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.

Taking Baby Steps (part 3): Dashboards - A managerial love story

Overview
Part 2 of this series "Taking Baby Steps (part 2): Only one person reads my Blog and I've already won" discussed some ways in which posts to personal, work-related Blogs (aka Knowledge Bases) are relevant to our team-mates and managers. Additionally, techniques on targeting posts through use of Tags were also presented.

In this 3rd post, I will talk about Dashboards, what they're for and how to set them up.

The Basic Unit of Information about which people relate at work
Projects.

Just the "sweet spot", please
There is an inverse relationship between someone's social proximity (in a "Social Degrees of Separation" sense) and their

1. Tolerance for Irrelevant Information
   
2. Amount of time willingly spent extrapolating "important" information

That is, the farther apart two people are in a socio-professional environment, the smaller their overlap of interests. Let's say 70% of my time is dedicated to Project A and 30% to Project B. My colleague Bob also dedicates 30% of his time to Project B. What this means is that out of all the information and knowledge I deal with on a daily basis, only 30% of it is relevant to Bob and I only have 30% of my time available to share this information.

Furthermore, depending on the roles being played, it is important to understand which 30% of Project B Bob focuses on. If Bob is the Project Manager, odds are that the details of your application's algorithm beyond a statement that "it works" is not very relevant to Bob. Including Bob in day-to-day, back-and-forth conversation about algorithm optimizations negatively impacts Bobs productivity given his slice of the pie. This should not be interpreted as "Bob should be left in the dark for the other 70%". Rather:

• Amount of information sent through the pipe is important.
  
• Quality of information is very important
• Order of information is also important

Some elaboration. For example, most people skim through email until something of importance catches their eye. Then they will read around that which jumped out. This is an act of validation. The reader is Gauging and Confirming Level of Relevancy. As was stated earlier, we all have a threshold. Whether this is acknowledged or not, we all associate Quality of information relayed to us with the originator of the communication. We even have functionality built into our email clients to reward those sources of information that we believe to consistently relay High Quality information. People whose communications I wish to help penetrate through "my" noise get their own Mail Folder and a Rule. The Folder makes it into my Top 5 and so on. Rather than skimming I tend to read these communications "normally". High Quality/Highly Relevant information from the originator creates a level of Trust. Perhaps its a bit too cliche to claim that Trust allows for solid Feedback Loops. Rather, its very clear that a lack of Trust results in a well stocked Trash.

Ideally, communications to Bob are well targeted bringing the 30% of the project Bob is involved in to the forefront. (Bob thanks me for not wasting his time.)

A not so "Side Note". I really dislike emails that say "FYI" followed by a long thread of bracketed who-knows-what. Figuring out the part that is in fact For My Information will require me to skim not just one email, but all the accompanying threads. Cliff Notes at the top, please!

Information Trickle
Why do "executive" summaries exist everywhere but in our routine communications within our Social Networks? The "Cliff Notes" quip above actually deserves some discussion. Clues about content subject matter and how it pertains to "me" are very helpful because they grant me the opportunity to cash out sooner rather than later. Tags are great but not as great as a one-sentence summary that speaks right to my forehead. Descriptive titles/subjects also help a great deal!

Whether we skim, or jump back and forth as we consume written information, it is still done (for must of us) in a linear way. Pardon the nerdy analogy but this is like a Disk Head tracking back and forth over a Hard Drive. Meta information about files, directories etc in all File Systems is also at the "top". Search Engines construct indexes that pull out relevant information so that from then on the engine can gauge a match - "this data is relevant" - as quickly and efficiently as possible. There are many other examples of almost identical optimizations that happen in technology because we demand it. Somehow, similar optimizations fail to make it into routine meeting, emails, phone conversations, and so on. It would be nice to have that Trickle from High Level but High Quality information to Low Level details in all mediums of communication.

Dashboards are about creating this kind of Information Trickle for other forms of Project-related information.

