Adventures in home working

I love the reforming project management blog,  it has some great insights.  As an architect/solution manager who has dabbled with project and programme management for 15 years I have found that all too often project managers get tricked into managing the project and not managing the people.  A great example of this is a list of project management steps which lists 16 steps of essential project management.  Hal then crisply points out in his comments:

It’s not a bad list. If you only followed Lee’s advice, then you would do ok with your projects. However…the author misses a central aspect of projects. Project participants are autonomous. They have the opportunity to say, “No,” even though they often go along saying, “Yes.” They also are likely to misunderstand what they are asked to do, just like you and I misunderstand what we are asked to do.

Projects require leader-managers who care for the project participants. The leader-manager sees that the participants are acting as a team — taking care of each other. Success depends on those relationships to avoid misunderstanding and to create a project setting where intervening in each others’ work is not seen as meddling.

I like to think of successful project management as all of the above, but also the management of the soft areas of team dynamics:

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

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:

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.

The idea seems to be to use a single client to manage all of a teams interactions around a specific activity.  It seems like a great idea in principle,  although I have a few concerns about how it will work in practice:

• I am worried that the process of publishing to the team the few steps in a process that need to be shared will be a bit of an overhead,  I favour a publishing process thats as seamless as possible (like adding a tag or ticking a check box)
• That trying to do all of this within the confines of a single application will be difficult with the screen real-estate available to most people, however maybe eclipse supports multiple monitors (then I will be happy) but laptop users will really struggle
• The tool will be a jack of all trades and master of none
• I will not be able to interface with the server infrastructure using standard protocols, like RSS, and will be forced into using the IBM client,  this will be a real pain because no matter how good the tool is its very unlikely I will be using it for all of my projects and certainly not for all of my research and storage
• That the team view of the world will be optimised at the expense of personal productivity

What I liked:

• That the developers do seem to be building the solution to support real business scenarios and not just features
• Online and off-line support
• A rich client, thats flexible and customisable

Here is a screen shot, and I recommend you take a read of the full article if you are a current Lotus Notes user.

I recently came across a quite amazing offer from AxoSoft,  that allowed me to get a 5 user version of their project management software OnTime for just $5 rather than $495, even better the $5 was donated to the Red Cross!  I have been struggling to find a project/task management solution thats flexible enough for my needs so I thought I would give it a try.

You can get access to the offer from here,  there is no link on the web site,  so the only way is through the blogsphere.  At the time of posting they had taken 645 orders and raised $3225 for the Red Cross.

5 minutes later my activation key arrived and I was up and running.  You need to install MSDE, but once thats done you have a 5 user system that is really powerful.  Here are a few of the highlights:

• It’s designed to support defect, feature and task tracking/management,  but its very easy to re-configure it. In my case I changed Defects to Activities, changed a few field names and removed a few others and I now have a project management and task management solution, instead of a bug tracker!
• It’s client server,  it has a great web client that connects to an SQL server or MSDE database
• They say that MSDE can easily support 50+ users
• It has a web client as well that’s broadly equivalent in functionality
• It allows you to build a hierarchy of projects, and browse your tasks at any level in the hierarchy
• It allows you to sort, group, filter and search items
• It allows you to store a description, notes, attachments (linked or embedded), work logs, emails and more against every item
• It’s wildly configurable,  the descriptions of pretty much every field and view can be changed to suit your needs and pick lists like status, priority etc can be customised
• It allows you to create emails, from items
• It allows you to automatically monitor any number of pop email accounts, and auto-process the emails that arrive in them.  In my case I created a number of email accounts and associated them with the activity and task lists.  Found that I could then automatically create an archive of emails associated with each task,  just by forwarding or cc-ing the email accounts I created and placing the task number in the subject field, (for example adding [#44] anywhere in the subject would attach that email to activity 44.
• You can create custom fields, add them to forms and and then group by them,  which is great for GTD users,  although you already have severity, status, priority fields as standard, but you can add fields for different places and different categories.

This is a truly amazing tool for the small project team,  but really excellent for a single user as well.  Unfortunately the 5 user for $5 trial may soon be over, but don’t despair because the 1 user version – which is functionally the same – is FREE of charge.  Here is a sample screen shot:

A few other notes:

• You will want to backup your database,  to do that I created an ODBC connection (in control panel) to my database and then added the following command to the batch file that does my regular nightly backup.  (onetime is the name of the ODBC connection)

OSQL -E -n -D onetime -Q “BACKUP DATABASE onetime TO DISK = ‘D:\Steve\SQL server\master.bak’ WITH INIT”

• There are some really great screen cams that show you how to use it,  start with the overview to get an idea of the power
• I found a bug in the pop email account monitoring service,  it doesn’t seem to download attachments, which is a real shame.  They are working on a fix.
• This is not a great solution if you need to keep your tasks in sync with your laptop, desktop, PDA etc.  However you can use the automatic email processing to allow you to create tasks by sending the appropriate account an email, which is pretty easy.  In fact as many of my tasks are initiated by email in the first place it’s often pretty natural to do it that way.  There is a feature request in to create Outlook sync.
• Check out the support forums for more bugs and issues

