Adventures in home working

Although I work from home and tend to be always connected to the Internet, I still find that I really like to use products that allow me to work off-line.  Not only is the performance often better, but it’s more reliable and I still spend a couple of hours a day disconnected.  lack of off-line support has been one of the biggest issues with SharePoint 2003 and although I have used Groove as an off-line client I have never been that satisfied with it.  Enter Office 2007, which includes off-line support for SharePoint 2007 primarily via Outlook 2007, but also for specific purposes via Groove 2007, Excel 2007 and Access 2007.  Take a look at the demos and you will come away pretty impressed, however that’s the purpose of demos!  Take a look at the Offline SharePoint blog and you will get a very different impression. 

There are many small areas where the off-line experience is just not what you would expect,  sometimes only a read-only copy is created, sometimes not all list types are supported, links don’t work – the list of limitations goes on.  Admittedly Colligo – the authors of the blog – make their own tool for offline use of SharePoint but they make no secret of that fact.  Anyway if you think all your off-line issues are met then think again, check out the Colligo blog and the Colligo alternative (Reader and Contributor)and if you want the best Off-line experience it’s probably still Lotus Notes.

It’s interesting though that neither Microsoft nor Colligo make it easy to get a comprehensive and detailed view of what works off-line and what doesn’t and in which products.  some sort of mega table is required, if anyone knows where to find that information please post a comment.

I am a real fan of Windows PowerShell, not least because of the quality of the team who have worked on it and I have blogged about it a few times before.  I was disappointed that it’s not pervasive in Vista although I know all about the need to make cuts to ship.  However it’s been really encouraging to see the great implementation for Exchange 2007 and now – encouragingly - the fact that it will be fully integrated with System Center Virtual Machine Manager this blog post provides the details.

Microsoft’s Knowledge network looks interesting, it uses a client side component to gather information from your PC including email authors and recipients, Outlook contacts, IM contacts, manager (as defined in Active Directory), managers direct reports and your direct reports and SharePoint 2007 colleagues and it also analyses email subject and body text for keywords that reflect your areas of expertise. 

Once assembled you get the chance to decide whether the resulting Keywords, Colleagues, or External Contacts are visible to – Only Me, My Manager, My Workgroup, My Colleagues, and Everyone.  The information is then published into your SharePoint 2007 “My Site”.  Integrating this information into the My Site is a great idea, because it already contains a lot of rich information about you, including – if you choose to keep one – a personal blog as well as AD info about your title, department, manager, group memberships, interests, skills, your picture and your colleagues.

Knowledge Network uses this information to extend the people search capability of SharePoint 2007.  You can find out more information about Knowledge Network from the excellent blog and web site.

If you want a good overview of social networking in general then I recommend this overview from Dave Pollard.

I would love to grow more of my own food, but I need a larger greenhouse and a lot more time.  Still for now at least I can content myself with a bowl of strawberries every night throughout the summer!

I don’t like having the room light on while working at my PC, so this idea on Lifehacker gave me the kick I needed to come up with a cheap way to backlight my monitors and it works really well.

Behind my displays I have a 30W 1 Meter fluorescent light fitting which kicks out the equivalent of 3*60W bulbs,  I added a small inline toggle switch for easy access. 

The effect is excellent, I get a nice background of reflected light that means I can clearly see everything on my desk, but I also get this great glow behind the monitors which is really easy on the eye.  Overall I am very pleased with the effect, and as a twist I assembled it all during a conference call briefing this afternoon – one of the best conference calls yet!

I have just discovered the chief happiness officer blog, which focused on happiness at work and I think it’s great.  Just this morning I was talking to Graham on the phone while out walking (I had nothing better to do, Graham was late for a meeting!) and I was saying how I dislike it when a company says it is in business to make a profit.  I much prefer to think of a company seeing its role as:

Providing fulfilling employment to it’s employees and providing great services to it’s customers whilst making a profit.

Framed like this the company can rethink it’s objectives and derive shareholder value as a side effect of having happy employees and satisfied customers, which I think (maybe unrealistically) is a much healthier way to run a company.

Anyway back to the blog,  the author is in the process of writing a book and is blogging ideas along the way, which seems a great process and one that’s increasingly popular.  As a taster here are some of the recent posts, followed by my comments:

Dealing with uncertainty at work, very important and useful advise in today’s climate.  As a team leader I have been in this situation several times and this is good advise.

Ask a co-worker for advice, a few years I did some research into who people like to ask for advise and way out in front was co-workers.  This was in an IT environment and it’s interesting that help desks were way down on the list.  We formalized this by creating a well supported super user role and it worked very well.

Why job descriptions are useless, very perceptive – when was the last time you looked at yours, the post doesn’t just trash job descriptions through, it describes some good alternatives.