Dashboards and RSS Feeds go hand in hand

My Dashboard at work contains the following:

• Tab 1: 20,000 feet -
  Idea here is to create that High-level but informative "At-A-Glance" View of team-wide activity. This High Level but High Quality landing page is relevant to anyone who may be interested in the activities of the team. For a manager 1 or more Social Degrees away, this is a good place to begin "dipping" into our "world" without being overwhelmed by all the details. For my team-mates, this Tab can serve as the Sync-Point for meeting agendas, follow-ups, Iteration refinement and so on. My team-mates will most likely want/need to drill deeper, the manager 1 or more Social Degrees away will not!
  
  Specifically, our first Tab contains:
  
• Changes to Production - Feeds that describe changes to portions of the "production" environment we are responsible for. This is a feed coming out of our Turnover Control System. It's not RSS at this point but hopefully will be soon.
  
• Work plan for the entire team spanning 2 weeks time (this is the Two-week Iteration). This is just an aggregate feed that collates Two-week Iterations from individual product blogs based on the "iteration" Tag.
• Top 5 Bugs or Issues spanning all our products. This is yet another RSS Feed filtered for items tagged or flagged as "important" from our issue tracking system.
  
• Links that allow the reader to subscribe to any of the RSS feeds exposed on the page
  

• Tab 2-x: Product-specific pages
  Each of these Tabs is dedicated to a specific Product/Project the team works on. These tabs are a natural "drill-target" from the 1st Tab. My Product Tabs contain:
• Changes to productions affecting this specific product
• Iteration posts for this product. This is a regular RSS Feed coming form my Product Blog filtered on the "iteration" tag.
• News Items or Alerts coming from the Blog or the Product Site. (The Product Site tends to target the end-user/customer. It's not very technical but provides enough insight about the Product's stage in it's life cycle, and the standard "what" and "how")
• Top 5 Bugs or Issues for this specific product/project
• Links that allow the reader to subscribe to any of the RSS feeds exposed on the page

RSS Feeds are a natural way to "summarize" content that lives elsewhere. As you can see, no content is actually managed by the Dashboard. The Dashboard simply assembles information into easily consumable pieces. The Trickle is enabled by:

• At-a-Glance views of tightly-correlated information
  
• Ability to stay High-Level yet still obtain more detail. The reader can explore Product-specific Tabs without leaving the context of the Dashboard.
• Link-backs to the source of information. The reader can drill even deeper by clicking on any item in any of the feeds and be taken to the full "article". The reader does this by choice - this is key.

Technologies at Play

1. Blogs with RSS capabilities -
   Blogs tend to be more appropriate for Weekly Summaries and Iteration posts. My Blog allows me to publish via email so I don't have to change my habits to post. I publish from my Email Client.
   
2. RSS Web Part -
   RSS is not just about getting news from slashdot. It can be a very powerful Glue for information that lives everywhere yet needs to be correlated in a single View.
3. A portal framework with a Tabs Layout -
   The Sharepoints of the world all have this built in. Acquiring RSS Web Parts is also not too difficult. Some Wikis out there (like Twiki or Confluence) allow you to inject all sorts of content into a single page view, including RSS. These are all basic things. As always, your friendly neighborhood IT department will have some options for you.
   

How to get started
Naturally, I recommend taking "baby" steps. Most teams will fall into two categories:

1. A lot of unorganized documentation floating around in multiple formats
2. All project-related know-how is stored in the brain of the guy two weeks away from retirement

For folks that fall into the 1st group, it's a matter of figuring out the kind of information that is most useful to highlight on a dashboard. Some teams I've worked with went straight to:

• Top Bugs
• Testing Results
• Latest activity around portfolio work for a client

Folks falling into the 2nd category should consider starting with Personal, Ad-hoc Knowledge Bases and expanding out from there.

In general, the type of information that is of Highest Value to your social network should be exposed first. The gains will be emergent and will inspire further investment into not just the Dashboards but also into creating and persisting the High Quality data underneath.

Conclusion and what's up next
Dashboards just front the Collaborative Environment. If the information in Product Blogs, Wikis, etc is not up-to-date, Dashboard's highlights are meaningless. It does take some work and consistency to provide this kind of transparency to your team, your manager and your customers.

