I’m seeing a lot more burnout at work for many reasons, all of them very disturbing. It’s bad for the employer because people become disengaged, productivity suffers, stress increases all around, sickness levels increase and retention suffers. It’s clearly bad for the individuals and their families and it’s also bad...
Unfortunately most of us have come across metrics that are used to measure individual performance, to provide a quantified ‘stick’ with which to beat the under-performing individual, I hate them with a passion. Whilst they might have some validity in an assembly line, they have no place where I work,...
I recently read an interesting blog post from Gartner summarising the results of a study that they undertook into why projects fail. The results aligned nicely with my own views: Our recent Gartner Research Circle survey asked clients about project failures. No respondent chose “technical skills” as the cause of...
This post expands on an earlier post that introduces the concept of Common Ground 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...
Friday is my ‘rest and relax’ day, a day when I work on my own, review what I’ve learned this week, collect my thoughts, plan for the future. As I walked along the beach to Lytham I started to ponder teams. We can sometimes get carried away by the idea...
Driving home from Cambridge Steph and I were discussing teams and so I got to explain my favourite tool for establishing effective collaboration, building ‘common ground’. It’s an incredibly simple concept, but that simplicity makes it powerful. The basic idea: The more complex a collaboration, the more areas of common...
Open source has always been difficult at Microsoft, they’ve struggled with how to use its obvious value as a development and delivery model, but the SharePoint podcasting kit seems to be a great example of how to do it right. Although SharePoint itself is unlikely to ever be Open Source...
It’s really nice to see some progress at last on SSE, ie it’s implementation by Microsoft as FeedSync. Jon Udel covers it. Of course right now there are no examples of it really being used, but maybe the creation of FeedSync was needed before people would really consider it stable...
Dave Pollard has a typically excellent post contrasting Knowledge Management 1.0 (which I remember being pushed at me, but thankfully resisted) and KM 2.0 that’s been inspired by the Internet and web 2. I have two thoughts worth noting: Things that work at Internet scale don’t always translate to the...
Having read Tom’s article where’s the working in social networking and Charlene Li’s counterpoint on the business value of social networking I’m still a bit torn. I think my conclusion is that whilst I definitely see the value in inter-enterprise social networking, I don’t see the technologies that provide it...