projectified

WIP for Knowledge Work

I saw this post at Learning about Lean via Frank's Focused Performance blog and it speaks well about the issues we all face as consumers of data and information. But more importantly it made me think about WIP for the first time since I was doing process and project management work at Boeing in 1996-1997. I thought a lot about it then when I was dealing with manufacturing but not so much since then as I have been doing 'info work.'

The thing it made me to tonight was to think about not just my inbox (as Joe Ely mentions directly) but also about the partly finished "things" I have laying around and the creative price of not having all of them done. It made me think about the partly finished specs for Project Server addin's that I had to put aside for other more pressing commitments and it made me think about the half incubated ideas for papers and blog posts that I scrawled down when I was on a plane or in a meeting and an idea hit me but I had no time for finishing it out.

I think the real price is that as I go back over some notebooks and OneNote sections that hold these seeds I am struck by how complete I remember the thought being when I made the note and how incomplete I think they are NOW. I have lost something between then and now. I'm pretty sure I can get it back but how long am I going to have to think about each of these ideas to get back to where I was 2 months ago?

So what I took from Joe's post (even though it was not what he wrote about exactly) was that I need to do a better job of documenting what I know will become long term on-hold WIP so that when I get the chance to get back to it I will not have to spend hours rethinking it to get back on track with it.

You all have these on-hold projects sitting around in notebooks and in Word documents. How many of them are in a state where you could pick them up right now and start working on them without a lot of re-publishing and rethinking? Think about it.

KM and PM: The Redheaded Step Children of all Organizations?

(Full apologies to any actual redheaded step children in my VAST reading audience)

My conversation with Jack on my Call to Arms Redux post got me thinking about the shared trials and tribulations of Knowledge Management and Project Management.

Both have great promise to better the performance of organizations. Both have been hyped to certain degrees by their proponents. Both have, to certain degrees and by certain people, been accused of being all hype and of “failing” to deliver any value.

I think one other thing they both share is the problem of organizations reading about them, getting fired up about them, doing some ‘research’ on software (since as all Executives know Software will solve any problem), installing software and then being disappointed that their organizations are not suddenly transformed into the case study they read in CIO magazine.

Obviously this is not just an Exec problem, it is a pretty wide spread human problem. People see lots of problems being “solved” with software so they get the idea that software is what actually solved the problem. In some cases like in database systems making it easier to find information this is mostly true but the general misconception stands: Software fixes problems.

This is what, I feel, is to blame for things like KM and certain PM initiatives ‘failing’. Too many people feel that it is the job of software to Manage their Ks and their P’s. They feel that spending $100,000 on software will fix any problem. The reality is much more difficult. The reality is about changing the way people think about their jobs and the way that what they know defines their value to the company and it’s about how they manage and organize their work and the work of those on their teams.

KM and PM initiatives fail because the people involved have not yet decided that KM and PM are good for them. Something about the sharing of knowledge and changing the way projects, resources and work are managed makes them uncomfortable and they do they natural thing: they resist. They find things wrong with the system. They don't use it. They poke holes in it and try to kill it. The whole range of defense mechanisms come into play. The most common is to just not use it. It is not an active hatred that kills the new system or process but a slow passive death from starvation.

Anyway: PM and KM “systems” are about people being comfortable with changing the way they do things.

 

The Project 50

Steven over at ProjectSteps, in his post about WOW Projects, reminded me about two of the coolest books I have read: The Project 50 and the Brand You 50 by Tom Peters. I read them both (and the third one in the series the Professional Services Firm 50) all in about 3 days and then turned around and read the Project and Brand You books again! In them he promised another in the series but, sadly, it never got published. As far as I know Mr. Peter’s concept of a “WOW Project” as Steven talks about in his post was first laid out clearly in The Project 50. I was working for Pacific Edge when I found these books and I begged my boss to let me buy copies for the other Project Managers and Program Managers in my group but was not able to convince him it would be worth the $60! (Ironic that the man managing a group of PMs that were designing and managing the building of Project Management applications would not let me spend $60 on Project Management books.) So I bought a set of them out of my own pocket so the group could use them. I feel that strongly about these books. They changed the way I looked at work and about the work I do and how that work is seen and thought of by my boss, my coworkers, my company and my industry (and myself for that matter).

Buy these books (at least the Project and Brand You books). I just dug them out of my moving boxes where they were since my last move and I am re-reading them this week! You will not be sorry!