Secret salaries vs. open, most people seem to prefer secret salaries, I worked in a department once with voluntary open salaries – almost everyone decided to declare them and we found it worked very well.

For more on my own thoughts on happiness check out this list of posts

The Creating passionate users blog has a great post on the need to challenge assumptions, so many times I come across assumptions that everyone knows are invalid, but are used because people assume they isolate a project from risk.  Of course all they really do is defer the risk.  Personally I think many assumptions should really be restarted as either issues or risks, that way they are constantly being reviewed by the project team.

I do a lot of Microsoft watching, and its pretty difficult to get a good overall impression of what’s going on in the company.  I have just discovered that all of the briefing sessions from the Microsoft Financial Analysis meeting are now available as online webcasts, even better they also make available all of the transcripts and presentations!

These resources provide an excellent checkpoint on pretty much every significant activity that Microsoft is engaged in.  The information is pretty high quality, it’s obviously got a sales feel to it, but the audience is financial analysts so Microsoft are fairly frank about their challenges and the presentations provide a lot of financial insights into both Microsoft and the industry in general.

Hint: It’s a good idea to double click the video in the webcast viewer,  at the highest resolution it looks pretty good in full screen and you can just about follow the demonstrations.  You might find it useful to download the slides though, as in the full screen view they are difficult to read.

The sessions are not very easy to navigate to though, so as I was watching them I created this list of shortcuts to the key information:

Colleen Healy, General Manager, Investor Relations, starts the day with a 10 minute introduction, a full transcript is provided along with a webcast and PowerPoint presentation,  unless you want an overview of the day you can skip this session. 

Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer , gives a good 25 minute overview, a full transcript is provided along with a longer webcast with demonstrations of Vista and Office 2007 and PowerPoint presentation this session provides a good overview of Microsoft’s strategy

Kevin Johnson, Co-President, Platforms & Services Division and Bob Muglia Senior Vice President, Server & Tools Business spend about an hour giving a fairly detailed analysis of infrastructure side of the business, there is a good discussion of how this division supports the other divisions and a good analysis by Bob Muglia of the workloads that Windows is strong in and what they are doing to improve share of workloads they are weak in (HPC, Edge and Internet facing Web), with additional contributions by Yusuf Mehdi chief advertising strategist, a full transcript is provided along with a long webcast and PowerPoint presentation this session is definitely worth watching, it’s full of facts and figures and useful insights.

Jeff Raikes, President, Business Division describes the growth opportunity of the information worker business, and expands that to discuss the Microsoft Business Division more broadly to provide a sense of they are looking at this business, a transcript is provided along with a webcast of about 40 mins and a PowerPoint presentation, I haven’t watched this yet.

Robbie Bach, President, Entertainment & Devices Division introduces his much expanded division which has grown from the Home and Entertainment Division to become the Entertainment and Devices Division, and in the process added mobile and embedded devices; Media Center; responsibility for music, TV, and video; and responsibility for games for Windows, a full transcript is provided along with a 40 minute webcast and PowerPoint presentation

Ray Ozzie,Chief Software Architect, spends about 30 minutes giving an overview of the move to services and how this will impact the relationship between Windows and Windows Live, this is an excellent presentation, it shows that Microsoft have a value proposition that’s pretty unique and gives a good overview of how Microsoft plan to capitalize on this uniqueness, a full transcript is provided along with a webcast and PowerPoint presentation

Ray, Kevin, Jeff and Robbie then field questions so their is no PowerPoint for this session, but the usual transcript and webcast are available

Kevin Turner, Chief Operating Officer, kicks off the afternoon session with a 30 minute presentation, a full transcript is provided along with a webcast and PowerPoint presentation

Craig Mundie Chief Research & Strategy Officer, then gets a 45 minute slot, a full transcript is provided along with a short webcast and PowerPoint presentation

Chris Liddell Chief Financial Officer gives a 30 minute presentation, a full transcript is provided along with a short webcast and PowerPoint presentation

Steve Ballmer, gives a 45 minute summary, a full transcript is provided along with a short webcast and PowerPoint presentation

Steve, Kevin, Chris and Graig then field questions so their is no PowerPoint for this session, but the usual transcript and webcast are available

Collaboration is a key competency for today’s enterprises and yet despite the fact that the Internet is awash with a myriad of different collaboration solutions many teams still struggle to be effective and most projects continue to fail by at least one metric.  

 Many people assume that collaboration comes naturally – provide people with a tool and off they go, unfortunately it’s rarely that easy. Despite the fact that hundreds of books have been written about how to help teams collaborate and how to successfully manage projects, many team leaders lack a simple framework to help them assess the scale and nature of the collaboration challenges that their teams face. Once the challenge is understood teams need practical guidance on where to focus appropriate process and technology improvements.

