Adventures in home working

I have been increasingly concerned over how we bring companies and their employees closer together in terms of the relative priorities that each places on their IT needs, for background check out this post and this one.

My fist steps towards solving this was to encourage companies to think in terms of solving end to end personal processes and not just business processes, because it seems to me that actually a lot more time is locked up in personal processes than business processes,  I gave a personal example in this post.

My thoughts have continued to evolve and now I think can be expressed very simply, companies think too much about process and no where near enough about people, this may seem overly simplistic, however read on and see if it makes more sense to you.

In my last post on this subject I showed how companies can approach problem solving in a way that neglects the needs of their employees and as a result significantly reduces their chances of success.  I now think by considering a needs hierarchy companies can increase that chance.  Here are some ideas to get started with:

In a previous post I described the fact that for many people you can describe their IT needs in terms of 4 layers,  this is important because it means that if you try to provide a new IT system that meets a need in layer 4, when the persons needs in layers 1 – 3 are not already met then you will struggle to motivate people to use it, because their focus will continue to be on meeting their needs in layers 1–3.

If this is true then this model has important implications for how you meet needs in the lower layers.  Let me explain;  you really need to meet needs in layer 1 in a way that makes it easy to then meet needs in layer 2 and you need to meet needs in layer 2 in a way that makes it easy to meet needs in layer 3.  You may think this is so obvious that its not worth mentioning, however, obvious though it may be – over the last 10 years we have consistently failed to do this in the enterprise deskop services management. 

To illustrate lets consider some examples:

About 10 years ago the industry invented the idea of a standard desktop environment for all,  with a locked down standard image delivered to a small range of PC’s with a small range of approved peripherals.  Software was delivered to these devices from a central repository using remote software distribution technologies.  This was a good solution to the tier 1 need, ie:

Initialy a person is motivated to get access to a computer and software that is reliable and has good connectivity.  Until they achieve this they achieve this they are unlikely to worry too much about anything else

What we didn’t consider was the fact that as soon as we met this Access need all of our users would rapidly move on to want to meet their tier 2 need:

Once they get access to a reliable computer they will seek to maximise their personal productivity, which will often express itself as a desire to control their IT environment, customising it, installing additional software, and generally making investment decisions that match their personal priorities.

Oh dear, we solved their tier 1 needs in a way that minimised the control they had over their environment, therefore forcing people with very diverse business requirements and personality types to all use the same standardised environment.  In some businesses even the monitor size and resolution was standardised.  In addition whilst we had good software delivery tools the cost and lead-time to get a new software product evaluated, tested, packaged, purchased and deployed was so long and painful that many people gave up before they even started.  What happened, a whole load of frustrated employees who either left the company, started to use their home PC’s, started buying PDA’s, or bringing their laptops into work etc.

So what did we do next, we decided we had solved the needs of individuals and needed to move onto solving the needs of teams, where I contend our users were actually focussed on Personal Voice! 

their priority will start to turn to control over their personal voice, ie how their contribution is seen by their managers and peers and other stakeholders.

How did this happen,  well – we failed to listen to the users and listened to our customers, and many of these customers were strongly motivated to focus on managing the costs that they controlled and in many businesses that didn’t include the lost opportunity costs associated with delivering end-user productivity.  So not only did we fail to fully deliver personal productivity, but we skipped completely the need for Personal Voice and went straight to addressing team/knowledge management needs.

Then we hit a problem,  the team/KM systems didn’t get used very effectively because the people who were meant to be using them were focussed on trying to sort out their personal productivity and were concerned that if they put all of their effort into making other people a success their personal voice/contribution would not be heard.  Had we done things in the right order it should have gone like this:

Once people feel they have control over their personal voice, their priorities will switch to the success of others, or to the teams of which they are members.

In my next post I will provide a rough sketch of how to address each of these layers in a way that considers the needs of the other layers.

In preparation for the imminent arrival of my I-mate sp5 I have been sorting out my software.  One of my key tools is E-Wallet which I have used for years to store all manner of information from health insurance details to software licence keys.  As a result I have licences for my PC and also for Palm and Pocket PC, but not for SmartPhone, so I emailed Lee at Ilium and asked him for information on how to upgrade.  24 hours later and I had an email telling me that as a long-term customer they would send me a license free of charge!! 

It’s great when a company can keep close enough to it’s customers to still respond to them as people and not just apply a set of automatic and inflexible rules.

A few weeks ago Jenny won one of the main prizes at the Swimtastic awards which are run by the ASA.  She had a wonderful time meeting the Olympic swimming team and got to swim with them which amazed her (they are a lot faster than me!) and got lots of attention.  Jenny has a wonderful smile as you can see in this picture with one of the team.

Her award reflected her achievements in swimming despite the struggle she has with Systemic Sclerosis which causes her skin to get harder and tighter with age and also causes scarring of her internal organs.  One of the side effects results in very poor blood supply to her fingers which makes them very cold and makes them very susceptible to infections,  this means she has to keep moving in the water to keep the blood flowing which is a distinct advantage.

For the last few months I have been considering individual motivations which is pretty tricky as people are motivated by many different things, however I have made an attempt to develop a simple model that does seem to reflect the IT related motivations I see in many people.

The diagram on the right provides a summary of the model, which goes as follows:

Initialy a person is motivated to get access to a computer and software that is reliable and has good connectivity.  Until they achieve this they achieve this they are unlikely to worry too much about anything else.

Once they get access to a reliable computer they will seek to maximise their personal productivity, which will often express itself as a desire to control their IT environment, customising it, installing additional software, and generally making investment decisions that match their personal priorities.  For example Joe’s priority might be a high end laptop with Office Professional and Firefox whilst Emma might want a desktop with 2 large TFT screens and be happy with Star Office provided she can have Adobe Photoshop.  Even though Joe and Emma have very different desires they may in fact do the same job, but being different personalities with different skills and work styles the environments that for them deliver maximum productivity are very different.