Call to Arms Redux

Way back in March of 2004 I did three posts I called A Call to Arms for Project Managers

Part I, Part II, Part III

In them I talked about my hopes for how project managers might use things like blogs and other KM type tools within their work.

I wonder how things have changed in the last year? Post a comment or email me if you have seen the types of tools mentioned in the above articles being used for Project Management purposes.

Oh and it should be noted that in Part I, I get in a little dig on Gantthead that was not quite fair. I had some notions of how their content shaped up based on an opinion I must have formed quite a while ago (like 1999). I have visited them recently and I must say that my comment was certainly out of date. They do have some very good stuff over there. In fact Gantthead and Project Connections both have a surprising amount of great stuff to check out. I have been up and checked out the premium side of Project Connections and must say I was happy with what I found. I have not seen the premium stuff at Gantthead (but I'm sure it is excellent as well). Both sites are worth your time to check out for sure.

A Call to Arms for Project Managers: Part III

In Part II we looked at how WebLogs and RSS might be used in a Project Management setting. Now I want to look at how lightweight (or “low impact”) KM tools might be used by teams to share information. I do not mean lightweight or low impact in a bad way but rather in a good way. Many of the more traditional KM tools are ‘heavy’ in that they often require a shift in the way users do their work. They are heavy on process and workflow. While this can be very good in that it enforces a system of use that can be good for the organization it can also stifle the use of the tools. Low impact tools do not require a strict workflow to be followed and they do not have a significant impact on the everyday work that people do. They can be worked into almost any work routine with almost no effect on that routine.

One such tool is Onfolio. This tool integrates into the IE interface and acts as a collector of web pages, images or text snippets. These collections are organized by creating folders within the collection. When you capture an item you specify the folder into which the item should be placed. You also get to provide notes about the item and can also define other meta-data in the form of custom fields that you can define.

Now this might not sound revolutionary…yet. There are other applications that do similar things. But the really neat part is the Onfolio Publisher. This is where it gets really cool. With this you can create reports on the items you have collected. So if you collected a set of code snippets from various programming sites you could create a report and upload it to an intranet or internet site or email it to a coworker as a .mht file. You can even save the whole thing as an RSS feed. (Here is where it gets cooler.) You can save the report to an RSS feed and then upload that to an intranet\internet site where your coworkers or others can subscribe to it in their aggregators! Each report you create gets saved as a different RSS feed so they can subscribe to the ones that they like. You keep collecting and then every so often you update the report by dragging the new content into the report, save it and publish the feed to update the xml file. Poof! You have knowledge sharing going on with out a wildly expensive server-based KM system.

What I envision here for a future version of this product is a predefined report that goes and builds itself based on the contents of certain Onfolio folders and then publishes itself on a preset schedule. Then what you have is one very cool way for project teams to share the information they are finding in their own personal research about the project. The developers on your team have these Onfolio reports about code they have found. They also have reports about the research they are doing on the different ways the system could be architected. You are interested in the architecture stuff but not the code part so you only subscribe to their architecture feed! I have been told by people at Onfolio that this exact feature is on the list for a future release. But even as it sits the updating and publishing of a report would take no more than about 5 mins a day. Drag a few entries onto the page and click 2 or 3 buttons and you have updated your feeds.

I have been using Onfolio for about under a week and it is already part of my daily routine. I have collections for Project Server sites, competing product information, documents of interest, project and portfolio management sites, etc, etc. I find something interesting, I right click on the page in IE and I select the option to Capture Page to Onfolio. I select the folder and click OK. Done.

Im also told that they are looking at integration with many of the blogging packages so that you could capture pages or snippets of pages into Onfolio and then blog them right from inside Onfolio.

So I guess the call for Part III is to go check out Onfolio or one of the other apps like it and spend a hour checking it out and then think about how you might work a tool like this into your project team. How might this kind of tool increase the sharing of information among your team? What impact would this sharing have on your project? Download it and give it some thought.

A Call to Arms for Project Managers: Part II

In Part I of this series I talked about Weblogs as a source of information for Project Managers for keeping up with the state of the art of PM. Now in Part II I will talk about how I think Weblogs could be used by PMs and by project teams to improve and expand the state of the art.

I picture WebLog software hosted on a corporate intranet and used by Project Managers as a combination of status report, informal issue log and project diary from the perspective of the PM. If done correctly this would become a much more valuable project artifact than the same old weekly status reports. It would be a documentary film in words of how the project was going each day. Post categories could be used to put posts into a specific context of status, issue, work report, etc.

