Adventures in home working

I might be stretching a point a little (well actually quite a lot) with the title,  but just like Software as a Service gets rid of all the redundant effort that goes on in every enterprise delivering software,  so Architecture as a Service is doing the same thing.  A few examples of AaaS arrived in the RSS reader today:

1. Microsoft started a BETA process to design a set of documentation for the delivery of SoftGrid solutions and Server Virtualization,  hopefully by using the feedback processes associated with software beta’s they will be able to hone their documentation set collaboratively to the point where the amount of duplicate work within every enterprise is greatly minimized.  You can sign up for the beta at http://connect.microsoft.com/ using code IPDM-QX6H-7TTV
2. VMware have gone one better and setup a wiki to serve the same purpose, maybe more as it addresses the whole lifecycle from plan through to manage allowing the community to share everything right down to scripts, reports and tools, excellent!  You can find it here http://wwwa.vmware.com/www/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Its also worth remembering that Microsoft have this cool technology in the works that allows you to model your infrastructure in Visual Studio and then provision it onto your utility computing infrastructure,  I wrote about it here.  And there are managed hosting alternatives that actually allow you to provision a whole virtual infrastructure on demand from a GUI development environment.

Now I know that architecture is really about developing a solution to meet business requirements,  which are often unique, but at least these initiatives and others are slowly chipping away at all that redundant work that goes on that doesn’t have to be unique, but is - just because there was no mechanism to share best practices across customers.

(updated with a link to Michael’s post that works!)

Michael argues that we hide behind the need for culture change on many collaboration projects, his key point is illustrated by this example:

if a team can run a project in email then they can run one in a collaboration tool. They don’t need a change in “culture” to make the transition, they need a change in “work practice”.

Whilst it’s difficult to disagree with the point that to switch from using email to using a collaborative workspace space requires a change in working practice, I don’t agree that it doesn’t sometimes also require a change in culture.  To cite a few examples of my own: 

1. creating a shared knowledge base requires people to share expertise that they might traditionally have thought of as essential to their long term employment and to reduce the visibility of their individual contribution to maximize that of the team.  Changing this attitude requires some culture change away from individual performance and “knowledge is power” and more towards “team results matter”.
2. creating a blog that narrates your work requires significant investment of time and energy and opens up immature ideas to public scrutiny.  This requires a culture change away from “immediate results” towards “investment in the future”, “spin off innovation” and “improved quality through greater participation”.  It requires managers to encourage people to be open and take risks without fearing that this will reflect badly on them.

In my personal experience I have seen a lot of culture related issues that have stalled changes in working practice designed to improve collaboration, for example:

1. People not being comfortable with letting other team members get access to their work in progress files,  preferring instead to only provide access to published/polished information
2. People not being comfortable with producing weekly highlight reports because it exposes the peaks and troughs in the output as if it were peaks and troughs in their input,  ie some weeks they might not have any highlights at all, maybe only low lights but have been working very hard
3. People being very concerned about publishing their ideas and thought processes in discussion areas because they believe that sharing incomplete work potentially damages their reputation and that the reviewers might take control of the conversation
4. People not investing the time and energy required to submit assets to a corporate knowledge base, because the people who benefited were too far removed from the contributor and therefore there was no benefit to her

I think all of these concerns were pretty valid ones,  working through them requires the working practice change to be supported by a culture that recognize and rewards the change in working practice.  Often the cultural change that’s required isn’t immediately obvious and that in itself is a cultural issue.  A willingness to take a risk - knowing that your peers and managers are will be there to support you and not stab you in the back. 

Right now as we move to a new world of work with less job security, and a lot more external competition from free agents and BPO providers it’s not difficult for me to see why some people look for evidence of culture change BEFORE they are comfortable with working practice change.

I blogged a little about the steps I see a person going through on their journey to collaborative behavior here and the factors affecting success here.