I have just posted about how impressed I am by the OneNote team,  and I especially like it when they share details of how the team uses the product themselves to push the boundaries of their processes.  In this extract of a long post,  Chris describes how they use the next version of OneNote to help with the planning and estimating process:

For our last milestone we used OneNote 12 and created a shared notebook, using several sections but one especially held a page for every proposed feature. We put a table at the top of each page, and embedded the spec document in question. The table also had a place to list the devs, testers, comments, unanswered questions (marked with note flags), etc. Everyone on the team could see the notebook at any time, even on the bus ride home. You could see which devs had started making comments on which spec. Two devs could comment on the same spec at the same time. We could query the whole notebook to see how many unanswered questions there were and what they were.

There were some neat side effects too. For example, previously we used to put these specs out and dev would say they would estimate them. Now we could actually see that they didn’t start estimating them until the following week (with an integrated development team it is gold to know what is really happening, not just what is supposed to be happening). Some PMs took advantage of that knowledge to put up an updated spec that had more detail – something we had been asked not to do in the past as devs had often started estimating the spec unbeknownst to us.

The most amazing thing was that we were done with the whole exercise and had higher faith in its being well executed in a matter of a week – usually it takes a month. This underlines one of the selling points of this approach – it makes your organization more agile. I was talking to a law firm the other day which is interested in OneNote. I asked them why a firm that charges by the hour is interested in time-saving productivity tools? The answer: law firms that engage in litigation are more interested in winning the case than in hourly fees. Anything that allows them to put a case together and move faster than the competition increases their chance of winning. The CIO told me that he learned something from a General when he served with the military: winning is all about not waiting your turn.

One of the things I like best about OneNote is that the development ad product management team explain (or at least summarise) the decision process they have gone through for major features and then explain how they expect these features and related features to be used.  This not only benefits us,  but also provides them with valuable feedback.  Done early enough in the process it means that the users have the chance to get involved in the design process, and I like this idea a lot.  In fact I like it so much that I want to start using it more within the company I work for,  here’s hoping I can pull it off.

Anyway back to OneNote here are two examples, first an explanation of multiple notebooks:

While we were hearing this request from people trying to organise their personal information in OneNote, we were also talking to a lot of customers who were experimenting with using OneNote to share information between the members of a team. This was not their personal stuff, but separate stuff that was team knowledge – for example, precedents for a case being researched by a team of lawyers. And OneNote’s approach to storing your information – one big “My Notebook” folder on your hard drive – didn’t match the way they wanted to store those separate sets of information either. They not only wanted their personal notes stored in one place and their team notes stored in another, they already had a place to keep team files. (As many teams at many companies do.) We really wanted to really nail this “group notebook” scenario in OneNote 12, so we wanted the user interface to make this separation clear.

and an explanation of working as a team with shared notebooks:

With a shared notebook:

• You can work by yourself or with others – it is asynchronous
• You can come and go as you please – there is no “session” to reconnect to, and no duplicated pages when you reconnect
• Everyone can edit at once
• Everyone or anyone can be offline (no net connection) and still edit
• Offline edits are synced and auto-merged with the shared notebook when the user gets back on-line (even several weeks’ worth of changes)
• Changes are automatically propagated to a server and thence to any of the clients involved in the shared notebook
• The contents can be searched instantly since they are cached locally and indexed.
• Team members can be added at any time and their machines will sync up to the latest bits.
• Everything written is tagged with who wrote/modified it and when it was created/modified
• You can query the notebook to show you what was written since you last looked at it – the actual text gets highlighted.
• Creating a shared notebook is as simple as creating a new notebook and picking a file share or SharePoint (or any WebDAV-capable server) for it – we’ll pick a decent default as well if you don’t care. If you make a notebook shared, we’ll offer to send an email invitation to the team members you specify and that’s all there is to it.

In some recent discussions I have been introduced to the concept of “productive friction”, which is an effect that’s created when team members with a diverse background get together.  It happens for example when people from different cultures or academic disciplines or companies work together to solve a problem and it increases the level of innovation.  John Hagel describes it in his book The Only Sustainable Edge and in his Article in the Harvard Business Review.

This recent article in Newsweek describes the effect,  and gives some practical and simple advice on how to take advantage of it in your projects:

What they found was that the most successful teams did two things right. First, they attracted a mixture of experienced people and those who were newcomers to whichever field they were in. That’s not surprising–the need for fresh blood has long been recognized as an important ingredient in success. The second criterion, though, was far less obvious. What successful teams had in common was at least a few experienced members who had never collaborated with each other. “People have a tendency to want to work with their friends–people they’ve worked with before,” says Luis Amaral, a physicist at Northwestern and a coauthor. “That’s exactly the wrong thing to do.”