One approach is to look inwards at the team and the complexity of the task to assess the level of challenge according to four categories (see fig 1).  The first and probably the most important, is the degree of – common ground – shared by team members, teams with a lot of common ground collaborate more naturally together and common ground becomes increasingly important as complexity increases. 

Where you set the dials for complexity and common ground will dictate the relative importance of technology and process readiness. Understanding nature of complexity and the areas where common ground is lacking (the focus of this article) will help you to home-in on the types of technology and process tools that you need to make your team a success (a future article).

The application of this approach is best illustrated by an example; in this case a typical corporate strategy team which is undertaking a regular yearly review cycle. Their review is not particularly urgent, but is complex (see fig 2) because of the interdependence of different tasks, the need to innovate to stay competitive, the number of decisions still to be taken and the need for different stakeholders to negotiate.

The team lacks common ground (see fig 3) in quite a few areas but the fact that they don’t all know each other, will be working virtually across multiple time zones and will need to work both on and offline will be a particular challenge to them given the complexity of their objective.

Initially the team should focus on building the relationship and trust between team members, probably push for a kick off using a professional video conferencing session and concentrate on well facilitated audio conferences while the team members get to know each other. Common access to information will be very important, so the team need to ensure they use an information sharing/discussion system that is available to everyone, is asynchronous and works well off-line, these characteristics are essential and can be achieved even with disciplined use of email and conference calls.

If the team wants to push the boundaries they should consider a web hosted team room with off-line support and also routinely recording their meetings; this will make it easier to create focus, manage information, engage new team members and involve specialist contributors.

Longer term the team members should consider Instant Messaging and Blogs, as these will allow members of the team to get to know each other much better, help them understand each other’s challenges and perspectives and extend the strategy review process throughout the year. 

A refinement to this simple framework is to consider how the needs of the team will evolve over a projects lifecycle, teams need different processes and tools during the storming and forming phase than during the performing stage for example.

National Semiconductor recently decided to give all of their employees an iPod, according to their press release:

Our employees were vital contributors to our most successful year in National’s 47-year history, and we wanted to equip them with the tools to help us create more value for our customers

This is pretty original,  I’ve heard of companies giving their employees similar gifts for great performance, but never the whole workforce.  It seemed to me a pretty bold move, especially when you consider how they plan to use the iPods, once all their employees have them:

We’re looking for new and more effective ways to communicate with our employees — and the iPods will help us do both,” said Brian L. Halla, National’s chairman and CEO.

I got more insights from a Podcast by Podtech:

National Semiconductor announced Monday it’s just given every one of its 8,500 employees a 30GB video iPod. But employees won’t just be catching up on soaps or rocking out at work. Jeff Weir, the company’s director of Worldwide PR, said the company will be podcasting corporate messages, product information and the like – right into its employees’ earbuds.

I really liked this idea,  I think the iPod could a great corporate communications channel and this certainly seems to the the vision of the company as I listened to the podcast, however I was a little disappointed the more I heard:

1. There was a lot of focus on the delivery of broadcast quality training and corporate communications, produced professionally from a studio,  this ruled out a lot of potential content
2. The idea of letting individuals within the business podcast was not being considered
3. The idea of routinely recording audio and web conferences and making them available had not been considered
4. The idea of ad-hoc communication via podcasts, for example letting managers podcast weekly status reports etc was not on the agenda
5. Microsoft channel 9 type video blogging that would increase cross company awareness had not been considered

Overall it seemed an opportunity missed and many of these additional use cases could have been achieved just by providing managers with an iPod and an external microphone.  Even so it seemed that National Semiconductor would have generated a lot of goodwill with it’s employees and that’s worth a lot right, wrong:

1. Even though National spun the iPods as a reward to the employees, those leaving the company were asked for them back, which generated a lot of negative press
2. It seems that a lot of employees didn’t seem to understand the importance of the iPod as a necessary part of the new way of doing business at National and decided to give their iPods away or sell them on eBay,  as soon as you can no longer assume everyone has an iPod it’s value is reduced.

Would I have done the same?  Not on reflection, instead I would have given every employee a Windows Mobile 5 Phone (assuming they were a Microsoft Exchange user), and a 2GB SD card and a USB cable for work and home.  I would have also made it clear that it was a company tool, that they had to use until they left the company at which point they could keep it.  That way I would have:

1. provided everyone with a platform for mobile email, calendar and applications
2. reduced my phone handset costs
3. still provided a great platform for podcasts
4. not had the problems with people leaving, because they could take it with them

Although I guess I would have created myself another problem – who picked up the bill for the mobile data usage!