Monthly Archives: February 2009
A drop in performance, a drop in morale: it’s the depression, stupid!
Artist Eileen Quinlan
How companies are struggling to maintain customer service amid sinking sales and declining employee morale. Read more at Business WEek »
Artist Eileen Quinlan
Nice to read the impact on employee morale. As a business manager one of my working assumptions for the forth coming years is the impact of the staff morale on the operations. Will my staff be involved, committed or will they act alienated because of their consciousness of how companies acted during this Great Depression.
Artist Eileen Quinlan
Will you be important or were you urgent
Nice posting done by Gina Trapani on February 18, 2009. Included in this blog because it reflects my current theme to connect and act to relevant developments in your context. Whick is something different than creating a permanent sense of despair, urgency. Anyway, both approaches may create excitement for you!
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Artist: Nikola Tamindzic www.homeofthevain.com
by Gina Trapani
Gina Trapani is the founding editor of personal productivity blog Lifehacker.com, and the author of Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better (Wiley 2008). She lives in San Diego, California.
Busy people have two options when they decide how their workdays will go: they can choose to be reactive to urgent demands on their time, or proactive about focusing on what they decide is important. The only way to actually get things done is to mitigate the urgent to work on the important.
Let’s differentiate between what I call urgent and important.
Urgent tasks include things like that frantic email that needs a response RIGHT NOW; a sudden request that seems like it’ll only take two minutes but often ends up taking an hour; a report you’ve got to write up before a meeting. More often than not “the urgent” is putting out fires, or busywork, or tasks that you’d rather do first because they’re less intimidating than your current project list.
Urgent tasks are usually short-term and we’re drawn to them because they keep us busy and make us feel needed. (If we’re busy people, we must be important people.)
But dealing with a constant stream of urgent tasks leaves you wrung out at the end of the day, wondering where all the time went, staring at the undone actual work you’ve got to complete.
On the flip side, important work moves you and your business towards your goals. The important stuff doesn’t give us that same shot of adrenaline that the urgent requests do. It can involve thinking out long-term goals, being honest about where you are and want to be, and just doing plain hard work that feels boring and tedious. On a personal level, important stuff may include making time to get to the gym every day. On a business level, important stuff may be devising your yearly plan, breaking it down into quarterly and monthly deliverables, and evaluating your current performance against last year’s plan. (Doesn’t the mere thought of going to the gym and deciding on this year’s goals make you want to check your email? Still, that’s the work that will help you meet your goals.)
If your workplace encourages that frantic vibe of headless-chicken running and constant urgency, it can feel impossible to focus on what’s important versus what’s urgent. Still, an awareness of the difference and a few simple techniques can help.
Choose three important tasks to complete each day. Write them down on a slip of paper and keep it visible on your desk. When you have a moment, instead of checking your email, look at the slip, and work on an item. Keep the list to just three, and see how many you can complete.
Turn off your email client. Shut down Outlook, turn off new email notifications on your BlackBerry, do whatever you have to do to muffle the interruption of email. When you decide to work on one of your important tasks, give yourself an hour at least of uninterrupted time to complete it. If the web is too much of a temptation, disconnect your computer from the Internet for that hour.
Set up a weekly 20-minute meeting with yourself. Put it on your calendar, and don’t book over it — treat it with the same respect you’d treat a meeting with your boss. If you don’t have an office door or you work in an open area that’s constantly busy, book a conference room for your meeting. Go there to be alone. Bring your project list, to-do list, and calendar, and spend the time reviewing what you finished that past week, and what you want to get done the following week. This is a great time to choose your daily three important tasks. Productivity author David Allen refers to this as the “weekly review,” and it’s one of the most effective ways to be mindful about how you’re spending your time.
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Artist: Nikola Tamindzic www.homeofthevain.com
Considering a future for a renewed advertising
Artist Liz Deschenes
The slide show http://www.slideshare.net/gamages/the-future-of-advertising-apa-170209is interesting in how it is defining communities.
Artist Liz Deschenes
And as a fan of connect to changing context, i promote it on my blog.
Artist Liz Deschenes
Catch22: do not read this post
Artist Richard Burbridge
I don’t try to catch up by reading everything, and I don’t worry about leaving unread items anywhere.
I read what I can with the time I have available and don’t spend any time worrying about the rest.
There will always be more interesting content than I can ever read in a lifetime.
Cees Nooteboom, famous Dutch writer of a certain age, stated this in his way. Read that what you want before your train leaves.
Artist Marcus Piggott
Agile management: fragile teams
Artist Levi Wedel
W. Wayne Turmel is a speaker, writer and corporate drone who lives in Chicago Il. He is the founder and president of Greatwebmeetings.com, as well as the host of The Cranky Middle Manager Show podcast, an irreverent and insightful look at the world of Middle Management. [more]One of the very cool things about doing The Cranky Middle Manager podcast is the ability to learn about new trends in management before they show up in places like Training magazine, by which time they have already gone the way of the dodo (just as your kids have already deleted any music by anyone making the cover of Time or Newsweek).
I’ve been talking to a lot of people in the software world lately, and learning about Agile project management.