Team members on the project could keep a WebLog to share solutions to problems encountered in the day to day work of the project. These could then be kept as a record for future teams on similar projects. Again post categories could be used to put the posts into context.

RSS feeds for each category in these WebLogs would let PMs, stakeholders, team members on the project or even team members on other projects get updates on the newest entries for those categories. Stakeholders could subscribe to the RSS feed for the Status category on the PM's WebLog to get instant micro-status updates. Team members could subscribe to a category on other team member's blogs that hold found code snippets, solutions to problems or discussions of how problems are going.

Often in a project team there are lots of emails that go out to a distribution list that includes the whole team. In many cases these lists can become jammed with emails that really only needed to go to the Devs on the team or to the testers. Other team members might be interested but not everyone! RSS feeds would help solve this problem. You have a set of standard categories in the Team Blogs. When a project starts you could subscribe to the blogs and categories that you find interesting. Then when a post is made it can be seen by all those that are interested in that subject or in that person's comments.

An app like Movable Type can support custom fields (as I understand it) so each entry could be marked with the project it pertains to so if a team member is working on more than one project it could be tracked in their blog entries.

I think that Weblogs and RSS feeds of their content could really become a powerful tool for PMs and their teams for sharing project information. Will it work for everyone? Certainly not but it does not have to work for everyone. If only 50% of your team decided to use blogs to share information as part of their daily routine it would be a huge thing. Movable Type is $150 so there is not a COST excuse.

The call? I'd like to see a project manager take the leap and use an internally installed blogging app like Movable Type to create a set of team blogs for their next project. If you do this please let me know how it goes.

Part III will touch on "Low Impact" KM tools.

A Call to Arms for Project Managers: Part I

There are a bunch of new technologies and products out there that can have, in my opinion, a really big impact on Project Management as a profession. They are Weblogs, RSS and what I call "low impact" knowledge management tools. (This will be a multipart series of posts.)

Weblogs
Weblogs are a technology/tool that almost all PMs should at least explore on two levels: information source and project communications tool.

Info Source
Up until about 2 months ago I had almost completely stopped using the Internet as a source of information about PM. I was stuck in a rut of checking the same few sites for new papers. There were a few that I liked and did a good job of giving me info: Niwot Ridge for one was very good but even places like Gantthead seemed to just be giving me advertisements made up to look like articles and whitepapers. It should be noted that I have since visited Gantthead and found that the impression I originally stated here was very much mistaken. I feel now that I formed this opinion from WAY back in 1999 (when I last spent any real time there and the few times I went back I must have hit the wrong articles and they just reinforced my false impression) and things have obviously changed. Gantthead is certainly worth your time to check out. I felt like I was missing out. Then I installed NewsGator and found a few sites like Frank Patrick's blog. I started checking out their blogrolls and BAM. It was like turning a corner. There are a bunch of people out there blogging project management topics and they are all scary smart.

Reading a good WebLog is like getting to see what is inside the head of an expert that you usually only get to hear talk for an hour at a conference. If they are good at blogging and really do it well their blog is like a record of their thoughts and opinions on the subject. They change and evolve and get influenced by other bloggers on related topics. Reading blogs lets you read opinions of people you would not ever have thought about including in your scope of thought.

PM has been changing and adding concepts and knowledge so quickly it is hard to keep up. Blogs, in my opinion, are THE way that we as a profession will be able to keep up.

So the first call to arms here is this: go get an RSS reader (NewsGator, Bloglines, Feedster) and start looking for Project Management blogs. I have a list of a few of my favorites on www.projectified.com but you can also search Technorati or Feedster to find others. THEN after you have read a few blogs and see what they are about go and start one of your own. I use TypePad and it costs about $5 a month but there are free ones out there like Blogger and BlogSpot You have something to say about PM. You have experience that is unique. Share it with us and let us learn from it!

Part II of the Call to Arms will be for PMs to use WebLogs as a Project Team communications tool.

Information Animals: Great Metaphor for Knowledge Workers

Janine has a blog called Knowledge Animal and while it only has the one post it is a pretty cool one.

This article compares knowledge workers with animals and it is a comparison that works pretty well. We have territories that we guard and protect to different extents. Sometimes we share our territory and some knowlege workers chase rival workers out of that territory.

I read it and now think a little differently about my 'territory' and how I work within it in ways that are not quite as human as I might have thought yesterday. :-) Check it out.