Once Joe and Emma have control over their environments their priority will start to turn to control over their personal voice, ie how their contribution is seen by their managers and peers and other stakeholders.  Personal voice has been pretty difficult to achieve and I believe that lack of achievement of this need has stalled many IT projects that relied on people working together effectively as teams.  Enterprise Blogs and related technologies seem to me to be a great way for people to express their personal voice and I think their popularity on the Internet reflects a lot of frustration within the enterprise.

Once people feel they have control over their personal voice, their priorities will switch to the success of others, or to the teams of which they are members.

Of course these steps will not be true for everybody nor are the steps binary, ie they actually just reflect the fact that people will be dissatisfied if they are asked to focus on higher layers before their needs at the lower layers are pretty well served.

By now of course most people will probably have figured out that what I am describing is closely related to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but I am not a psychologist so I am not really qualified to do any analysis at this level.  I just wanted to share my simple observations.

I just came across a great essay by Ross Mayfield on the Power Law of Participation. Ross provides an excellent way to visualise the different thresholds for participation and this is really important because it talks to the fact that people don’t have the time and energy to do everything, so slight increases in difficulty translate into thresholds for participation that are not reached. The following graph shows the idea off better than words.

Much as I like the idea my order would probably be slightly different to Ross, as follows:

• Read
• Tag
• Comment
• Subscribe
• Favourite
• ….

Anyway you get the idea and it’s one that anyone planning to deploy a new process or system must bear in mind.  In my company we call this focusing on the end user experience, and this is in my view key to success.  All to often people focus on the process and how important it is,  however to many people their part in the process is not that important to them, and it it gets in the way of what they are trying to achieve then their contribution to the process might not reach the critical threshold for participation and the process will fail.

Let’s take an example: a project manager sets up a collaborative workspace and relies on each team member to:

• check the workspace discussion areas, issue, risk and change logs every week
• post replies to discussion items that they can contribute to and track these daily
• create new risks and issues as they arise
• update existing risks and issues they own as their status changes
• post updates to documents as they reach key milestones

well I can be pretty sure that most if not all of these activities will not get done by at least some team members some of the time (if you are really lucky!).  Technologies like RSS help, because it’s much easier to scan a set of RSS subscriptions, especially with the better tools, than it is to visit a whole load of web pages.  However that’s unlikely to help with posting updates to documents.  Tools like SharePoint with Office do make publishing a much more integrated experience,  but I still don’t think they support the “publish snapshot” – checkout – carry on working off-line scenario that may of us have.

Key message: Think about people at least as much as process!

I really like FeedDemon, but I have noticed a few niggles that are worth feeding back, so here goes:

1. I need nested folders, I know there is some debate about this but here is my logic. I have sets of folders with different characteristics. For example I might have:

1. A set of folders that I want to retain the contents of, e.g. subscriptions to SharePoint document libraries

2. lists that are maintained for reference using RSS Simple List Extensions, e.g. What’s on at the cinema this week, the weather forecast for the next 5 days

3. A set of folders that have content in them that I must read, for example changes to important web sites that don’t often change, SharePoint notifications that I need to review, subscriptions to bug reports that I have filed, or to parcel tracking feeds etc

2. Each folder tree should have the following features:

1. The ability to see a river of news for all of the contents of all of the folders

2. A bubbled up unread count

3. Customizable retention policies

3. I would like the ability to move the toolbar to the right of the menu, such a lot of wasted space

4. More icons please, i.e. a customise icons dialog

5. I need a “mark all read” icon that acts on the folder tree I currently have selected, I know there is a right click option, but there is plenty of room for additional buttons on the toolbar if you did the above

6. The ability to provide credentials in the feeds property dialog, and the ability to edit these properties before FeedDemon tries to connect to the feed to validate it

7. Add a feed properties icon to the main reader window, in my case I don’t have feeds displayed, only unread folders, so it’s a pain having to expand folder and right click on the folder

8. Allow me to specify where to download each “podcast” feed to, default to a single location. For example I like to download videos to a different location to mp3s. As we use RSS enclosures for ever increasing variety of content types we will not always want to assume that the only destination is our mp3 player

9. On my 3 screen display a click on the taskbar doesn’t restore the window, I need to do a “right click” “restore”

This is my second day using Windows Vista beta 2 and now Office 2007 on my trusty TC1100 and its going really well so far. The whole environment seems slicker on the Tablet now, especially the improvements in selecting files and multiple files and the new docked TIP seems to have much better hand writing recognition. I am enjoying OneNote 2007 especially the ability to take notebooks offline (leaving the master on my desktop). I am eagerly awaiting my iMate sp5 which is due in a couple of weeks and work well with OneNote mobile.

Having played around with a few of the built in applications, including photo gallery and media player I am pretty happy with the performance having copied over about 10GB of music and photos.

I have had one graphics driver failure which required a hard reset and had one driver install issue which was very easy to rollback.

The main issue I have is with the task bar and quick launch icons which don’t repaint properly until the mouse passes over them, but this is easy to deal with so long as it gets sorted out by RTM.

(This post created and submitted using Word 2007)

This is my first post to my blogharbor account using Word 2007 which has blogging support . In theory this will support the blogger api which I will be trying and will also support images, which should mean that I can tap into the Office 2007 clip art.

Over the past couple of years I have thought a lot about work life balance and think I have made real progress.  One of the small tips I have found useful is to subscribe to a number of more positive Ezine Articles on various self improvement topics.  I find it really helps each morning as I plow through my business RSS feeds to read a few articles on happiness or meditation for example.  This is a typical article on happiness just to get you started.