(You can hear a whole interview about it here). The more I learn, the more I’m convinced that while there are extremely valuable lessons to be learned, there are some warnings to be heeded as well.
First, a definition: “Agile” is actually a single name for a number of methodologies for designing software that have proven to be more effective than traditional project management theory in dealing with business realities like changing requirements during development.
It promotes best practices that emphasize teamwork, customer involvement and the frequent creation of small, working pieces of the total system. This is important because so much changes in software development , often overnight, and you never know how long it will take to create a working piece of code.
In other words, if you think about how software people work, traditional project management is a recipe for frustration ( if not actual madness and homicide). Because coding is more art than science it’s almost impossible to say how long a certain step in the process might take- it might take weeks of grinding, testing and cussing or it might happen in a sudden Red Bull-inspired flash of genius.
By breaking the steps into small discreet tasks, doing frequent check-ins and working as a small but “agile” team, no one goes too far off the rails, and everyone knows what’s happening in the project on a regular basis. So far so good.
In many ways, the software world is a great model for the workplace of the 21st century. The teams are frequently “virtual”- different members answer to different parts of the organization but the project leader has to keep things together and on task.
They are also “remote”. Team members may be literally anywhere in the world and in any time zone making it a 24/7 workplace and day to day communication is usually through technology. Finally, it’s all about small tasks, done with insane focus- always being mindful of the desired final outcome.
The difference between an Agile environment and where you and I work is that there’s a NAME for this craziness and the software folks have started to get their mitts around how to work in that system. The rest of us are left flailing as they give us that superior/sad shake of the head software geeks give us mere mortals when they think we aren’t looking.
On the surface, it would seem that Agile is a great solution to the challenges of a modern workplace. But there are potential problems with the way people manage in this environment – problems that are easily handled if the manager is aware of the dangers but can become crippling if they’re not
For a start, because the focus is on small tasks requiring intense concentration, it’s really easy to lose track of what’s happening in the rest of the company and open yourself to ugly surprises at budget time. Loyalty is often to the team rather than the company as a whole. Many programmers assume that the manager’s job is just to keep the rest of the world from interfering with their work. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Agile team managers say that their job is to “just get out of the way”.
But projects, particularly software development, don’t happen in a vacuum. The financial and operational reality of the Organization is critical to their success. It’s up to the manager to keep delivering context for the team and to be the eyes and ears of the group. Brilliant code is useless if the company’s strategy changes or the Project that drives the team is cancelled.
Part of the macho Agile environment (remember, this is a process that calls team meetings “scrums”- as in rugby) is to do things “lean and mean”. This throws up another potential pitfall because it frequently means that the manager is a part of the team doing the work. (Pause while I scream at the term “working manager” which is finding its way back in vogue).
While pitching in and being part of the team is terrific in theory, remember that the role of a manager is not to “do”, but to “help it get done”. Too many times managers who were great individual contributors revert to their coding role and let the “management stuff” (paperwork,coaching, reporting to THEIR bosses) slide.
My theory is that people will always default to the parts of the job they like and ignore the parts they don’t. A successful manager can’t get so lost in the day to day operations that they lose site of their role as manager.
Yet because speed and attention to the task at hand is the team’s driving force, it is all too easy for managers to forget the human side of managing teams. So many Agile managers tell me, “I don’t have time for one-on-one’s – that would be 7 hours a week and we can’t spare it”. In the short term, team commitment to the goal is sufficient to get tasks accomplished, but over time the human factors that bedevil teams set in. If getting to know each other, building relationships between teammates (especially if there’s no chance of meeting in the lunchroom) and talking about what’s going on in the individual’s personal world are perceived as “extras” or as not essential to the team’s mission.
Eventually engagement, productivity, trust and all the other human issues so critical to success can become huge problems. This can lead to missed deadlines, turnover and calls to the Employee Assistance Program.
Add to this mix the fact that the team is usually separated by geography and conducts its business via technology like webmeetings, conference calls and email . You can see how easy it is for poor communication to cripple a team.
The main way to tackle these problems is in what organizations choose to measure. If the only metric of team success is how much code or which tasks get accomplished, I can almost guarantee that the higher-level management behaviors will go by the wayside. If human connection behaviors like one on ones, team building activities and the like are part of the mix, Agile can be a great part of the company’s success.
Many organizations are more than happy to implement Agile teams in their workplaces, but without equipping managers with the tools to communicate effectively and form truly human connections across distance they are setting up teams that are more fragile than Agile.
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Artist Levi Wedel
If you are a blogging knowledge worker, this might apply
Although being more operational than academic (strange classification anyway), I liked this item (and its drawing).
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Artist Katrina M. d'Autromont http://www.katrinadautremont.com
Source http://blog.mathemagenic.com February 2nd 2009 02:56 am
In case you were wondering: I’m almost there, submitting dissertation in two weeks. I can not wait to share it, but it will take a while before I have a version to post online (I guess in April). So, for those who do not want to wait that long I have conclusions of my PhD research in two versions.
The short version in this post describes blogging practices of knowledge workers in respect to specific parts of the framework below that provides a view on what knowledge work entails.