For most of my working life I have really enjoyed my work and put in a lot of hours,  but my recent illness has resulted in me working probably an average of 6 hours a day over the last 3 years and it’s resulted in a significant shift in my thinking.  The first thing I noticed was that many people I worked with didn’t realize that I was working reduced hours, the second thing was that whilst the total output of work did reduce quite a bit, the volume of really high value work probably increased. 

Although I produced fewer slides and pages of reports that no one read, I did a lot more coaching, development, networking, facilitating and idea generation and with a higher adoption rate. 

This observation got me thinking about when I was most productive in my 20 years at work and it struck me that there was one period that really stood out - and it was when I was working a true flextime system.  Under this scheme my employer allowed me flexible start and finish times and allowed me to trade any hours I worked beyond 37 hours a week back to holidays.  I had a lot of holidays during those 3 years, and I don’t think I ever booked an hours over-time, but it was without doubt the most fun and most successful time in my life. 

I recently re-read a book that inspired a lot of this thinking called Slack by the famous Tom Demarco of PeopleWare fame.  The subtitle of the book says it all “Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency” and it’s message is much needed in today’s business environment, I liked it enough second time around to buy a copy for my current boss. 

I was also encouraged to see that there are some signs that the issues of over work without associated over-achievement are being increasingly recognized by leading businesses.   This snippet from a longer article cites the work of Dr Ellen Ernst Kossek of Michigan State University’s School of Labor and Industrial Relations - gives you an idea:

Kossek says the study showed that reduced-load work arrangements can reap several key benefits for employers, including greater productivity, less turnover and cost savings.

“Some of these benefits are counter-intuitive but nevertheless they are real,” Kossek insisted.

Employees working fewer hours were less stressed and felt they performed their job better

But the most compelling reason for advocating reduced workloads for professional employees is that they are a good way to retain top performers, something that every organisation wants to do.

Employees working fewer hours were less stressed, able to manage family commitments and felt they performed their job better. They also exhibited a greater loyalty to the organisation.

And there can be other hidden benefits, Kossek agues. For example, she said, an attorney on reduced workload used the time to think about his job. He came up with an idea that resulted in huge savings for the firm, something that might not have happened if he had been working full-time.

Hopefully you won’t learn this lesson through illness forcing you to slow down like I did,  but instead I encourage you to pick up a copy of Slack and have a good read one weekend and perhaps come back to work the following week determined to change life for your self and your teams.   

If the idea of slowing down really appeals then I can also recommend In Praise of Slow, although I must admit I did skim read it towards the end so I’m not totally cured.

I’m not a Office communicator user and have often wondered why Microsoft bothered with multiple products in this space.  That was until I read this post,  which described the main reasons that Office communicator is better than WLM.  The level of differentiation really surprised me and it’s had quite an impact on my thinking since about the difference between web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0.  Here’s the highlights, with a couple of extra benefits I have added in bold.

Communicator 2007 with OCS is better than using WLM because:

Its integrated with the AD, Exchange and SharePoint

• Looks up all the numbers for you, mobile, landline, home etc from contacts or the GAL
• Uses your calendar to auto set your presence state
• Takes you to their mysite on right click
• Presence globes throughout MS Office system, including SharePoint, AD, Outlook, Word, other apps etc.

Security

• Anyone can sign up for your Windows Live ID and thus pretend to be you (all it says is ‘email address not verified’
• In WLM you can change your name to someone else. All too easy to change your name and impersonate someone else.
• When you leave an organisation, your communicator buddy list stays with the company. With WLM you take that list with you
• Communicator is possible to log conversation centrally, not possible with WLM
• Because it encrypts the traffic so people can’t intercept your messages as they travel outside the firewall

Higher fidelity presence

• You can see at a glance if they are OOF before you email them or IM them
• With Communicator you have advanced presence such as ‘in call’ and ‘in a meeting’ which are set automatically
• You can tag a contact if you are looking for them
• With Communicator you can also see the presence of those that are NOT on buddy list.  This is a big one - its people you don’t know that well that you need the most presence assistance with.  I’d have to put the whole company on my buddy list to use WLM for this.