Blogs and social networking tools help people establish the essential connections between experienced people with different perspectives, and this is one of the main reasons why I keep a public blog, and long for an internal blog, or an alternative mechanism:

The study also suggests a role for technology in bringing seasoned people together. Tacit Knowledge Systems, a start-up in Palo Alto, California, is marketing a computer system that links people with similar professional interests. The system monitors e-mail in a corporation or other large organization and keeps tabs on what employees are interested in. If a worker is looking for somebody to collaborate with, he or she can query the system to find somebody appropriate. Tacit is developing a new version that actively forges connections by prompting employees when it finds people who, on the basis of shared interests, might make a good team. Finding a way to maximize creative potential is one of the most pressing problems in corporations. Knowing what makes one team more creative than another is an important first step.

If you want to find out more,  but don’t have the time or the money to follow the links above,  I recommend you download and listen to these two interviews from IT conversations.

In this IT Conversation Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with John Hagel, who with co-author John Seely Brown, has written “The Only Sustainable Edge,” a new perspective for business.

In this IT Conversation, John explains why he considers web services to be a “deceptively disruptive technology” and why he’s an advocate for web-services strategies that focus on the edge of the enterprise rather than lower-return internal integration projects. “Companies are losing opportunities by not thinking systematically about the technology,” he says.

Andre has this simple and easy to interpret model for classifying people in business:

1. Builders – At the front of every train you typically have the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are all about ‘what could be’. They envision the world the way they want to create it and then set out to make that vision a reality. Entrepreneurs are typically described as both visionary or charismatic.
2. Executers – In the middle car you have those that were born to execute. Executers might not brainstorm your next innovation, but once an idea is hatched, they can execute the heck out of it.
3. Protectors – At the back of the train you have the protector. Neither innovation nor execution mean anything to a protector, who is motivated only to protect and guard what’s already been won in terms of assets. Protectors are better at saying “no” than anything else, for fear that any movement might somehow diminish or dwindle what’s been harvested by those before them.

It’s a lot easier to interpret than many models I have seem.

Some of the best years of my working life were spent in an office environment I designed to promote collaborative work.  It had many of the characteristics of a “war room”.  With quiet areas around the sides, tables in the middle and loads of break-out areas, white-boards, flip charts and a design review/presentation area.  I described this environment in a previous post.  I have generally been frustrated at the lack of discussion about workspace design in the IT press, so I was pleased to come across this article that resonated strongly with my experience:

Recently, many companies in the software industry have been experimenting with putting teams of workers into “war rooms” to enhance communication and promote intense collaboration, explains Stephanie Teasley, an assistant research scientist in the U-M School of Information’s Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work.

Instead of toiling in separate cubicles, workers sit at wall-less workstations in one big, open room. The room is typically outfitted with central worktables, whiteboards and flip charts to facilitate group discussions. While companies expect benefits from such arrangements, workers sometimes balk at the idea, fearing they’ll sacrifice privacy and the quiet they need to concentrate on demanding tasks. The U-M researchers say their study is the first to closely examine the effects of what they call “radical collocation” on both productivity and worker satisfaction.

Teasley collaborated on the project with Mayuram Krishnan and Judith Olson of U-M and Lisa Covi, who was at U-M when the work was done but now is at Rutgers University. The group studied six software development teams at a major automobile company, all of which had little or no experience working in war room settings. The researchers evaluated the workers’ productivity using measures commonly used in software development; then they compared the war room teams’ scores with productivity data the company had collected on software development teams working in traditionally arranged offices. The researchers also interviewed the workers and had them fill out questionnaires at the beginning and end of the project. In addition, they made detailed observations of two teams—sitting in on meetings and conference calls, watching the teams solve various kinds of problems and photographing them in action.

Teams in the war room environments were more than twice as productive as similar teams at the same company working in traditional office settings. In a follow-up study of 11 more war room teams, productivity nearly doubled again, making the war room teams almost four times as productive as their counterparts in ordinary offices. The setting alone may not account for all of the productivity differences; teams working in the war rooms also used techniques designed to accelerate software development. However, those techniques could only be carried out by radically collocated teams, says Teasley.

The before-and-after questionnaires showed that workers liked working in the war rooms better than they expected to and were not as distracted by nearby colleagues as they thought they would be. In interviews, the workers said they learned to tune out distractions and tune in when something important was happening. Indeed, overhearing one another’s conversations and watching one another’s activities probably had a lot to do with the productivity surge, the researchers believe. When a worker was stuck on a software-coding problem, others passing by would stop and offer help. And when one team member was explaining something to another, others could overhear and interject clarifications and corrections. The privacy issue was resolved by having a few private cubicles, equipped with telephones and computers, available near the war rooms. Workers used these mainly for making personal phone calls, such as calling a bank to check on a loan or phoning a doctor’s office for medical test results.

“Although the teammates were not looking forward to working in close quarters, over time they realized the benefits of having people at hand, for coordination, problem solving and learning,” says Teasley. “With the growing push for using technology to allow people to work in virtual teams, this study shows us the value of having seamless access to team members and helps us to envision how technology might best be used to support teams that cannot be radically collocated.”