Taking Baby Steps (part 4): The Ten-Step Plan

Here it is. Feedback is always welcome. Naturally.

1. Need a Blog: Pick a Blogging platform but do your best to leverage an in-house platform, if one exists. Please, do not simply download some Blogging software into your work environment. Reach out to your friendly, neighborhood IT dept for guidance.
   
2. Put a project into your "lab": Pick a small project that can benefit from improved transparency. By "small" I mean one that is not super critical and one that you have some leeway to experiment with. These tend to be the types of projects where Delivering is your primary responsibility and not Joe's...
   
3. Don't overdo it: Establish guidelines about what kind of information is worth "tracking". I've outlined some ideas in my previous posts ("Taking Baby Steps" series). In essence, establish a Knowledge Base of some sort, even if you have to cobble something together. Don't over-engineer your posts. Like a good workout program, keep it lively, keep it real, reduce obstacles so you can sustain.
   
4. Dogfood: Spend a few weeks being selfish and commit information to the KB that helps you be successful on your project.
5. Dangle the carrot: Give the link or RSS Feed to this KB to your manager and your team-mates. Use the content as a basis for your meeting agendas and follow-ups. Work on getting your colleagues to read your post prior to the meetings. One way to do this is to send a plain-old-email with a link to your post an hour ahead of a meeting. Make it clear that the meeting will cover the agenda enumerated there and you'd like to spend less time regurgitating and spend more time decision-making.
   
6. Aggressively seek the ever-elusive "manager" comments on your blog. Period. Your efforts will not succeed without a completed Feedback loop. Active participation is key.
   
7. Manage expectations: This is not a be all, end all solution. Make sure that your social network is aware of this fact.
   
8. Tag it up: Create a taxonomy of "special" Tags and standardize them. That is agree, for example, that all weekly summaries posted to individual product blogs should be Tagged as "weekly" and that all 2-week look-aheads should be Tagged as "iteration".
9. Roll it up: Construct a Dashboard Tab that may be of value to your manager's manager by rolling up RSS feeds filtered by your "weekly" and "iteration" tags. Get your manager's, manager's manager to acknowledge its usefulness. If you can pull this off, send me an email and I will honor you with the Order of Blogging Ninja.
10. Road show: Leverage your network to identify like-minded individuals who will benefit from a similar set up. Document the set-up process, best practices and your experiences on a Wiki as you explain the process to your buddy. Encourage your buddy to contribute to this Wiki as (s)he works out the implementation and goes through the process. Rinse and repeat. After a month or two, put together a Forum of sorts and present your findings to your department. Please don't be boring. Then, go to Disney World.

I'll let the 10th point act as the transition into the world of Wikis; coming up next.