Phone integration

• Communicator integrates with your phone
• Can divert calls to the device you choose even mid call
• Communicator lets you answer the phone on your pc if you like because the two are integrated
• You can have your phone do simultaneous ring like your desk and mobile
• Via remote call control, you can see your phone calls come in even when you are not near your phone or mobile and can choose to take them via the pc or send to vmail
• Is integrated with your voicemail letting you talk to your voicemail inbox from the client
• With Communicator you can make outgoing and incoming calls from your PC. WLM only does outgoing - and its nowhere near as good quality (IMHO)
• You can click on a phone number in a document and it will phone it, you can cut and paste numbers and edit them before dialling

Enterprise management

• Communicator client is updated once every 3 or so years. WLM has a shorter refresh cycle so requires more effort to maintain in an enterprise
• You can do multi person video conferencing - don’t think you can do that with WLM
• Can IM a distribution list
• Cleaner UI, more corporate

Extras

• No adverts
• Great API for programming BOTS and other enterprise integration scenarios
• Integration with web conferencing
• Ability to switch seamlessly from peer to peer mode to client server mode once more than two participants are involved
• Works with Microsoft’s roundtable video conferencing hardware

Its a pretty impressive list,  although I think Lotus SameTime is on track to do an even better job of demonstrating just how different enterprise real-time communication is from consumer grade equivalents.

This post is dedicated to Sam - who is trying to make all this integration work in the real world!

(updated to add missing link later on in the post)

Stu has an interesting post on effective collaboration,  I think his arrows pointing in the right direction, but I don’t think its the whole story.  In Stu’s model we need to have a willing person, a willing team, the right culture (less important) and the right tools.    I think these 4 things are key for a short term activity,  in my experience pretty much any team can collaborate well given enough management attention and team enthusiasm, even if they just have a shared file system and a whiteboard.  But the real trick will collaboration is to sustain it over time and to make it work across all of the activities a person’s involved in,  not just the priority project.

For this more sustained and systematic collaboration to take hold I think culture’s more important and I think we need to drill a bit deeper into what motivates people.

In this post I described a way of thinking about the stages a person goes through to be comfortable with collaborating,  I’m no psychologist but it seems to fit my observations so far.  I stretched the idea further with this post trying to apply Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the same discussion.

But my best post on the topic is probably this one where I took a similar approach to Stu, but looked at the challenges that we face in collaborating and tried to come up with a model to describe them all and their relative importance for different types of collaborative endeavor.  I’ve read whole books that attempt to address the topic of this post so its pretty simplistic, but it’s nice when such a big topic can be reduced to a diagram as simple as this one.

In this interesting post Mike Gotta asks “Will Microsoft Become Facebook for the Enterprise?” I think the answer is a definite YES.  Whilst I think there is a role for LinkedIn or FaceBook for inter-enterprise social networking I still think that Intra-enterprise social networking is hugely important and I think that the needs within the enterprise are much richer.  I’m pretty confident that Microsoft has everything it needs. 

SharePoint 2007 strikes me as an excellent foundation upon which to build,  its extensibility seems impressive and the fact that it already includes basic versions of all the main elements, blogs, wiki’s, personal pages and people search provides them with a great learning platform.  Mike scores Microsoft pretty poorly so far:

• Blogs:B-
• Wikis:C+
• Tag/Social Bookmark System: N/A
• Social Networking: B+
• XML Syndication: N/A (feed aggregation and management)

but my point is that it’s just a matter of time,  Microsoft has all the technology infrastructure they need, all the research, all the resources and their B- existing infrastructure is giving them all of the practical experience (Microsoft thrives in practical experience). 

I am a little surprised that Microsoft haven’t purchased NewsGator though,  it seems a perfect complement to their ambitions (both within Windows/Office Live the enterprise) and and it’s all based on their technologies.  Makes me think they must have something up their sleeves.

It won’t be long though, I suspect we won’t even have to wait for a new version of SharePoint (but I have no inside information).

