their jobs. On the strategic level, this role is responsible for formulating the company’s product line strategy and driving its implementation, while balancing corporate goals with long-term market trends and opportunities.

This point is quite interesting given my previous point, the article suggests that often the planner and engineer roles are combined, which I just suggested above, however as our company is big there is a one to many relationship with the Product Management function focussed on one time activities, that are then repeated many times in the field:

Frequently, the product planner and sales engineer roles are combined into one position, in which the person is charged with doing product demonstrations and providing presale support because he/she is also defining the product and thus has more expertise and in-depth product knowledge than the average salesperson.

It then suggests that these roles often suit technical people with an MBA.  It just so happens that I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA in Engineering Business Management .  I also spent many years as a customer of the company that I am now working for, so I have seen both sides of the business.

Corporate job descriptions for open positions that prefer candidates with a technical undergraduate degree and an MBA with an emphasis in marketing are a clear indication that the company views the position as a combination of the two roles.

I liked the summary: 

Product management is a domain, not a role, and it changes and evolves with the organization. It is a multifaceted and multi-disciplined domain; therefore, there will always be some ambiguity involved, but it can be significantly mitigated by applying a proper product management team concept and structure, with well-defined roles and responsibilities. Doing so is crucial—whether the company is building or rebuilding the corporate product management function.

As a result of the team restructuring and the redefinition of roles, the newly attained occupational focus helps build professional expertise.

I particularly liked this section:

The product planner can now devote time and effort to excel as a market expert and problem-teller whose role is to perform customer advocacy better than everyone else in the company, while backing assertions with quantitative market/customer data.

The product marketer is now focused on becoming a process expert, perfecting corporate competency in using tools and executing techniques, processes and tasks; that promotes winning products in the marketplace.

All this decreases departmental rivalry and allows the engineers to develop their professional expertise as technology experts and problem solvers.