Typically, gate-keeping Knowledge Bases and their Dashboards is the responsibility of Team Leads and Product or Project Managers. To get started though, all you need is a Champion, someone who will get the team going, while incrementally proving value. Once your manager is convinced (unless of course you are the manager) some top-down "encouragement" never hurts.

In my next post, I will propose a 10-Step Plan to putting these concepts to practice so we can move on to topics such as Wikis, Issue Tracking, and Interruption Management.

Taking Baby Steps (part 2): Only one person reads my Blog and I've already won

Overview
My last post entitled "Taking Baby Steps (part 1): Personal, Ad-hoc, KB", suggested that Knowledge Workers should embrace a Blog (at work) as a personal Knowledge Base. The focus was on the Network of One and some of the wins on a, facetiously, "selfish" level. Laying a foundation for productivity-focused collaboration is realizing that the "hidden hand" also works wonders in a collaborative setting.

In this post, I will talk about some ways in which this Network of One also benefits folks One Social Degree away -- even if it's just one other person. This is the Network of Two.

Who is One Social Degree Away?

• People who directly depend on your work
• People whose work you directly depend on
• Your manager
• Your intern
• Your service team overseas
• Your client
  

At work, our "social network" of peers is typically well established. We are hired into teams, we have colleagues, team-mates, customers. Someone depends on what you produce - these people will benefit from the knowledge you share.

Syndicate updates via RSS/Atom
Any good Blogging software already has syndication capabilities built in. Simply advertise the URL to your Blog's "feed". All you need is an RSS reader. Some come integrated with your email client, others are standalone or web-based. Your friendly, neighborhood IT department should have something to meet your needs.

But this is a post on the Network of Two. Your manager is, in fact, the first person to whom you should advertise your RSS feed. Your immediate manager will always be your #1 fan.

Managers love Workstreaming
Once your manager subscribes to your RSS Feed, and you make a selfish commitment to maintain your very own knowledge base, you will automagically keep your manager concurrent with the happenings in your daily work-life.

The Network of Two and effective Workstreaming will emerge when you begin to cater "some" posts to your immediate audience. Hint to your manager that something is especially important to her with Tags such as "important" or "for larry".

The key is to allow the Blog/KB to become part of your natural routine. There are no rules of how much to post or how often. Just keep things relevant.

Completing the Feedback Loop
You know you've established a successful Feedback Loop within your Network of Two when:

• You find a "comment" on your Blog from your manager

I really want that first point to stand out - there are other indicators and emergent efficiencies when this Feedback Loop is completed:

• Meetings between you and your manager are shorter and more to the point
• You spend less time figuring out things you've forgotten
• You manager seems more helpful and, in general, more knowledgeable about what you are working on
  
• Sometimes the last point allows your manager to spot problems early and offer some very timely wisdom.
  

And so on...

Extra Brownie Points
The rarely seen but often sought after "Manager's Blog" where you get to leave comments.

Reverse Mentorship
I read my intern's blog every morning and I learn a book's worth every week. Just yesterday, I received a very in-depth refresher course in Java's SOAP API.

What about the team-mates?
My team works on many projects at the same time. I'm only a lead on one or two of them. This means that I need extra help staying up to speed on projects where I play a secondary or tertiary role. I read my peers' Weekly Update-tagged posts only. Good Blogging software will allow you to subscribe to a filtered subset of all the posts based on one or more Tags. How does my RSS reader know it's a Weekly Update? The Tag is "weekly".

For these secondary projects, reading "weekly" posts is enough for me to stay on track. This is especially helpful when I come back from vacation and dread opening my INBOX.

Non-urgent Information Only
Many folks try to misuse RSS by using it for Alerting purposes. This is not what the syndication medium is for. If you want to catch someone's attention because you require Immediate Feedback, use the phone, send an instant message, meet them at the Cooler.

RSS is best suited for Knowledge sharing that does not require immediate response. Your audience consumes the content at their own leisure, at their own pace. If you use RSS for anything else, it will very soon become as noisy and convoluted as email is today.

Final note of advice here -- turn desktop popups for RSS Updates off. Unless the Alerting mechanism is really smart, it will never know what is truly important to justify the time wasted recovering from the Interruption. I'm busy and need to focus, stop competing for my attention because my feed from pizza.com has an update.