Office is on the ropes,  there’s no doubt in my mind that Office 2007 is a great product, I use it every day and I would probably go so far as to say that it’s a joy to use.  That said I know it’s showing its age,  it’s just too difficult to work with virtual team members, too complex for the basic stuff I need to do - day in day out - and too centered on the specific document I’m working on rather than improving my overall personal productivity and personal knowledge management practices.  Of course with Web 2.0 and Open Source alternatives there’s now no shortage of great innovation going on that currently - in my view - complements Office, but within a year will probably be competing and I am relieved.

Relieved - because Microsoft really needed a big scare, a scare like Linux has given the Windows team, something to shake them out of their comfortable slow cycle of incremental innovation and into the real world.  I don’t think we have even seen a hint yet of what this will mean - it’s certainly a lot more than Office Live Workplace, but I am quietly confident.

Why?  because Office 2007 was all about competing with the past,  a new UI meant that the Open Source clones hit a brick wall and a new file format meant that competitors needed to spend many development cycles going nowhere implementing the incredibly complex Office XML format. 

This leaves the huge Office 14 team to focus on the future, solving the problems of inter-enterprise virtual teams, improved ad-hoc real-time collaboration, collaborative authoring, more transparent offline/online transitions with SharePoint, richer web functionality etc.  I have no doubt that Microsoft has the skills (look at SharePoint, OneNote and Excel services for example) it’s all about the motivation - and right now their motivation (loss of one of their premier cash cows) must be at an all time high.

I’m excited by the potential as well,  Office is still the most important IT tool I use and I see tremendous potential for improvement if Microsoft gets it right,  what’s equally interesting is to see that IBM are even making a serious attempt at integrating their collaboration tools with Office (Quickr and SameTime) and as a user of both that’s also very good news.  Right now Quickr seems better integrated with Windows for example than SharePoint 2007 is!

A long time ago now I read the Mythical Man Month,  and I remember two things from it:

1. On a large activity conceptual integrity is really difficult to achieve and maintain
2. In the sixties IBM seemed to do a better job at managing large development programmes than we do now with all of our computer assistance

I’m often reminded of these two points,  almost every day I see the evidence of an activity that has no conceptual integrity and even when it started with it, most programmes I deal with have lost it completely by the time they have finished.  Joel illustrates the point nicely with this story:

In one of Gerald Weinberg’s books, probably The Secrets of Consulting, there’s the apocryphal story of the giant multinational hamburger chain where some bright MBA figured out that eliminating just three sesame seeds from a sesame-seed bun would be completely unnoticeable by anyone yet would save the company $126,000 per year. So they do it, and time passes, and another bushy-tailed MBA comes along, and does another study, and concludes that removing another five sesame seeds wouldn’t hurt either, and would save even more money, and so on and so forth, every year or two, the new management trainee looking for ways to save money proposes removing a sesame seed or two, until eventually, they’re shipping hamburger buns with exactly three sesame seeds artfully arranged in a triangle, and nobody buys their hamburgers any more.

and goes on to describe how he has been victim of this conceptual integrity drift himself,  although it’s impressive that he realized that it had happened and stopped it,  if this had been an activity run by a project manager and not an owner I bet it would never have been stopped!

This is sort of what happened with our new web design. We’ve been tweaking it and polishing it and changing things carefully, and the firm we hired to design it has been taking us step-by-step through information architecture, site maps, wireframes, initial designs, and several rounds of design. All with a carefully-designed process to get our buy-in at every step along the way. And so far every step I thought the design was converging and we’d get a nice web design out of it.

And then I came back after a week on the road, took one look at it, and thought, oh crap. We can’t go public with that.

So as I was saying - I’m also often reminded about the fact that we seem to have forgotten how to run programmes (and maybe projects as well),  I partly blame computers - today’s projects seem to be way too much about sitting in from of a laptop producing plans, estimates, registers, and deliverables and not enough about objectives, people, progress, discussion, review and quality. 

Joel has written a great book,  that has some useful insights into these and many other issues.