The long version includes that plus summaries of the relevant results from the studies I did. Both are from a draft of the final chapter of the dissertation.
Ideas
- Weblogs are used to maintain awareness of the ideas “out there” through reading in small bites, using weblogs of others as trusted sources and own network as a filter.
- Weblogs provide a space for articulating and capturing ideas that might be undocumented or hidden in private collections otherwise, parking them in a trusted external repository shared with others.
- Blogging is used for sense-making supported by writing, multiple ways to organise and assess one’s own blog posts and conversations with other bloggers.
- When developing ideas the person-centric and open-ended nature of blogging brings unexpected insights that cross topical boundaries.
- Over time ideas captured and organised in weblogs provide a fertile ground for reflection and reuse.
Conversations
- Weblog conversations are informed by and embedded into histories of writing in individual weblogs as well as history of interactions and relations between participating bloggers. Those contexts are not necessarily explicit and visible to everyone who participates.
- Since weblog conversations involve communicating via comments to a specific weblog and via linking across weblogs they are fragmented and distributed over multiple weblogs. In addition, those conversations may be supplemented by interacting via other media. The distributed and fragmented nature of weblog conversations results in exposure to different audiences, crossing multiple topics, combining individual input and the power of dialogue.
- In comparison to other tools, participation in weblog conversations requires extra effort that includes manually connecting conversational fragments by linking, and well as creating and maintaining an overview of those fragments. This effort limits the scale or frequencies of such conversations and also makes them more likely to happen within densely-knit networks of bloggers.
- Weblogs provide a possibility for an occasional interaction rather than support constant conversations. They are not particularly suitable for goal-oriented conversations, but provide a fertile ground for exploring ideas, especially those that cross topical boundaries or where the interests of others are not known in advance.
- Participation in weblog conversations contributes to developing ideas and relations that often cross boundaries and exclude intermediaries.
Relations
- Personal nature of blogging plays an important role in establishing professional connections. Weblogs are often treated as online representations of their authors, living business cards.
- Weblogs are used for establishing and maintaining both, personal relations with other bloggers and informational relations that involve treating other bloggers as trusted information source without engaging in person.
- In both cases it is “connecting through content“, where the person-centric nature of blogging plays an important role in establishing trust (either in blogger as a person or as an information source) and connecting across boundaries.
- Networking via weblogs is enabled by publishing and interaction. Publishing allows efficient broadcasting on a variety of topics to often unknown audiences and is essential for being present as a blogger, getting to know others and making informed choices about engaging with them, and as a low-key way to stay in touch. While bloggers do not actively interact all the time, it is the conversations between them over time that help to establish personal bonds that eventually enable getting things done together.
- While personal relations are often initially established via blogging, over time multiple channels come into play to monitor others and to interact with them.
Tasks
- The open-ended and public nature of weblogs does not necessarily makes them a good tool to work directly on tasks, so in most cases weblogs are used for enabling work, rather than doing it. Weblogs influence one’s work indirectly when they are used for developing ideas, engaging in conversations and establishing relations that might be needed in the future:
- documented ideas might be reused and reworked, accelerating working on tasks;
- relations with others make it possible to engage them when needed;
- conversations result in unexpected ideas and relations that can turn into new projects or contribute to the on-going ones.
- Blogging might became more closely integrated with one’s work when it requires working on tasks that match the medium, for example, those that require documenting potentially useful ideas, relationship building or communicating to a broad audience.
- While in some cases blogging might become the required way to perform one’s work or a focus of it, in most cases it is added to a pool of various tools one can use to work on a task. Knowledge workers choose to use blogging as an instrument when it works for them and do it intentionally, ad-hoc or in retrospect.
Context
- Blogging on professionally interesting topics often results in a degree of integration with work, even when started without such an intention. In business settings blogging is neither purely individual nor business-driven – the choices that shape a particular weblog are multifaceted and weblogs of individual knowledge workers are positioned on various places between the extremes.
- Bloggers have to deal with the effects of visibility that comes as a result of blogging. While visibility might be a driving force for blogging and a reason for many positive effects it brings (e.g. ideas and people being found) it also comes with challenges of dealing with expansion of networks and information overload, changes in power distribution when crossing hierarchical or organisational boundaries, raised expectations and making mistakes in public.
- Given that blogging is shaped by and useful in different contexts that often result in incomparable requirements, bloggers have to make choices and draw the boundaries deciding if they blog for themselves or others, do it for connecting with peers or a business gain, or how personal their work-related weblog should be.
- Blogging is creating microcontent, but the value of it is in the connections and patterns across those fragments over time. It is also efficient in exposing a blogger to a great number of ideas and people across various boundaries. So, learning to deal with fragmentation and abundance is part of blogging practices.
- Choosing, managing and ‘working around’ tools is part of blogging. Next to making choices about the technology set-up for their weblogs when starting, bloggers constantly deal with making choices about media to engage with others. Various tools used for that purpose require the effort of maintaining contacts across them and learning how to maximise their potential and account for limitations.
Artist Katrina M. d'Autromont http://www.katrinadautremont.com
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Oh yeah, it is about context, connecting and compact acting. And that is the theme of this blog!