Up Next, Too many Feedback Loops?
Every communication medium will be abused and misused. You may find yourself subscribed to too many feeds claiming importance. My next post will talk about cutting through noise with RSS and Tag-powered Dashboards.

Taking Baby Steps (part 1): Personal, Ad-hoc KB

Overview
This collection of posts is part ideology and part methodology aimed at Knowledge Workers still struggling to embrace the Blog and Wiki whateveryoucallit. I don't blame them. The words "Blog", "Wiki", "Tag", and so on, meant very little to me as well until I put each of the technologies to a very specific use.

What started out as a system to manage developer teams overseas turned into a Pipeline for Knowledge Sharing within a Team.

To me, collaboration is a Bottom-to-Top story. It begins with a very selfish Network of One. And that's OK! If you can't prove value to yourself, how can you prove it to the guy sitting next to you at meetings?

Mental Filters
Like many Knowledge Workers, I suffer from information overload and a bad memory. First step is always admitting you have a problem, right? Now, I tend to ask myself two questions whenever I deal with information:

• Is it useful to me now?
• Might it be useful to me later?
  

If there's even a remote chance that I'm dealing with Useful Information, it needs to go into my Knowledge Base. This is my Mental Filter. All incoming information competing for my attention goes through this and other filters.

A Blog is a Personal, Ad-hoc Knowledge Base
It just so happens that the simplest and most complete Knowledge Base I know of is my Blog. It's mine. It's for me. I don't care about structure, colorful phrasings, or a full bibliography. I just need useful knowledge sans the BS. If I take the time out of my Very Busy Schedule to throw something into my Knowledge Base (KB), I owe it to no-one but myself to only post useful and Highly Relevant information.

I also haven't figured out how to not live in my INBOX so I want to be able to email my KB.

Side Note: But wait, why not store everything in email and search there? With Blogging, selfishness turns into something very useful for the rest of the Team. Email just doesn't have that kind of potential for collaboration.

Finally, I want control over the organization of my Knowledge Base but I don't have time to organize into pretty folders. I just want the information I need at my fingertips with minimum management. And while on the topic of being selfish, I want the search functionality to work for me; I want to help it help me. I want to be able to Tag my KB posts with words or phrases that serve as Keys to Knowledge in my head. It should be easy for me to share these Keys with the cyborg extension to my head that is my personal KB. The search functionality in my KB should pay special attention to these Tags a.k.a Keys. It's a matter of improving relevancy and hence my productivity.

A note about Privacy Concerns
Start with a Blog that your Firm provides for you. It should be internal and inaccessible from the outside world by the outside world. Don't worry about protecting your posts from the prying eyes of colleagues. Focus on yourself. Only your immediate network will ever care about what you have to say anyway. Post openly, but only post work-related information. Remember, you don't have the time to post on anything else.

What kinds of things should I post about?
It took me a bit of trial and error to figure out my Blogging sweet-spot. At first you'll post too much or too little. Remember, it's for you so figure out what works for you.

Some ideas on what you may want to track in your KB:

• You figure out how to do something, save yourself brain space, write yourself a mini how-to
  
• You solve a problem, post solution so you don't have to solve it again
• Someone owes you a TPS report
• You've identified follow-up items at your 3-hour meeting
• You wish to condense your meeting to 15 minutes by posting an Agenda to your KB
• Someone else posted something that may be useful to you later

Ans so on...

Conclusion
When picking out a KB starter-kit, be selfish. My recommendation is to go with a Blog. Blogs have many useful features; clearly I've only scratched the surface. But really, the other features will come in handy later. Here is what you should ask of your Personal, Ad-hoc Knowledge Base Blog:

• Can you email it?
• Can you tag posts?
• Can you tag posts within your email?
• Can you search it?
• Are your search results influenced by the tags you assign to your posts?

Good news is most Blog implementations already do this. Your friendly, neighborhood IT department will help you set one up.

Up Next
In my next post, I will talk about how KB-directed Selfishness is, in fact, very useful to Team-mates.